Abu Dhabi's MGX Deepens Anthropic Bet In 65 Billion Dollar Round

Abu Dhabi has added to one of the most closely watched positions in artificial intelligence. MGX, the technology investment vehicle chaired by UAE National Security Adviser Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, has backed the 65 billion dollar funding round raised by Anthropic, the San Francisco company behind the Claude family of models, according to Semafor. The investment deepens a stake MGX already held, and it lands as the company is widely expected to move towards a public listing.

A bigger position in the Claude developer

The round gives Anthropic a valuation of about 965 billion dollars, placing it ahead of several direct competitors on paper. For MGX, the move is less about a single cheque than about consolidating a place on the register of a company seen as one of the two or three leading model developers in the world. MGX was set up in 2024 by the Abu Dhabi AI group G42 and the sovereign fund Mubadala, and it has moved quickly to assemble a portfolio across the businesses building frontier models.

The UAE's spread across frontier labs

With this round, MGX now holds positions in Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI, the three companies most often named at the front of the model race. All three are expected to move towards public markets within the year, with xAI tied to the listing of its parent SpaceX, which began trading in New York on 12 June. That combination gives the UAE the broadest private market exposure of any Gulf state to the firms building the underlying technology, rather than only to the data centres and chips that run it.

Gulf money meets frontier AI

The UAE is not alone. Qatar's Qatar Investment Authority has invested in both Anthropic and xAI, while Saudi Arabia's PIF backed HUMAIN put a reported 3 billion dollars into xAI in February, as Semafor reported at the time. Anthropic itself had initially ruled out taking money from the region on national security and ethical grounds before changing course, a shift detailed in an internal memo reported by Wired. The company is now spending heavily to keep pace, with one investor describing a monthly compute bill of at least 1.25 billion dollars in reporting by The Intercept.

What it signals

For readers in the Gulf, the takeaway is the direction of travel. The region's funds are no longer content to own only the physical layer of the AI economy. They are buying equity in the model developers themselves, ahead of listings that would turn private stakes into publicly priced holdings. That brings potential upside if the companies list at or above current valuations, and a matching exposure to any cooling in the market or any political friction over foreign ownership of strategic American technology.