Gulf

1. HUMAIN ups its VC fund
2. Saudi’s beauty boom
3. Wall Street RSVPs to Riyadh
4. OPEC’s threat from within

Crude as an artistic muse.

HUMAIN lines up giant AI fund

HUMAIN, Saudi Arabia’s state-controlled AI firm, has been showing off how far it has come in the 18 months since it launched: hardware, lucrative investments, and now a massive pot of money aimed at backing new tech. The company will unveil a venture capital fund later this year expected to be significantly bigger than the $10 billion initially anticipated, HUMAIN’s chief executive told Semafor in an interview. It has been encouraged by early success backing Elon Musk’s xAI before its merger with SpaceX and public listing. The company is racing ahead with the development of data centers across Saudi Arabia that CEO Tareq Amin says are cheaper than their rivals’, while also investing in defending this infrastructure as the US-Iran war rolls on.

The breakneck pace of developments — which also includes consumer technology such as laptops — reflects the scale of the bet that Saudi Arabia is making on AI, both as a vehicle for global economic disruption and as a revenue stream to diversify away from oil sales. The momentum behind HUMAIN also contrasts with some of the kingdom’s other ambitious investment plans, which have faced budget cutbacks and management churn.

Saudi dominates Gulf beauty market

Saudi Arabia’s $8.1 billion beauty market is forecast to grow 8.7% annually through 2030, almost double the global average. It’s already the Gulf’s largest, accounting for more than half of regional sales, according to Euromonitor data cited by Business of Fashion. The boom is being driven by Saudi women’s rising disposable income: Many of them prefer to spend on homegrown beauty businesses that are largely founded by other Saudi women, who rank second worldwide for startup participation.

Female participation in the workforce has grown rapidly since Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s social reforms in 2016 — women currently constitute around 34% of the labor market, up from 20% when the changes were introduced, according to World Bank data. But the story isn’t all rosy: Over the past decade, there have been prominent arrests of women speaking out about gender equality in the kingdom.

— Ed Clowes

Dimon and Dalio RSVP to Riyadh

For anyone wondering whether Wall Street would still fly to Riyadh in wartime, Saudi Arabia’s flagship investment conference has published its RSVPs. Ray Dalio, Jamie Dimon, Larry Fink, and Stephen Schwarzman lead the speaker list for October’s Future Investment Initiative, released nearly two months out, earlier than the conference typically names its lineup. The Gulf’s conference season is usually packed into the cooler months, and the last quarter of 2026 is even more crammed because events in the spring were postponed due to the war.

Organizers have been concerned about turnout, but early signs point the other way. LEAP, the delayed tech conference that wraps up in Riyadh today, looked much like its earlier editions: packed and heavy with international names. FII’s early list is another signal that it will be business as usual at the event nicknamed Davos in the Desert. The tenth edition runs Oct. 26-29.

— Manal Albarakati

View: OPEC’s new threat comes from within

Saudi Arabia’s deep crude discounts for Asian buyers may indicate that the kingdom is prepared to defend its market share even as OPEC+ tries to collectively manage supply, setting up a possible clash with the oil exporting group, independent energy commentator Wael Mahdi wrote in a column for Semafor.

This weekend’s meeting “can decide next month’s barrels without internal tensions spilling out,” Mahdi writes. “But the 2027 capacity review is the harder task: Deciding who gets to produce more, who must wait, and whether those being asked to wait still believe the bargain is worth accepting.”

Education

• Dubai’s schools are open, and most of the emirate’s 400,000 students — largely foreign and privately educated — have returned. But enrollment growth has slowed from the targets that school operators had set before the war, signaling a slowdown in the influx of new expats this year compared to the post-pandemic boom.

Sovereign Wealth

• Abu Dhabi Investment Council tapped an executive from Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan to become chief investment officer of its private equity division as the sovereign wealth fund ramps up deals abroad and fills out its C-suite.

Tech

• HUMAIN, PIF’s AI unit, has invested in Dubai-based Arabic.AI and Tarjama. The companies didn’t disclose financial details of the deal. They plan to use HUMAIN’s AI infrastructure and models to build Arabic-language tools for Saudi businesses, as well as agents that read, check, and draft contracts and other documents.
• Abu Dhabi AI firm G42 is reportedly in talks to raise billions of dollars, joining other state-linked firms in courting outside capital. Mubadala Investment Co., Microsoft, and Silver Lake are already investors. — Bloomberg

For most of a century, oil in Saudi Arabia was like water or weather: everywhere and nobody’s subject. The kingdom’s painters gave their canvases to palm trees and dates, dhows and calligraphy, while crude merely paid for the paint. As the kingdom plans for life after oil, crude has become a muse, with art spanning the eras before, during, and after it.

Riyadh’s Black Gold Museum has filled a Zaha Hadid building with more than 350 artworks on the subject, with backing from the culture ministry and the state’s petroleum think tank. In November, Jeddah-born brothers Turki and Abdulrahman Gazzaz will open Post-Oil 2026 at Qatar’s design biennial. Its poster is a still life every Jeddah resident knows, a rooftop of water tanks and air conditioners against a hazy sky. Saudi artists once painted around such scenes; now they are painting, sculpting, and curating them as nostalgic moments born of, and paid for by, the boom.

— Manal Albarakati