Where the math is defensible.
Long-form research on live enterprise decisions. Publication is selective. Every number traces to a named source. No takes without evidence.
Saudi Arabia 2026: the Vision 2030 reset, the PIF reprioritization, and the budget arithmetic at USD 78 Brent
Nine years into Vision 2030, Riyadh is sequencing rather than retreating. PIF holds approximately USD 940 billion in assets, the 2025 budget commits SAR 1.342 trillion in expenditure, and the IMF estimates the fiscal breakeven oil price at USD 96 per barrel. The Line has been scoped down from 105 miles to 1.5 miles by 2030. The question is no longer whether the giga projects deliver in full, but which ones survive the reset.
Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 is at the nine year mark, and the official posture has shifted from maximalist scope to disciplined sequencing. The Public Investment Fund reported total assets under management of approximately USD 940 billion at end 2024, against the original 2030 target of USD 2 trillion that has effectively been deferred. Th...
UAE G42, sovereign AI ambitions, and the US China tech triangulation through 2026
G42 spent 2024 and 2025 converting Abu Dhabi political capital into US compute access, Chinese hardware divorce, and a balance sheet position inside the largest AI deals on the planet. Microsoft put 1.5 billion dollars on the cap table in April 2024, the Bureau of Industry and Security wrote a Diffusion framework in January 2025 that named the UAE explicitly, and Stargate UAE pushed five gigawatts of campus capacity to Abu Dhabi. The story is no longer whether the Gulf builds sovereign AI. The story is whose chips, whose models, and whose security guarantees the buildout runs on.
G42 was incorporated in Abu Dhabi in 2018 as a Mubadala adjacent holding company chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE National Security Advisor and brother of the President. Through 2023 the group accumulated stakes in TikTok parent ByteDance, Huawei surveillance, BGI Genomics sequencing partnerships, and a Wuxi cloud jo...