MGX raises a $50bn AI fund and is already spending it

Abu Dhabi’s MGX AI fund has raised close to $50bn. For the first time, the emirate leaned on outside investors to do it, and the money is already going out the door.

MGX is the Abu Dhabi investment firm built for the AI era. It has pulled in nearly $50bn for a single fund, according to Bloomberg.

The cash came from regional sovereign wealth funds, global pension funds and large institutional investors. The fund closed in recent weeks. It ranks as one of the biggest pools of money ever raised purely to invest in artificial intelligence.

MGX has already started spending it.

Abu Dhabi flips the script

The raise marks a shift in how the emirate operates. Abu Dhabi has long been an exporter of capital, sending its oil wealth out into the world.

This time it did the opposite. It tapped its network to raise money at scale, instead of writing cheques from the state.

That makes MGX look less like a traditional Gulf sovereign fund and more like a global asset manager. It raises outside money, then invests alongside its Abu Dhabi backers.

Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan chairs the firm. He is the UAE’s national security adviser and the president’s brother. MGX is barely two years old. The $385bn fund Mubadala and the AI company G42 are its founding partners.

Where the money goes

MGX invests across the whole AI stack. Its portfolio already spans frontier models, semiconductor infrastructure and data centres.

It holds stakes in OpenAI, Anthropic and Elon Musk’s xAI. It has also backed big infrastructure projects alongside BlackRock, Microsoft and Nvidia. That includes a $30bn vehicle aimed at the data centres that train and run AI models.

The next big target may be in Asia. MGX has been exploring a multi-billion-dollar deal for DayOne, a Singapore-based data-centre operator, Reuters reported. It would be the firm’s first acquisition on the continent.

DayOne is no minnow. It runs data centres across Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Japan and Finland. It had also been lining up a US listing valued at about $20bn. MGX may balk at that price, the people told Reuters, and DayOne could still choose to go public instead.

The race for $100bn

The new fund is a step toward a much larger goal. MGX is targeting more than $100bn in assets under management.

To get there, it plans to spend as much as $10bn a year over the next few years. Any fresh outlays come on top of the billions it has already committed.

Pulling in third-party capital helps. It widens the investor base and lets MGX chase bigger deals than state money alone would allow.

Why so much, so fast

The scale reflects how expensive frontier AI has become. Training a leading model is costly. Building the chips and data centres to support it now runs into tens of billions of dollars.

That cost keeps climbing. OpenAI alone spent about $34bn last year, and the bills for compute show no sign of easing.

So the capital pools keep getting bigger. Governments, sovereign funds and private equity firms are all racing to buy into what many executives see as the defining technology of the decade.

Abu Dhabi has put itself at the centre of that race. It has the cash, cheap energy for data centres and close ties to the biggest names in tech.

The bottom line

A $50bn fund is a vote of confidence in the AI boom from some of the world’s most patient investors. It is also a bet that the spending will pay off.

Not everyone is sure it will. Sceptics warn that valuations have run ahead of revenue, and that a stumble at one big model maker could ripple across the whole supply chain. For now, Abu Dhabi is happy to keep writing the cheques, and to invite others along.