SWFs are keeping busy

Gulf sovereign capital didn’t take an Eid break: The region’s big funds were busy while the markets were closed. Mubadala booked a 17x exit on an AI cooling play, Savvy Games wrote a USD 6 bn check for Southeast Asian gaming, Aramco tapped Citi to sell a chunk of its midstream infrastructure, and ADIA quietly moved into European bank capital relief. Add a Pax Silica-linked critical minerals fund, a Saudi delivery unicorn testing IPO waters mid-war, and a new SAR 4.5 bn bet on the Holy Cities — and it’s clear the deal pipeline barely blinked.

The one worry: Wall Street is getting tense about the health of the private credit market, where Gulf SWFs are big players. We’ll be watching this space in the weeks ahead.

Who’s exposed? Everyone. ADIA is just the latest, launching over the break a significant risk transfer (SRT) fund with London’s Christofferson Robb & Company and taking a participating stake in the manager. But at least it’s not in the US: The move gives Abu Dhabi’s biggest sovereign wealth fund a direct entry point into the regulatory-heavy world of European bank capital relief — a shift from vanilla corporate and real estate lending toward more complex credit protection for performing EU bank portfolios.

Mubadala and KKR just booked one of the sovereign wealth world’s most eye-popping exits. The pair sold Canada’s CoolIT Systems to US water giant Ecolab for USD 4.8 bn — roughly 17x what they paid for the liquid cooling specialist just three years ago. CoolIT sits at the exact bottleneck of the moment: It keeps AI data centers cool. Mubadala and KKR bought in at USD 270 mn in 2023, rode the global data center build-out to peak valuation, and got out.

Our take: With concerns about a possible bubble in the AI infrastructure buildout amid all the overlapping circular deals, this one could wind up looking particularly prescient…

SPEAK OF Mubadala… The fund joined SoftBank and Singapore’s Temasek in a US-led investment fund to shore up critical mineral and energy supply chains, with Washington kickstarting the vehicle with a USD 250 mn commitment. The fund sits under the Pax Silica framework and targets rare earth and mineral security at a moment when the regional war has doubled helium prices. It’s sovereign capital being deployed to hard-wire the logistics and mineral networks underwriting next-gen AI compute.

PIF’s gaming arm is writing another big check. Savvy Games Group is acquiring Istanbul-based mobile studio Moonton from China’s ByteDance for USD 6 bn — a 50% premium over what the TikTok parent paid in 2021. The deal brings Mobile Legends: Bang Bang and its 1.5 bn installs under the Saudi umbrella, giving Savvy a dominant beachhead in Southeast Asia. Current management stays on, according to an internal memo from Moonton CEO Zhang Yunfan. Moonton joins a portfolio that already includes Scopely (Monopoly Go), Niantic’s gaming division (Pokémon Go), and esports giant ESL Faceit. Separately, Saudi’s Electronic Gaming Development Company picked up a 5.03% stake in Japan's Capcom — PIF already held 5% before the transaction.

ALSO IN SAUDI- Saudi Aramco is moving forward with the sale of a USD multi-bn stake in its oil export and storage terminals, a deal that could fetch over USD 10 bn, with Citi advising. The timing is deliberate: Aramco is signaling business-as-usual even as it reroutes crude through its East-West pipeline to bypass the Hormuz chokepoint. Shoring up the balance sheet given what’s happening in the region right now is a smart move.

Private-sector moves

Ninja, the Saudi quick-delivery unicorn, is testing IPO waters despite the war. The four-year-old startup has been gauging investor appetite for a Tadawul main market listing in late 2026 or early 2027, Bloomberg reports, with executives meeting investors in London this month and banks being selected. Ninja logged USD 1 bn in revenue last year and is targeting USD 1.6 bn in 2026. It claimed a USD 1.5 bn valuation in last July’s Riyad Capital-led round. A private raise remains the fallback if volatility persists, the report claims. Tadawul has held up better than most regional bourses since the conflict started, with strong oil prices propping up energy heavyweights.

Arabian Dyar and Al Rajhi Capital are launching anSAR 4.5 bn real estate fund targeting residential and hospitality projects in Makkah and Madinah — a bet on what Arabian Dyar CEO Naif Alatawi calls investment destinations that “have stood there for centuries.” The fund could eventually deploy up to SAR 20 bn to meet demand from non-Saudi Muslims now eligible to own property in the Holy Cities under last January’s Real Estate Foreign Ownership Law. Dyar is already working on SAR 10 bn worth of projects in Makkah’s Masar district. “Prices could hit SAR 50k per sqm when the market opens,” Alatawi told Bloomberg.

ALSO WORTH KNOWING TODAY

Borouge Group International has taken control of Borouge, completing its acquisition of a 54% stake from Adnoc and 36% from Borealis to bring total ownership to 90%, according to an ADX disclosure. The move locks in control ahead of the broader Adnoc-OMV polyolefins mega-merger — a c. USD 60 bn platform combining Borouge, Borealis, and Nova Chemicals — which is on track to close before month-end.

Rakbank has wrapped up the sale of its merchant acquiring business to Network International for AED 551 mn, according to a press release. Network International will onboard Rakbank’s c. 5k merchants over 6-8 months and offer its payment solutions to the bank’s clients. The deal was first reported last November and still needs regulatory approval.

Qualiphi acquired Career Club from iCareer in a six-figure USD deal to build what it calls the region’s first Arabic-first career services ecosystem. The platform serves 500k students across 40 Egyptian public universities and 7k in the Gulf, with plans to onboard 15 more Egyptian universities and expand into two additional Gulf markets this year.

Market Snapshot

Tadawul flat • ADX +1.1% • DFM +1.6% • EGX30 -1.4%

Brent USD 104.49 / bbl · Gold USD 4,514 / oz · USD / SAR 3.7502 · USD / EGP 52.63