I spent yesterday at the Kennedy Center watching a strange geopolitical dance.<\/p>\n
At a hastily organized but packed US-Saudi Arabia investment summit, the kingdom agreed<\/a> to increase the fuzzy $600 billion it agreed in May to invest in the US to $1 trillion, but offered few new details. The deals largely ran the other direction: toward Riyadh.<\/p>\n Elon Musk\u2019s xAI will build a 500-megawatt data center in Saudi Arabia. Goldman Sachs, Neuberger Berman, and Franklin Templeton were added as investors in the $11 billion development of Saudi Aramco\u2019s Jafurah gas field. A Pentagon-backed rare earth miner will build the Saudis a refinery. One of New York City\u2019s largest real estate players will develop smart cities in the kingdom.<\/p>\n And Saudi\u2019s homegrown AI contender, HUMAIN, is taking a stake in an American startup, Luma \u2014 on the condition that a large part of Luma\u2019s data infrastructure<\/a> moves to the kingdom. Meanwhile, the officially circulated list of Saudi-to-US investments touted the acquisitions of Electronic Arts, announced in September, and Scopely Games, completed in 2023<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Saudi delegates were gracious guests but clear about their priorities. \u201cThat\u2019s key,\u201d Saudi Minister of Investments Khalid Al-Falih said when I asked him about the kingdom\u2019s pivot from splashing its cash abroad in hopes of influence and financial profits \u2014 sometimes getting neither<\/a> \u2014 toward deals that will generate tangible economic benefits at home. \u201cThe kingdom is a partner that can match the needs and capabilities of the US,\u201d Al-Falih said.<\/p>\n Saudi Arabia \u201cis not an ATM,\u201d Marc Winterhoff, the interim CEO of Lucid Motors, told me recently. Lucid, a US company but majority-owned by Saudi\u2019s sovereign wealth fund, is the cornerstone of what Riyadh hopes will be a domestic auto sector. For now, it\u2019s a Potemkin industry \u2014 Lucid manufactures cars in Arizona and ships them in kits to be assembled in the King Abdullah Economy City to be sold or reexported \u2014 but it\u2019s on its way, and a symbol of Saudi Arabia\u2019s demand: Want our money? Build our future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I spent yesterday at the Kennedy Center watching a strange geopolitical dance. At a hastily organized but packed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":144995,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[114,184,85,46],"class_list":["post-144994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=144994"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144994\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/144995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=144994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=144994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=144994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}