Sheikh Tahnoon: the UAE spymaster betting $1.5tr on AI dominance

Tahnoon's rise began long before AI. He returned from the US in 1995 to run his father's private department, then founded Royal Group, which grew into a $300bn investment vehicle. His security role expanded after 2013, when he became the UAE's deputy national security adviser and later took the top job, overseeing operations including Project Raven, a digital surveillance programme that was shut down after a Reuters investigation in 2019. Around that time, he appears to have shifted toward AI, fusing his business and security networks to supply both capital and data.

The stakes hinge on whether his AI infrastructure plans — the datacentre near Khalifa port, the microchip foundries, the energy plants — proceed as intended. Critics quietly complain that his dominance crowds out private competitors, while the UAE government declined to comment on his plans, leaving the outcome uncertain for the companies and governments that may come to rely on the computing power he controls.