Already plugged in

Good morning, ladies and gents. The smartest Gulf money this morning is buying things that already work: a power station that’s already plugged in, a gas project that’s already shipping.

AI’s appetite for energy is the reason: Adnoc Gas CEO Fatema Al Nuaimi said at ADIPEC yesterday that “gas is going to continue to grow” over the long term, as the world needs more energy to power AI. Shell’s latest LNG outlook says the Hormuz disruption has shut about a fifth of the world’s monthly LNG supply since February.

Qatar’s answer to AI’s power problem is to buy somewhere it’s already solved. QIA’s AI arm, Qai, and Brookfield will invest GBP 2.5 bn (c. USD 3.4 bn) in a data center at Drax’s power station in northern England, Bloomberg reports. The site already has a grid connection, so the first phase, up to 100 MW, could be online by 1Q 2028 without the years-long wait for a new one.

Abu Dhabi is applying the same logic to Hormuz: XRG is buying Shell’s 16.7% non-operated stake in Australia’s North West Shelf LNG project for a base USD 1.4 bn plus a milestone-linked payment, its first Australian LNG asset. The project can liquefy 14.3 mn tons a year, almost 3% of global capacity, and none of it has to cross Hormuz to reach Asia.

Not every Gulf position is having such a tidy week: UAE regulators have the largest cryptocurrency hack in history on their hands: Abu Dhabi’s Financial Services Regulatory Authority (FSRA) is essentially the home regulator for Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, which was hit with a USD 6.3 bn hack last week, and MGX has a USD 2 bn stake in the exchange. The FSRA says it is “aware of the matter” and “engaging closely with Binance.”

Back at ADIPEC, Egypt and the UAE talked storage on the sidelines. Egypt’s Petroleum Minister Karim Badawi and Deputy Prime Minister Hussein Eissa met UAE Energy Minister Suhail Al Mazrouei to push the Fujairah-linked projects agreed in October 2025, including a logistics zone in El Alamein for storing and trading crude and petroleum products, according to a statement.

The opposite wager is in our Lede this morning: the Gulf’s airports, where the concrete is going up before the jets and the connecting passengers to fill it. Boeing now expects to miss its target of 500 737 deliveries this year, and airlines canceled 26.5k flights at Dubai, Doha, and Riyadh between February and late October, yet Dubai plans room for 150 mn passengers a year at Al Maktoum, more than twice what DXB is on pace to handle this year. “There is a real possibility that airports expand faster than the fleet is added,” Amandeep Kaur Ahuja tells us.