Haytham & Company

Saudi Arabia's $64 billion invitation to participate in infrastructure projects was answered yesterday by 59 firms submitting their interest for Quality Valley, a mixed-use PPP in Riyadh, closed its expression of interest window under a 32-year design-build-finance-operate-maintain-transfer concession 53 Saudi names and 6 international, across developers, contractors, financial advisors and participants from the UAE, Bahrain, Spain, Singapore and the US ⦿ The international read of the region is currently indexed almost entirely to the security cycle.. that's where the attention is but there's a lot more happening on the ground → Acwa's reported 32 projects under construction going live in 2026, 44.2GW and 2.6M m3/day in water, → Diriyah Company l شركة الدرعية awarded a $490M contract to Hassan Allam and Albawani for SAMoCA in late Apr, taking the programme past $29B in awarded contracts → Modon closed 2025 with SAR 30B in industrial investment, with foreign investment flows roughly doubling → Jeddah Tower passed the 100th floor in April, on track for 2028 completion and set to become the world's tallest tower The procurement calendars, construction sites and EOI windows are operating on a different timetable. The strategy was approved in Jan, pipeline published in Feb, Quality Valley, one of many closed in May There's a longer list behind it that will close in the same pattern through the rest of the year

Saudi Arabia invested $3B in xAI earlier this year making HUMAIN a significant shareholder in SpaceX since after they merged soon after but Beyond the headline, there's something far more interesting happening here 🔘 So what's at play? The answer lives in the topology of these investments. That $3B in xAI connects to: → Neo Space Group (sovereign satellite + geospatial platform) → HUMAIN (Building 3GW or more of AI infra + applications and models) → Alat (domestic electronics manufacturing) → Acwa (Over 120GW of energy assets + plans to almost double by 2030) → Maaden ($110B investment in rare earths, critical minerals, base metals) Each node makes every other node more valuable. Fidelity Investments, invests in xAI, they get a financial return ..When HUMAIN invests, they also get knowledge for domestic AI operations ‣ orbital infra strategy ‣ energy demand validation ‣ and a working template for vertical integration across entire economic portfolios ——- ⦿ There's a concept in development economics called the Economic Complexity Index Hidalgo (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Hausmann at (Harvard University) showed that.. "Countries tend to converge to the level of income dictated by the complexity of their productive structures" Essentially, the wealth of a nation comes down to what it knows how to make, not the resources it sits on top of ⦿ On that index, Saudi Arabia ranks 39th..behind Romania, behind Bulgaria Typically countries whose income exceeds their complexity will get poorer over time, unless they build new capabilities ‣ That's the real ambition behind vision2030 ⦿ But here's the thing, Saudi Arabia jumped 21 positions on that index in five years In comparison, India rose 8 positions and China rose 3 Happening while the Kingdom is seen to be 'tightening its belt' on non-strategic spending, as widely reported earlier this month ----- The traditional path to economic complexity says you walk through 'product space' one step at a time. Petrochemicals to chemicals to plastics to machinery..each move adjacent to the last ‣ Japan did that in 50 years, Korea in 40, China in 30 Saudi Arabia is testing whether sovereign capital, deployed in the right network, can compress that timeline dramatically. Whether you can acquire productive knowledge through investment relationships rather than sequential production alone History says you can't buy complexity but it also says nations build capability sequentially. That assumption may be worth questioning in the new age

The Public Investment Fund (PIF) is managing $1 trillion now and the Board just signed off on the new strategy so Capital markets, industries, and the media alike have begun their discussions on what this means for anyone that has a stake in the region Scanned a few headlines today to get a sense of how the public is seeing this. A handful of Google searches will tell you that this is about fiscal responsibility, domestic development, and strategic prioritization... That part is clear, but let's look at something that doesn't often show up in the headlines These are just 12 of Public Investment Fund (PIF)'s domestic PUBLIC holdings: ‣ aramco: 16.00% stake, FY25 dividend income USD 13.68bn ‣ stc: 64.00% stake, div income $1.88B ‣ SABIC: 70.00% stake, div income $1.68B (through aramco) ‣ Saudi Energy: 74.31% stake, div income $578M ‣ Riyad Bank: 22.00% stake, div income $246M ‣ Elm Company: 67.00% stake, div income $129M ‣ Bahri | البحري: 22.55% stake, div income $55M ‣ Saudi Tadawul Group: 70.00% stake, div income $52M ‣ Kingdom Holding Company: 16.87% stake, div income $47M ‣ Acwa: 44.22% stake (rights-issue year) ‣ Maaden: 67.11% stake (capex-heavy growth phase) ‣ The Saudi National Bank - SNB: 37.20% stake, div income $1.28B ⦿ Around $20B dividend income across this list, not including indirect interests through holdings like Sanabil Investments (which *Est based on data from Saudi Tadawul Group and Argaam Media The Saudi economic transformation story has been an incredible one to watch and be a part of over the recent years. But I find often, global commentary still reads PIF through the lens of lavish sports investments, entertainment plays, and flagship trophy assets What it actually consists of is assets of national concern, with global reach, significant innovation mandates, and immense investment power of their own The Saudi sovereign fund's steering a $1 trillion ship out into the open seas with the PIF board Recent changes will also require a recalibration for anyone looking to partner with the public and private sector in the region. But in my opinion, it the recent changes will create an unprecedented opportunity for enterprises whose own ambitions are aligned with the region's

Blackstone launched a publicly traded vehicle to buy data centres and most the commentary I've seen is discussing it like a real estate vehicle but I'm not sure that's what's at play here.. There was a line buried near the bottom of the Bloomberg piece where execs said they want the vehicle to become "a broad barometer of the value of data centers" Doesn't sound like investment language.. more like the language of someone building a pricing mechanism for an asset class that doesn't have one yet But you can't build a pricing mechanism out of thin air.. you need to own enough of the underlying market that your benchmark actually means something ⦿ So what have they assembled in recent years: 2021: QTS Data Centers acquired for $10B, largest DC operator 2024: AirTrunk acquired for ~$16B, APAC data centre platform. 2025: Potomac Energy, 774MW gas plant in NV, near 130+ DCs 2025: PPL JV, gas-fired power generation for PA DCs 2025: $25B committed to PA digital and energy infra 2025: Hill Top Energy Center, 620MW gas plant, $1 billion 2025: Shermco Industries, $1.6B, elec services for DC and utils 2025: Enverus acquired, energy data analytics platform 2025: DDN investment of $300M, AI HPC data storage, $5B val 2025: TXNM Energy acquired for $11.8B, regulated utility 2026: Publicly traded data center vehicle announced ----- Right now, data centres are priced through bilateral negotiations. Every deal is bespoke, every comp is arguable, and the opacity is actually what allows operators to command premium pricing $170 billion ‣ That's Blackstone's current data center portfolio plus pipeline $120/kW per month ‣ DC rents when they took QTS private in 21 $195/kW per month ‣ DC rents today Put a public benchmark on top of that and the whole dynamic starts to shift. Every private operator raising capital gets measured against it, every hyperscaler negotiating a lease can point to it, competing asset manager's LPs may start asking why they're paying 2 and 20 for exposure they could buy in the public market with full liquidity --- ⦿ Let's think about this.. is Blackstone really just investing in data centres? My read would be that they're assembling something that looks a lot like the infrastructure of a market, not just a position inside one.. and historically, when someone builds the benchmark in an opaque asset class ‣ the dynamics around pricing, competition, and access tend to shift in ways that favour whoever established it I wonder how many others have arrived at the same conclusion and are positioning around it, if at all.

Jeff Bezos has a $30b AI lab and wants to partner with a Middle Eastern sovereign wealth fund and the world’s largest bank to reinvent how manufacturing and industry operate at the most foundational level ‣ Project Prometheus raised $6.2b late last year ‣ Separate holdco being structured as a 'manufacturing transformation vehicle' with tens of billions at its disposal to acquire industrial businesses ‣ Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) and J.P. Morgan Security and Resiliency Initiative in early discussions to back it The architecture caught my attention.. Prometheus builds AI that models the physical world ‣ holdco acquires the businesses those systems are designed to transform ‣ acquisitions generate training data that compounds the intelligence ‣ which raises the value of the next acquisition..the loop is self-reinforcing ⦿ This same form’s appearing independently across the market too: → OpenAI took a stake in Thrive Capital, embedding engineers inside portfolio companies, taking equity rather than cash → General Catalyst deployed $1.5b to acquire and rebuild traditional businesses as AI-native ops, already doubling EBITDA margins within 12 mths → Elad Gil, a solo GP, has spent three years raising billions to acquire people-intensive businesses and restructure them through AI None of these entities fit a single traditional asset class, the topology of private capital is mutating ——— OpenAI just raised $110b at a $730b valuation.. just yesterday the world was questioning the business model. That debate continues, but the capital power is real.. Lately I’ve been speaking about the change in the topology of private capital and asset management. These recent moves are starting to signal there may be a new business model category..emerging somewhere in the nexus of capital and intelligence Consider what becomes possible under that logic.. → Anthropic adopts a Constellation Software Inc. model, compounding both revenue and intelligence with every vertical software acquisition → The Musk ecosystem across SpaceX, Starlink and xAI becomes the Brookfield of the future, an AI-native infrastructure conglomerate → Figure stops selling robots and acquires the businesses the robots would operate in Market’s been pricing these companies against their current business models…I would argue the structural possibility is that their actual business models haven’t been revealed yet.

Why did the world's largest infrastructure investor say the war has no effect on their $20 billion project in the Middle East? Brookfield confirmed a $20 billion AI infrastructure partnership with Qatar Investment Authority in December and Connor Teskey, CEO, affirmed to Bloomberg last week that the conflict does not affect their project and called the Middle East an 'incredible region' Let's also note: ‣ Kuwait Investment Authority: Launched $100B AI infra program with Brookfield ‣ Public Investment Fund (PIF): Anchored $2B PE vehicle vehicle for the region ‣ S&P Global: Affirmed credit rating to A+ just today ‣ King Salman Park Foundation: $3.8B in new international investment commitments this wk The question I keep hearing this past week, across every sector and geography, is how this affects business plans in the region Over the coming week or so I'll share insights on the commercial and industrial layers which I believe strongly underpin the region's resilience.. For now, I’ll leave you with some thoughts.. ⦿ Conflict makes headlines but it has never once broken the trajectory The Gulf has compounded through the OPEC embargo, two Gulf wars, the Asian crisis, 9/11, the Global Financial Crisis, the Arab Spring, two oil collapses, COVID, and now Iran. Plot the GDP of any Gulf nation from 1965 to today, overlay every one of those events, and the curve still trends upward The less sophisticated version of these economies was resilient through all of it. The version that exists now, with globally integrated sovereign wealth funds deep institutional partnerships, and maturing capital markets, is structurally more capable than anything that came before ⦿ The world is quick to price conflict into a region but rarely prices the resilience I don't think Brookfield is being cavalier, they're being literate and reading the 60-year chart.. and they're not certainly not alone in this Every cycle produces the same two cohorts.. those who stayed and compounded, and those who pulled back and re-entered later at higher cost, from weaker positioning, with less trust