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A Spymaster Sheikh Controls a $1.5 Trillion Fortune. He Wants to Use It to Dominate AI
Tahnoun bin Zayed al Nahyan—the UAE’s chess-obsessed, jiujitsu-loving intelligence chief—controls vast sums of sovereign wealth. America’s AI giants are scrambling for a piece of it.
But as a home for new data centers and a source of investment capital, the UAE has emerged as a particularly attractive potential partner on a number of fronts—from its sheer wealth to its brand-new nuclear power supply to the relative sophistication of its own AI sector. “The question everyone has: Are they playing both sides?” In a July open letter, US congressman Michael McCaul, the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, called for “significantly more robust national security guardrails” to be placed on the UAE before the US exported any sensitive technology to the country. This past summer, around the same time that Tahnoun was barnstorming through America’s dojos and C-suites, Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, was hosting some of the world’s leading technology thinkers—including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt—at his vast South African hunting estate called Ekland.
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