SoftBank seeks Gulf investors + Mubadala inks a deal with TSMC

Masayoshi Son is back in the Gulf: The SoftBank founder and CEO is looking to raise up to USD 100 bn from Gulf investors for a fund that would buy companies and give them an AI makeover, the Financial Times reports.

Sound familiar? Saudi Arabia’s PIF and Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala contributed a combined USD 60 bn to his first Vision Fund, which launched in 2017.

Mubadala’s chip bet pays off: GlobalFoundries, the US chipmaker that’s c. 73% owned by Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund Mubadala, signed a USD 2 bn deal to supply Taiwanese chip giant TSMC with silicon interposers, The National reports.

In plain English: interposers are the parts that let chips talk to each other — AI has sent demand for them soaring.

Aramco Digital goes agentic: The Saudi state oil company’s tech arm is teaming up with industrial AI firm OrbitronAI to build and sell agentic AI tools to industrial companies, per Middle East AI News.

Finally: The UAE wants its civil servants to be AI power users. The country is training c. 80k government employees to build their own AI agents, AI Minister Omar Sultan Al Olama said at AI Everything Abu Dhabi last week, per CXO Insight ME. UAE residents are the world’s biggest AI users, according to Microsoft.