Middle Eastern capital is placing massive bets on 'the new oil'—Chinese enterprises shouldn’t sit this one out.

Middle Eastern countries have launched an AI investment 'arms race'. Abu Dhabi’s ADQ, another major sovereign fund of the UAE, pledged $15 billion over the next five years to support AI development. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) announced a $72 billion investment over five years into AI infrastructure. Qatar launched a dedicated $5 billion fund to attract global AI enterprises. Why are Middle Eastern countries so focused on AI? The answer is straightforward: amid the global energy transition, these nations are strategically transforming to reduce their dependence on oil-based economies and seek new engines of growth. In the digital economy era, data is widely dubbed 'the new oil'. AI—and especially data centers—are viewed by the Middle East as pivotal directions for this transformation. Notably, Middle Eastern countries do not merely aspire to be financial investors in the global AI industry; rather, they aim to become core participants by building infrastructure and cultivating full industrial ecosystems. Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, unveiled in 2016, includes 96 strategic objectives—of which 66 directly relate to AI or data—targeting a position among the world’s top 15 AI-capable nations/regions by 2030. Saudi Vision 2030 — Source: Going Global Economic & Trade Exchange Platform, SDIC Securities Research Institute With strategy set, only energy and capital remain—and both are abundant in the Middle East. This massive spending has turned the region into a hotbed for AI investment. At LEAP 2025 held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in February, leading tech firms announced investments totaling $14.9 billion: • Google Cloud announced establishing a global AI hub in Saudi Arabia and pledged $70 billion in economic contribution to the Kingdom over the next decade. • U.S. software firm SambaNova announced a $140 million investment to build advanced AI infrastructure in Saudi Arabia. • U.S. AI startup Groq announced a $1.5 billion investment to jointly establish, with Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest AI inference data center in Saudi Arabia. • U.S. big-data analytics company Databricks plans to invest $300 million over three years to enhance technical capabilities among Saudi citizens and expand its business operations in the country. Investments and partnerships announced at LEAP 2025 Zhengjieju (a Chinese media outlet) noted that Chinese enterprises are also actively participating: • At LEAP 2025, Tencent Cloud announced a $150 million investment to build a data center. • On October 15 this year, Alibaba Cloud announced the official launch of its second data center in Dubai, designed to meet the rapidly growing demand for cloud computing and AI services across the Middle East.

The 'life-or-death battle' of the world’s No. 1 CBD

TikTok ID: dy0so323fq2w Xiaohongshu ID: 95619019828 Bilibili Account 1: UID 3546863642871878 Bilibili Account 2: UID 3546955410049087 Zhihu Account 1: Wu Jianming (wujianming) Zhihu Account 2: Wu Jianming Over the past 40 years, if you wanted to build an impressive Central Business District (CBD) in China, your master plan would almost inevitably reference one benchmark: London’s Canary Wharf. Here stands the world’s most iconic single-function commercial district: Glass-clad skyscrapers pierce the sky; suited bankers hustle through its corridors; over 120,000 finance professionals work here—making it one of capitalism’s most powerful gears. Yet recently, even this legendary landmark faces awkward realities: As of March 2025, vacancy rates in Canary Wharf’s core area surged to a record high of 18.6% (compared to just 7.6% in London’s West End). HSBC—the ‘landmark tenant’ that had occupied space here for two decades—chose to halve its footprint while accepting rent per square foot more than doubling, and moved back to the City of London without looking back. Shortly after, Clifford Chance, Moody’s, and State Street followed suit in a wave of high-profile departures. Canary Wharf Group (CWG), the developer behind the district, saw its asset valuation plummet by over £1.25 billion (roughly RMB 10 billion) within two years. It posted massive pre-tax losses for two consecutive years, prompting Moody’s and Fitch to downgrade its bonds to ‘junk’ status. Canary Wharf Group (CWG) Does this sound like a tragic failure? Hold on—the most surreal twist is yet to come. Just as vultures circled, in late 2025 JPMorgan Chase suddenly announced a £3+ billion investment to construct London’s largest super-tower in Canary Wharf; soon after, Visa relocated its European headquarters there. Meanwhile, CWG leveraged its high-quality retail assets—boasting a 97% occupancy rate—to secure a £610 million loan from Apollo Global Management. Its key backers, Brookfield and Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), injected £400 million in equity and pledged an additional £900 million in contingent equity—raising over £2 billion in refinancing within just 12 months. On one side: record-breaking exodus and junk-rated debt. On the other: the best leasing performance in a decade and a £3 billion vote of confidence. This stark, surreal dichotomy is astonishing. Today, we’ll unpack this breathtaking, century-defining CBD reinvention. 'The Pure-Blood CBD' So why exactly are companies fleeing? In fact, rents here aren’t expensive—in fact, prime rents (~£49.5/sq ft) are significantly lower than those in the City of London (£72.5/sq ft). Historically, this value-for-money was its greatest strength. But the post-pandemic hybrid-work era has shattered that logic: when companies need less total office space, they’d rather spend the same amount on premium locations—central, well-connected, amenity-rich offices where employees genuinely enjoy working ('flight to quality')—rather than renting large, cheap floors in an isolated district.

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Brookfield, QIA to Invest £2.5 Billion in Drax Data Center

Brookfield, QIA to Invest £2.5 Billion in Drax Data Center

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