Newsletter #17: Temasek, KIA, MGX join AI infra fund; How to resolve family feuds in Dubai
There's an Asian way of doing business 🫱🏻🫲🏼
Singapore’s Temasek and Kuwait SWF join Blackrock’s $30b AI infrastructure fund 💵
Discreetly lodged in a Blackrock presentation slide was a familiar Singaporean logo…
Temasek is the latest state investor to join the AI Infrastructure Partnership (AIP), a consortium aimed at investing $30 billion into AI infrastructure like data centres and energy facilities.
It follows hot on the heels of fellow sovereign investors joining the club — Kuwait Investment Authority (KIA) and Abu Dhabi’s MGX which focuses on health. Other key anchor investors in AIP include GIP, Microsoft, Nvidia, Elon Musk’s xAI.
The vastness and complex intricacies of the AI supply chain means that investing in AI naturally requires an end-to-end approach, spanning public to private, front-end applications to backend infrastructure, energy, hardware, software and everything in between.
As global governments rush to secure AI sovereignty, the race appears to benefit those with more centralised bureaucracies — a feature of both Asia and the Gulf. I’m pretty sure we can expect more SWF activity from these regions, whether in the form of:
1) Buying AI chips/GPUs; 2) Co-investing in frontier products and services supporting AI chip technology; 3) Building data centres; 4) Strengthening local cloud provider capability defense capabilities and cybersecurity; 5) AI model training based on local data hosted in local servers; 6) Supporting local startups and research.
We’ve seen plenty of PR from the Gulf around this recently from Saudi’s Humain to Abu Dhabi’s G42-backed 5-gigawatt AI data centre.
Singapore on the other hand, has been less public about its own dealings. The country’s more notable mentions have been a S$500 million allocation to acquire and lease GPUs and AI chips; and partnerships with Nvidia and AMD to form a GPU-as-a-service and R&D respectively.
What can we expect next in this space? Would love to hear what you think :)
How to resolve family feuds (Dubai edition)
The FT caught a really good scoop this week on the UAE’s Majid Al Futtaim (MAF) Group.
For those unfamiliar with the Gulf, MAF is one of the largest privately owned companies in the region. The family’s assets are in the malls, hotels, leisure & entertainment space, last reported to be worth about $19 billion at end-2023, generating annual revenues of over $9 billion in 2024.
Some well-known names under them include Carrefour, Abercrombie & Fitch, Hollister, Lululemon, GAP, VOX Cinemas and Mall of the Emirates.
Dubai has taken control of a linchpin of the emirate’s consumer economy, stepping in to overhaul its governance and resolve a troubled succession three years after its founder died.
A government-established “special judicial committee” — formed at the request of the 10 heirs of the founder of the eponymous Majid Al Futtaim group — has appointed a new board to oversee its parent company, according to four people with knowledge of the details. (Source: Financial Times)
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think Asian family offices resolve disputes this way? Let’s try to paint a scenario here. ✍🏼
STORYTIME! Poor Asian immigrant moves to Southeast Asia for better opportunities. Toils for decades turning his little shop into a mega business empire. Becomes insanely wealthy. His favourite women are wife number 1 and mistress number 3 with ten children across his ladies. Founder dies, leaving hard-earned wealth and huge gaps in his will regarding succession and wealth transfer. Children are stuck. What do you do?
You can:
Form strategic alliances with mutually aligned siblings, club your business interests and assets together
Cosy up to the right people in judiciary system and government
Start or buy a media company to launch a propaganda campaign
Build a business in direct competition to your opposing sibling/s and battle it out in the marketplace
Launch a corporate takeover of your opposing sibling/s assets
Go to civil court and work it out there
Talk to your mum and plead with her to help
No, no, no. In the Gulf, you go directly to the government, ask them to form an independent committee to help resolve the dispute for you 🫨
A contact of mine described this as a good modern take of how a majlis works in the Gulf, where disputes are resolved by going to the ruler when it cannot be done internally.
This isn’t the first time that Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum has intervened in the affairs of the MAF family.
In the late 1990s, he mediated in a dispute between Majid and his cousin Abdulla. Sheikh Mohammed, then crown prince, oversaw the corporate divorce that saw Abdulla buy out Majid from lucrative exclusive representation agreements for brands including Toyota and Ikea. (Source: Financial Times)
It’s worth noting that given the scale of MAF’s businesses and the importance of the tourism and hospitality sector to the emirate, it would have made sense for Dubai’s ruler to intervene too. In any case, I still thought it was an interesting story.
ICYMI:
Dubai takes control of linchpin of emirate’s consumer economy (Financial Times)
Interesting reads 🤓
Is private equity becoming a money trap? (Financial Times)
VCs have almost completely abandoned biotech investing (Pitchbook)
JPMorgan Banker Warns of Silicon Valley Trap for Clean Tech (Bloomberg)
How stablecoins are entering the financial mainstream (Financial Times)
News Sites Are Getting Crushed by Google’s New AI Tools (WSJ)
Grab Plays Down GoTo Deal, Says No Talks ‘at This Time’ (Bloomberg)
SCI taps Lazada co-founder as CEO, acquires his AI startup (TechinAsia)
India’s Lenskart filing $1 Billion IPO At $10 Billion Valuation (YourStory)
Hackers claim massive data breach at American Hospital Dubai (Cybernews)
What is Dubai's use case for tokenising real estate exactly? (Kristie’s Substack)
What’s on Linkedin and X:
