MGX
Last reviewed
Jun 7, 2026
Sources
20 citations
Review status
Source-backed
Revision
v1 · 2,000 words
Improve this article
Add missing citations, update stale details, or suggest a clearer explanation.
Suggest edit
CtrlK
Last reviewed
Jun 7, 2026
Sources
20 citations
Review status
Source-backed
Revision
v1 · 2,000 words
Add missing citations, update stale details, or suggest a clearer explanation.
MGX (formally MGX Fund Management Limited) is an Abu Dhabi technology investment company focused on artificial intelligence and the compute infrastructure that supports it. It was launched in March 2024 by the Emirati state, with the sovereign investor Mubadala and the AI group G42 as its founding partners, and it has stated a target of managing about US$100 billion in assets. In a little over two years MGX has become one of the most visible sovereign backers of the global AI buildout, taking founding stakes in two of the largest AI infrastructure vehicles ever assembled: the Stargate Project led by OpenAI, and the AI Infrastructure Partnership organized with BlackRock and Microsoft. It has also bought equity in OpenAI and xAI, helped fund data center campuses in the United States and France, and made high-profile bets in cryptocurrency and TikTok. The firm is chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the United Arab Emirates national security adviser, which has placed it at the center of debates over how closely the Gulf state should be tied into American AI supply chains.[1][2][3]
MGX was unveiled in Abu Dhabi in March 2024 by the Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Technology Council (AIATC), the emirate body that coordinates state AI policy. Mubadala Investment Company, the roughly $300 billion sovereign wealth fund, and G42, the Abu Dhabi AI and cloud group, were named as founding partners.[1][3] The company is registered in the Abu Dhabi Global Market financial free zone and describes its mandate as investing across three areas: AI infrastructure such as data centers and connectivity; semiconductors, including logic and memory chip design and manufacturing; and AI core technologies and applications, a category that extends into software, life sciences, and robotics.[2][3]
The founders bring complementary track records. Mubadala created the contract chipmaker GlobalFoundries in 2009 and has held large positions in semiconductor companies including AMD, while G42 operates data centers and AI software and provides MGX with technical and operating expertise. MGX has said it intends to invest globally, across North America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, rather than only inside the UAE.[2][3]
MGX is chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a brother of the UAE president and the country's national security adviser since 2016. Sheikh Tahnoon sits atop much of Abu Dhabi's investment apparatus: he chairs G42, the holding companies ADQ and International Holding Company, and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, a portfolio that observers have valued in the hundreds of billions to more than a trillion dollars in aggregate.[4][5] Khaldoon Al Mubarak, the managing director and group chief executive of Mubadala, serves as vice chair. Day-to-day leadership rests with Ahmed Yahia Al Idrissi, the managing director and chief executive, who previously ran Mubadala's private equity and direct investments business.[2][6] Sheikh Tahnoon personally chairs MGX board meetings, including sessions in 2025 and 2026 that reviewed the firm's OpenAI and other technology deals.[6]
MGX presents itself as a vehicle for channeling Gulf capital into the physical and computational backbone of AI. Its priorities are data centers and the power needed to run them, the semiconductors that fill those data centers, and the model developers and applications that use the resulting compute. That focus aligns MGX with the UAE's broader strategy of converting oil wealth into a position in advanced technology, and it has led the firm to act both as a direct investor in companies and as an anchor limited partner in large pooled infrastructure funds. The $100 billion asset target, if reached, would rank MGX among the larger technology-focused investors in the world.[2][3]
In September 2024, MGX became a founding partner of what was first called the Global AI Infrastructure Investment Partnership, alongside the asset manager BlackRock, BlackRock's infrastructure arm Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP), and Microsoft. NVIDIA joined as a technology partner advising on AI data center design. The group said it would initially seek to unlock $30 billion of equity from investors and could mobilize up to $100 billion in total investment, including debt, chiefly for data centers and power infrastructure in the United States and partner countries.[7]
In March 2025 the consortium renamed itself the AI Infrastructure Partnership (AIP) and announced that NVIDIA and xAI had joined, with GE Vernova and NextEra Energy agreeing to collaborate on power. AIP made its first major move in October 2025, when AIP, MGX, and GIP agreed to acquire Aligned Data Centers, a US and Latin American operator with roughly 5 gigawatts of capacity, in a deal valued at about $40 billion including debt. The partners described it as one of the largest private data center transactions on record, with closing expected in the first half of 2026.[8][9]
MGX is one of four initial equity funders of the Stargate Project, the US AI infrastructure venture announced at the White House on 21 January 2025 with a stated ambition to invest up to $500 billion over several years. The other founding funders are OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle, with SoftBank chairman Masayoshi Son chairing the venture. Reporting on the initial financing described SoftBank and OpenAI as the lead partners, with Oracle and MGX each contributing a smaller share of the first tranche of equity. MGX is the only non-US entity among the founding funders, which made its inclusion a notable signal of how central Gulf capital had become to the American AI buildout.[10][11] An offshoot, Stargate UAE, was announced in May 2025 as the first Stargate site outside the United States, developed in Abu Dhabi with G42 and the same US partners.[12]
MGX has assembled a portfolio that spans frontier model developers, infrastructure funds, data center operators, and a handful of bets outside core AI. Its single largest equity exposures to the leading model labs are an October 2025 purchase of OpenAI shares and participation in xAI's 2026 financing.
| Company / Project | Amount / Year | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Stargate Project | Founding equity funder, Jan 2025 (program up to $500B) | One of four initial funders with OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle |
| AI Infrastructure Partnership | Founding partner, Sept 2024 ($30B equity target; up to $100B) | Co-founder with BlackRock, GIP, Microsoft |
| Aligned Data Centers | About $40B, Oct 2025 | Buyer alongside AIP and BlackRock's GIP |
| OpenAI | $6.6B secondary share sale, Oct 2025 (at $500B valuation) | New investor in employee and early-investor tender |
| xAI | $20B Series E, closed Jan 2026 (about $230B valuation) | Anchor investor with Qatar Investment Authority |
| Campus AI (France) | About 7.5B euros (about $8.1B), 2025 to 2026 | Co-investor with Bpifrance, Mistral AI, NVIDIA |
| Binance | $2B, March 2025 | Minority investment, settled via a Trump-linked stablecoin |
| TikTok US (USDS) | Stake within a roughly 45% investor bloc, Sept 2025 | Co-investor with Oracle and Silver Lake |
MGX's OpenAI position came through a $6.6 billion secondary share sale completed in October 2025, which valued the company at about $500 billion and let employees and early backers cash out alongside existing investors such as Thrive Capital, SoftBank, Dragoneer, and T. Rowe Price. MGX had earlier been reported as a prospective participant in OpenAI's $40 billion primary round of March 2025, though the publicly confirmed syndicate for that round named SoftBank, Microsoft, Coatue, Altimeter, and Thrive rather than MGX.[13][14] In xAI's $20 billion Series E, which closed in early January 2026 at a valuation of roughly $230 billion, MGX and the Qatar Investment Authority were described as anchor investors, joining strategic backers NVIDIA and Cisco; a large portion of the round was reported to be debt.[15]
In France, MGX joined the state bank Bpifrance, the model developer Mistral AI, and NVIDIA to build Campus AI, described as Europe's largest AI data center campus. At the Choose France summit in June 2026, President Emmanuel Macron put the planned investment at about 7.5 billion euros and the partners raised their ambition toward 3 gigawatts of capacity nationwide, with the first site near Paris and operations targeted from 2028.[16] MGX's $2 billion investment in the cryptocurrency exchange Binance in March 2025 drew attention because it was settled using USD1, a dollar stablecoin issued by World Liberty Financial, a venture linked to the family of US President Donald Trump. MGX is also part of the investor group that took a stake in the US operations of TikTok (USDS) alongside Oracle and Silver Lake in September 2025.[17]
MGX sits at a sensitive junction of US and UAE technology policy. Because the most capable AI accelerators are restricted under American export controls, large UAE buyers of compute have faced scrutiny in Washington, and that scrutiny has centered on G42, MGX's co-founder. In January 2024 the US House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party asked the Commerce Department to consider export restrictions on G42 over its past links to Chinese firms tied to surveillance and the military. G42 cut its ties to Chinese suppliers in late 2023 and took a roughly $1.5 billion investment from Microsoft in 2024, steps widely read as a condition of keeping access to US technology.[18][19]
The chairmanship of Sheikh Tahnoon, who also serves as the UAE's national security adviser and chairs G42, reinforces the perception that MGX is an arm of the Emirati state rather than a purely commercial fund. Supporters argue that pulling the UAE firmly into the American AI orbit, including through Stargate and the AI Infrastructure Partnership, is a strategic win that keeps Gulf compute on Western hardware and away from China. Critics warn about the national security implications of routing advanced US chips and stakes in leading AI labs through a government-controlled investor, and MGX's Trump-linked stablecoin transaction and TikTok involvement have added a domestic political dimension in the United States. The balance between enabling allied investment and guarding sensitive technology remains unresolved, and MGX has become one of the principal test cases for it.[18][20]