‘The Donald of Dubai’: UAE billionaire near Trump bets $66 billion on AI to develop into the world’s knowledge king
DAMAC Properties chairman Hussain Sajwaniwho attended the US president’s 2025 inauguration and is second on Forbes’ Arab rich-list, sees “big” potential in knowledge as demand for computing energy soars.
Sajwani, whose Instagram feed footage him with the likes of Trump, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, rode Dubai’s actual property rollercoaster to amass a web price of $15.3 billion, in accordance with Forbes.
“We’re half imaginative and prescient and half being fortunate, and thank God, in the present day we’re constructing a stupendous enterprise,” he instructed AFP by video name from the Datacloud World Congress in Cannes.
He described how hours of video calls in the course of the Covid-19 pandemic satisfied him to pivot to knowledge centres, earlier than OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 set off a frenzy over AI.
Sajwani has earmarked websites in 13 nations throughout North America, Europe, Asia and the Center East which, if all accomplished, could have a complete capability of 6,000 megawatts, costing roughly $66 billion to construct.
“The thought got here throughout Covid, the place everyone was locked down and I used to be spending quite a lot of hours on Zoom,” Sajwani mentioned. “It was very apparent that Zoom and different companies that had been doing e-commerce had been going to develop.
“So I assumed the info centre enterprise would have a future. Truthfully, I by no means thought there could be such progress.”
Drone assaults
A mixture of opportunism and success has made Sajwani one of many Center East’s greatest property builders, incomes him the nickname “the Donald of Dubai”.
He began in catering however moved into property within the Nineties, leaving him well-positioned for an actual property increase when Dubai opened its market to overseas patrons in 2002.
After surviving near-wipeout in the course of the 2008 international monetary disaster, DAMAC has constructed 60,000 properties with one other 60,000 below development and operates in a dozen nations, Sajwani mentioned.
In 2017, he opened Dubai’s Trump Worldwide Golf Membership, and early final 12 months he stood side-by-side with the newly inaugurated president to announce a $20 billion funding in US knowledge centres.
DAMAC Digital, launched in 2021, has now accomplished websites in Thailand and Saudi Arabia, with eight in complete anticipated to be operational by the 12 months’s finish.
The footprint additionally contains Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Turkey, Greece, Spain, Italy, Finland and Sweden, in addition to the United Arab Emirates.
Sajwani was unfazed by the Center East warfare, the place drones struck knowledge centres within the UAE and Bahrain in the course of the preliminary weeks of Iranian assaults.
“We took the choice 4, 5 years in the past to do knowledge centres and we have continued,” Sajwani mentioned.
“The warfare has confirmed to us that UAE is kind of resilient and the federal government did an ideal job of defending the nation.”
‘High on the planet’
5 “hyperscalers” have signed up as shoppers for DAMAC’s knowledge centres. Though DAMAC can not disclose their names, hyperscalers are main gamers in cloud and AI providers and embody manufacturers corresponding to Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
Sajwani mentioned DAMAC Digital was now on target to outstrip DAMAC Properties as the most important firm in his empire, which additionally contains funding and logistics arms.
“Now we’ve got nearly 6,000 (megawatts) landbank,” he added, referring to parcels of land with sufficient energy and fibre connectivity to help an information centre.
“If we construct all that, that is big.”
Sajwani dismissed issues a few potential AI bubble or oversupply, saying “within the coming three or 4 years, the demand is large.
“And AI goes to create a revolution in each facet of human beings’ life.”
He mentioned DAMAC is setting its sights on sooner or later overtaking Equinix, the world’s greatest knowledge centre supplier with greater than 280 websites.
“We need to be greater than them. We need to be the highest on the planet,” he mentioned.
