SpaceX’s IPO is going to put the spotlight on AI stocks — here’s what that means for the Big Three Gulf players

SpaceX could announce the terms of its IPO as soon as this afternoon, with bankers expected to lift the lid on the price range and share count for what would be the largest listing ever as Elon Musk races to market before frontier model makers Anthropic and OpenAI. There’s going to be a lot of chatter in the days ahead about what the SpaceX IPO means for the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar: The three Gulf heavyweights have made a patchwork of investments in, with, and alongside SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI.

The cacophony of AI investment news in the regional press over the past two years has been a lot for tech-and-finance nerds like us to keep track of — let alone normals. Herewith, our primer on what you need to know about SpaceX, the IPO, which Gulf country has exposure to which model maker, and how their strategies have so-far differed.

What we know about the SpaceX IPO: Musk is believed to be seeking up to USD 75 bn — more than double the USD 29.4 bn Saudi Aramco raised in 2019 — at a valuation of at least USD 1.8 tn.

First, a caveat: SpaceX is not OpenAI or Anthropic. SpaceX absorbed Elon Musk’s xAI this past February, and anyone buying shares in the company is not getting exposure to a pure model-maker: You get rockets and satellite internet provider Starlink, plus an AI arm — xAI — whose consumer model, Grok, courts controversy. What’s more, SpaceX is increasingly behaving like an infrastructure landlord rather than a model lab: It just signed Anthropic, a direct rival, to a c. USD 15 bn-a-year lease on its Colossus supercomputer, with orbital data centres pitched as the next step. The Gulf’s single biggest “AI” bet is, right now, rocket-and-satellite company with a compute business bolted on.

#1- The UAE: No one in the region built earlier or broader, giving the Emirates four pillars that are regional leaders right now:

• MBZUAI — the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, the world’s first, is training talent and investing in research;
• TII — the Technology Innovation Institute, is building the open-source Falcon models (with serious Arabic chops) and recently sold incredibly sophisticated cryptographic tech to a California company that counts Anthropic among its customers;
• G42 — the Mubadala- and Microsoft-backed champion, builds models, data centers (via Khazna) and cloud compute (via Core42);
• MGX — the sovereign AI fund chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, with c. USD 100 bn to deploy in opportunities around the world.

MGX is the only Gulf vehicle we think has equity in all three labs, having come into OpenAI’s 2025 round, Anthropic’s Series G, and xAI, now SpaceX. And it builds compute everywhere — the 1 GW Stargate UAE cluster in Abu Dhabi, a Buffalo site scaling to 60 MW on a USD 550 mn HSBC facility, and a French campus with Bpifrance, already Europe’s largest, now scaling to 3 GW from 1.4 GW as part of a USD 30-50 bn UAE push into French AI.

#2- Saudi Arabia’s strategy has been to own the stack on home soil. Rather than focusing on slices of the Big Four global labs (Google is vastly more important in that list than SpaceX), PIF built a single champion, Humain, and is assembling the “layers” in order — chips and data centers with Nvidia, AMD, and AWS; export licences from Washington; now the applications, including a Nvidia-powered move into Level 4 robotaxis this week. Its lab exposure runs through SpaceX: PIF holds just under 1% and is weighing a c. USD 5 bn anchor commitment to the IPO. Kingdom Holding and Prince Alwaleed have disclosed a combined 0.63%, worth more than USD 10 bn. And a Humain spokesperson confirmed to us that it, too, holds SpaceX shares. Notably, the Kingdom has no confirmed Anthropic stake and no OpenAI equity.

#3- Qatar: the quiet financial investor. QIA was the first Gulf money into Anthropic and has since doubled down, anchoring xAI’s Series E (so it, too, now holds SpaceX), and signing a national-AI partnership with OpenAI. It spreads capital for returns and access, without Saudi’s infrastructure ambition or the UAE’s all-of-the-above reach.

The days after SpaceX’s IPO will be decisive for the timing (and possibly even ability) of Anthropic and OpenAI to go to market. Anthropic has already filed for an IPO, and OpenAi is widely expected to follow suit. A solid first day that proves durable over the two weeks that follow will make Anthropic a lock for fall — and a slump could prove a buying opportunity for Gulf sovereigns convinced that AI is a key part of the future global economy.

But Gulf sovereigns also face some risk: We saw the other side of the West last month. By the time AI chipmaker Cerebras finally listed — surging 68% to a c. USD 95 bn valuation on the first day of trading — the UAE’s G42, once its largest backer and customer, had been pushed into non-voting shares and saw its share of Cerebras’ revenue cut to 24% from 85%. Why? To satisfy US national-security reviewers, making it a first mover that got squeezed.

Today, all of the Big Four frontier labs are US-domiciled, meaning everything from which chips can ship to our part of the world to whether sovereign-fund money is even welcome is all decided in Washington, not here. Our bet on the future AI economy is increasingly a bet on DC politics — a fact we think will make Chinese makers of open-weight models all the more attractive in the year to come.