Artificial Intelligence

Abu Dhabi AI chief bullish over future investment

April 25, 2025, 8:44 PM

Ali Osman, chief investment officer at MGX

MGX CIO speaking at AI forum
Concerns over global economy
Looking for longevity

Investment in artificial intelligence is at “a crossroads” as the build-out of underlying infrastructure, such as data centres, demands trillions of dollars more in capital, according to Abu Dhabi’s technology fund MGX.

Ali Osman, MGX’s chief investment officer for AI, said on Friday that he remains optimistic about “tremendous” growth in this space even amid sobering news about the global economy as US President Donald Trump pursues far-reaching protectionist policies on trade.

“We’re very much still risk-on in the market, and we remain optimistic,” Osman said during a forum hosted by media platform Semafor on the sidelines of the International Monetary Spring Meetings in Washington.

“This technology will revolutionise the way we create value in the economy,” he said. “And the United States continues to be at the leading edge.”

MGX, which is 18 months old, is a partnership between Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund Mubadala and G42, an Emirati AI development firm also backed by Mubadala.

A day earlier at the same conference, Mubadala CEO Khaldoon Khalifa Al Mubarak said that AI has become central to everything his company does and how it makes decisions.

“I don’t attend any investment committee right now without our AI vector being part of it,” Al Mubarak said. “Today it’s non-voting, but at some point we’re going to make a decision on that, whether we will make it a voting member of our investment committee.”

According to Osman, MGX is seeking to solve perhaps the biggest challenge in supporting construction of new data centres across the world: raising massive amounts of money with a long-term outlook.

“The current vehicles that are investing in data centres today don’t provide the right longevity,” he said. “They’re closed-ended funds, they’re mismatched in terms of time horizon, they can’t form capital at the scale that’s required.”

The open-ended AI Infrastructure Partnership, which MGX launched last September with Microsoft, Global Infrastructure Partners, Blackrock among others, aims to deploy $30 billion to fund the development of large-scale facilities, according to Osman.

“That’s going to be a majority or a very significant proportion of what MGX does from a capital deployment perspective,” he said.

Nvidia and Elon Musk’s xAI joined this effort last month.

Aside from AI infrastructure, MGX also focuses on two other buckets: semiconductors and advanced AI-based software.

While the fund does not disclose its size or other detailed figures, Osman said that it is writing “equity checks” of approximately $1 billion to $2 billion per transaction, with an overall availability of about $8 billion to $10 billion per year.

The primary targets are AI-native businesses, those that were “born in this environment,” because they tend to reach profitability “a lot quicker” and “really transform the value proposition,” Osman said.

But MGX also looks for legacy businesses whose offering can be drastically improved by the adoption of AI.

“Our view is that you can’t really detach advanced technology from artificial intelligence,” Osman said.

He added that blockchain technology is an important part of MGX’s approach because of how it “unlocks tremendous value in the AI environment.”

In March the firm invested $2 billion-worth of stablecoins into Binance, the world’s largest exchange for digital tokens by trading volume and users.