Happy Friday, friends. We close out a week in which the AI complex spent money at a scale that makes our regional deal flow look positively restrained, Xi Jinping landed in Cairo for the first time in a decade, and Riyadh had full conference halls nearly the entire week.
Let’s start with the money. Nvidia is paying roughly USD 13 bn for Hugging Face, the open-source platform at the center of a recent OpenAI-linked security breach and a company it had already backed. Nvidia is selling the deal as protection for open-source developers. OpenAI shipped GPT-6 Astra, which it says leads on software engineering, science and cybersecurity, and which president Greg Brockman called a “generational leap in capability.” And Anthropic is finalizing a USD 15 bn credit facility ahead of an IPO set to eclipse SpaceX’s as the largest in history, on annualised revenue already north of USD 65 bn. Three balance-sheet events in three days, each of them underwritten on the assumption that demand keeps compounding.
This morning’s Lede asks the same underwriting question of our side of the world. We look at the bankability of GCC infrastructure projects when volume assumptions can no longer be a reliable guarantee of project success due to the war.
And the number we can’t stop thinking about: 900%. That’s the salary premium China is now paying Taiwanese talent specializing in chips design and production, with many engineers moving to mainland China, Taiwanese industry veterans told tech news outlet Rest of World. The talent poaching appears to be part of a wider campaign to secure critical insights into Taiwan’s revered chips industry, with China setting up front tech companies on the self-governed island to embed themselves in microchips supply chains and talent. Every capital in our region is building data centers and courting fabs. The scarcest input in that industry is a person who knows how to run one, and someone has now put a nine-fold price on them. –Salma
Backstop first, business case second: Four major deals that reached the finish line in the Gulf this year — Kuwait’s crude oil pipeline, an industrial wastewater plant in Jubail, a solar-and-storage complex in Abu Dhabi, and a green hydrogen project in Oman — have almost nothing in common as assets. But all four are live examples of what banks want before putting bns behind infrastructure — and why sovereign backing is becoming almost as important as the project itself.
Since the Iran war disrupted traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, the biggest question on GCC lenders’ mind has become: Who keeps paying if the project’s own numbers stop working? Volume assumptions — the traditional basis for financing a pipeline, a port, or an export-linked plant — have become an unreliable basis to ensure financing.
What has replaced volume assumptions is the credit of whoever stands behind the asset — a ministry, a sovereign wealth fund, a national oil company, or a sponsor close enough to the state to be treated as one. In a region with no shortage of capital (and no shortage of infrastructure projects to finance), fewer and fewer projects can get to a bank and secure financing on faith.
What Hormuz changed
“The events since the end of February have structurally affected GCC project finance, driving international lenders to severely shorten tenors to 5-7 year structures to avoid multi-decade geopolitical risks,” Junaid Ansari, director of investment strategy and research at Kamco Invest, tells EnterpriseAM. Credit spreads have widened “independent of underlying deal structures,” he says, “forcing a pivot away from broadly syndicated international loans toward private placements, domestic bank liquidity, and state-backed sovereign wealth fund capital.”
The volume test went first. “Before the crisis, a project could easily get funding if it promised high volumes, but with the Strait of Hormuz disrupted, physical shipments are too unpredictable,” Ansari says. “Now, banks make it conditional on sovereign or government-backed fund guarantees to step in and pay the bills if things go wrong, making the financial power of the government partner far more important than the project itself.”
The alternative view: Fernando Faria, partner and head of infrastructure at KPMG Middle East, sees no uniform move in tenor across the region, though he says lenders are visibly pricing the environment. “We have, however, seen additional risk premiums reflected in some projects as lenders and other market participants account for the current geopolitical environment,” Faria says. The pressure also shows up well outside the loan agreement, he notes. “Ins., sourcing, and logistics costs can also be affected when supply chains or transportation routes are disrupted. These factors ultimately feed into the overall project economics and can affect financing requirements, even when the underlying credit fundamentals remain sound.”
The market-level number is already visible. GCC construction is expected tocontract 6.2% in 2026, per Fitch Solutions’ research arm BMI, with markets split sharply on Hormuz exposure.
What a deal wants, what a deal needs
Three features recur in the transactions that are getting to the finish line: A contracted or volume-based revenue stream, a sovereign or quasi-sovereign counterparty that also functions as the named customer, and a long-dated concession or lease.
Kuwait’s Project Peregrineis almost a textbook example. The USD 16 bn transaction gives a consortium of Blackstone, Brookfield and KKR rights to Kuwait’s 13 crude-oil pipelines for 20.5 years. KOC retains operational control and pays a volume-based tariff to the joint venture. The network is effectively tied to Kuwait’s oil-production and export system — giving investors both a defined asset and a sovereign-backed end user.
Saudi Arabia’s Jubail wastewater projecthas a similarly tight structure. The USD 500 mn project has a 30-year concession, a named quasi-sovereign customer in SATORP — the Saudi Aramco-TotalEnergies joint venture — and revenues linked to delivering a defined industrial service. A consortium of regional and international banks provided the financing.
Jubail also closed in February, weeks beforeSATORP itself came under attackduring the Iran war. The structure was signed before that risk was visible, which makes the deal a live test of counterparty durability rather than an example of one being priced in.
When the sponsor is the collateral
Masdar’s USD 6.1 bn Abu Dhabi solar-plus-storage projectdoesn’t clear that bar on the public record, and it closed anyway. 5.2 GW of solar capacity paired with 19 GWh of battery storage, designed to provide 1 GW of round-the-clock power, one of the world’s most ambitious renewable financings. It reached financial close in July with a USD 5.1 bn financing package from 13 international and local banks.
Masdar and EWEC have publicly framed the project around ambitions to power AI data centers and “redefine the role of renewable energy for the information age.” Neither has disclosed a power purchase agreement or offtake contract underpinning the financing, and EnterpriseAM could not independently verify that one exists. In other words: the third box — a named, contracted customer — is not confirmed here. On the evidence available, 13 banks committed USD 5.1 bn against sponsor strength and proximity to the state — Masdar’s balance sheet, its track record, and its institutional partnership with EWEC inside Abu Dhabi’s broader procurement architecture — rather than against a disclosed contracted counterparty.
That flexibility looks reserved for sponsors big enough, and close enough to the state, to stand in for a named customer.Oman’s ACME green hydrogen project offers another version of the same model. Phase 1 has a PPA and an offtake arrangement with Yara, while Hydrom and OPAZ provide the government framework around the project.
Faria’s own test for a bankable GCC project puts the state ahead of the asset: Clear alignment with government priorities, clear government support, and a stable contractual revenue stream. “There is rarely a single factor that determines whether an infrastructure project progresses to financing. However, two considerations remain particularly important in the GCC: the strategic priority attached to the project and the strength of government support behind it,” he says.
Strategic priority doesn’t service debt on its own, though. “Strong budget commitments or, where appropriate, specific support from a Ministry of Finance can provide additional comfort to capital providers and strengthen the overall credit proposition,” Faria adds. “Predictable contracted revenues give lenders greater visibility into future cash flows and the project's capacity to service debt,” he says. “The credit quality of the relevant counterparties therefore remains an important part of the assessment.”
Where the money stopped
Governments are applying the same discipline to their own pipelines. Saudi Arabia is reprioritizing rather than canceling: PIF suspended construction on Neom’s The Line in September 2025, and Red Sea Global has paused new construction at the Red Sea Project, too, treating the 10 resorts already built as “proof of concept” while phase two sits on hold. Mukaab, the flagship tower at New Murabba, is moving the other way, with sources telling us that New Murabba is preparing to send RFPs to contractors for the next construction phase. Early works and excavation are done, and the source expects a project award in 2027.
PIF’s“reprioritized”2026-30 strategy makes the logic explicit, emphasizing investment efficiency, value realization, risk-adjusted returns and priority economic ecosystems over the size of the pipeline — a long way from the capital-allocation message of Vision 2030's early years.
The UAE has held up better, but without escaping the direction altogether.New project awards fell 5.4% y-o-y to reach USD 20.5 bn in 2Q 2026, according to a report by Kamco Invest. Sequentially, the plunge was sharper at 56.6%, with declines across seven of eight sectors, led by a 99.4% drop in gas awards. Masdar closed USD multi-bn financing in that market regardless.
“Financial closure in the GCC today requires a checklist that largely overlooks market-volume assumptions, and focuses mainly on emergency liquidity and sovereign backstops,” Ansari explains. “Sovereign guarantee, force majeure, and ins. remain the key consideration,” he added.
The Gulf still has the balance sheets to build almost anything. What a developer has to bring to a bank now is a name — someone contractually obliged to carry the risk when reality stops matching the spreadsheet.
Xi Jinping’s first state visit to Egypt in a decade delivered structural frameworks rather than blockbuster deals — but concrete money is flowing across manufacturing, batteries, digital banking, and infrastructure. The bigger headline agreements — including a Huawei chip or data center agreement — don’t appear to have materialized during Xi’s visit.
What did get signed: Five formal agreements plus more than 20 cooperation documents, according to the Egyptian Presidency, spanning Vision 2030 alignment with the Belt and Road Initiative, industrial and supply chain cooperation, and IT. The two saides also agreed to expand the China-Egypt Teda industrial area in the Suez Canal Economic Zone into its third phase, targeting localization in renewables, automotive, textiles, and chemical fibers.
The 20 cooperation documents fill in the map: technology, finance, the digital economy, transport, and media. Set those alongside other reports and news including OPay’s digital banking bid, a USD 665 mn light-rail financing package, and back-to-back battery and tire MoUs — and the shape is clear: Beijing is widening its Egyptian footprint on every front at once, from the ports to the payment rails.
The bigger picture: Announced Chinese greenfield investment in Egypt has topped USD 52 bn since Xi's last visit in 2016, with a record 30 new projects unveiled in 2025 (up from 11 in 2024), according to fDi Markets.
Egypt as a Chinese tire-export hub: China’s largest tiremaker Zhongce Rubber Group signed a letter of intent for a USD 500 mn Sokhna complex targeting 95% export share to African, Middle Eastern, and European markets, according to the Investment Ministry. Tire manufacturer Linglong Group also signed an agreement for a USD 2 bn integrated industrial complex to manufacture passenger cars, bus and equipment tires, and conveyor belts, while smart-equipment manufacturer Jiangsu Changzhou signed an agreement on planning and building automotive production plants in Egypt. These follow a handful of other Chinese tire investors targeting Sokhna in the past year, after Sailun’s USD 1 bn plant, Chaoyang Longmarch’s USD 190 mn factory, and Zenith’s USD 300 mn tire-components plant.
Batteries and energy storage: Mansour Group signed an MoU with Tianneng Battery Group — China’s top lead-acid maker — to study Egyptian manufacturing of automotive batteries plus lithium cells for new-energy vehicles and grid storage. It parallels government plans for Huawei-backed battery energy storage systems.
Digital banking too: Chinese-owned payments giant OPay formally applied to the CBE for an Egyptian digital banking license, Al Arabiya reports, joining Banque Misr’s Onebank and QNB’s ezbank in Egypt’s licensed digital banking space.
Infrastructure continues: Two financing agreements worth USD 665 mn are lined up to extend the New Capital’s light-rail transit line — the latest Chinese money on a railway Beijing has financed since it broke ground, with a consortium of China’s AVIC Int’l and MPEC building Phase 4.
Compute, Arabic models, and fundraises — these were the main three concrete themes that dominated thefifth edition of LEAP, which closed in Riyadh yesterday after being pushed from April to August due to the US-Israel-Iran war.
The show shifted from selling ambition to selling capacity. Communications and Information Technology Minister Abdullah Alswaha opened LEAP telling the audience the digital economy has grown 69% since 2022, from USD 118 bn to USD 199 bn. The pitch at previous editions was that Saudi wanted to be a compute hub. The pitch this year was that it already is one, and that investors — American, Chinese, Korean, Indian — were signing up to not just build new capacity, but also buy capacity that is either operational now or planned through 2030.
New and old
American players are following through on prior commitments: Amazon Web Services confirmed the largest US commitment of the show. Its first USD 5.3 bn Saudi cloud region is on track to launch in December. Alongside it, AWS and Humain agreed to make up to 50 MW of capacity available in the Kingdom’s first AI Zone by 2028, provisioned with AWS Trainium chips and Nvidia infrastructure. AMD, Cisco, and Humain JV separately put live the largest AMD inference cluster outside the United States, powered by 13k Instinct MI355X GPUs running on Cisco Silicon One networking — the first step in a 250 MW planned capacity by 2027 and a 1 GW target by 2030.
And the Riyadh buildout is already pulling new US firms into Riyadh. San Francisco-based Together AI committed with Humain to a 250 MW facility, and data-management firm NetApp is doubling its Saudi sales team from three to six and grew its solutions engineering team from two to four ahead of a regional headquarters launch in Riyadh, Senior Solutions Engineering Manager for Middle East and Africa Walid Issa told EnterpriseAM on the sidelines of the show.
Saudi firms also committed to their own data-center buildouts, including Humain launching its AI Cloud with 1.1 MW capacity, to be scaled to 35.1 MW next year, while NHC Innovation’s Khuzam Digital Valley is targeting 65 MW of scalable capacity by 2033. Al Moammar Investment Systems will invest USD 1.2 bn to expand its data centers to 192 MW of total operational capacity and Alfanar committed USD 150 mn to localize data-center component manufacturing.
But perhaps the most interesting development is that Chinese and Korean players are now joining the compute foray. Mobily and BytePlus — the enterprise arm of ByteDance — announced a joint investment of more than USD 150 mn to launch BytePlus’ first public cloud region in the Middle East and Africa, built on Mobily’s Saudi data-center infrastructure and targeting media, AI, and gaming workloads. China’s Tencent Cloud secured a Saudi operating license, cleared to serve government bodies and financial institutions, and will build on the c. USD 150 mn it has invested so far in the market. Meanwhile, Korea’s Naver Innovation and China’s Byteplus announced they will be the first two anchor customers to the USD 3.3 bn Khuzam Digital Valley project, announced during LEAP by homegrown NHC Innovation.
Arabic language models make a return
Humain used LEAP to launch its first own-branded Arabic-language AI products. The PIF-owned firm unveiled HUMAIN M3, an open-weights Arabic language model trained on more than one trillion Arabic tokens, alongside HUMAIN Voice, a conversational AI platform covering Saudi, Maghrebi, Egyptian, and Levantine Arabic dialects. HUMAIN also made a strategic investment in Dubai-based Arabic-language enterprise AI platform Arabic.AI and entered a partnership with Arabic. AI and its sister firm Tarjama to expand Arabic and multilingual AI across Saudi Arabia and international markets.
AND- AWS is integrating Humain’s Arabic LLM (Allam) into Amazon Bedrock. The move would allow customers of AWS to integrate Allam alongside other foundational models.
ALSO- Visual intelligence outfit Luma AI will roll out a “fully native” Arabic-language interface for its Luma Agents AI platform later this year in partnership with Humain, covering navigation, menus, and workflow tools, according to a press release. The platform already supports Arabic-language prompts and generates Arabic-language creative outputs, but the new update is premised on being “fully native,” allowing the workflow to operate fully in Arabic.
The region’s non-oil private sector had its broadest month of improvement in August since the war began, with the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Egypt all seeing improved conditions during the month. The exceptions were Qatar and Lebanon, each of which lost ground as costs climbed and external demand thinned.
IN CONTEXT- The Strait of Hormuz was all but closed throughout most of the month, with just 447 transits recorded in August, compared to 3,098 in February, according to Lloyd’s List data. While July’s purchasing managers index (PMI) readings had leaned on the calm of the now-defunct US-Iran ceasefire and the cooling oil prices that came with it, August’s improvement was instead driven by domestic demand and from firms working around the disruption. New export orders fell in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Lebanon, and Turkey, while the countries that gained ground did so on local customers, local suppliers, and restocking.
The UAE ran furthest with that. Its PMI rose to 55.3 from July’s 52.7, the fastest improvement in business conditions since December 2024. New work inflows were at a joint record for their strongest level in more than two years, while export demand rose for a second consecutive month. Firms leaned on domestic vendors to route around the disruption, which cut delivery times, pushed input cost inflation to a six-month low, and let companies rebuild input stocks at the sharpest pace in nearly three years. Employment, on the other hand, fell for the second time in three months, which S&P Global Market Intelligence Principal Economist David Owen attributed to hesitancy about committing to long-term capacity.
Saudi Arabia’s0.7 point growth to 53.8pushed its PMI to a six-month high and marked a fifth straight month of expansion, with output growing at its fastest pace in seven months. The split between domestic and external demand was starkest here: New orders rose for a fifth month while international orders fell sharply and faster than in July. “Domestic demand remains an important driver of growth,” said Riyad Bank Chief Economist Naif Al Ghaith, pointing to fiscal support and the development project pipeline. The reading still sits well below the survey’s long-run trend of 56.8, and competition kept output charges rising at their slowest rate since March, even as staff costs rose at the fastest pace since February.
Kuwait built on July’s rebound, with thePMI climbing to 53.6from 50.8 as output and new orders grew at their quickest rates since February and employment rose for the first time in six months. New business in Kuwait was “supported by a renewed increase in new export orders as companies reported being able to secure sales from customers in neighbouring countries.”
Egypt, meanwhile, came within striking distance of the line that separates contraction from growth, with its PMI jumping nearly three full points to 49.6. The August reading is a seven-month high and shows the softest contraction since January. Employment rose for the first time since last October, at the second-fastest rate in the survey’s 15-year history, while business confidence hit its highest since June 2022. The strain showed up in purchasing, which fell at the steepest rate in nearly three years on material scarcity, cash flow limits and Hormuz disruption, while the oil rebound reaccelerated input costs.
Going the other way
Qatar moved the other way,slipping to 47.6from 48.5 and extending its downturn to six months. Output fell for the eighth time in nine months and at a faster rate, across all four sectors, even as the decline in new orders slowed to its softest since February. Costs are the pressure point: Input price inflation accelerated for a survey-record eighth consecutive month to a 22-month high, and employment growth sank to its weakest in 25 months.
Lebanon lost its narrow foothold, with the PMIeasing to 50.1from 50.7 and activity virtually flat after modest gains in June and July. New business fell after two months of growth, dragged by a ninth straight monthly decline in export orders. Operating expenses rose at the second-fastest pace in almost three and a half years, and output charges at the second-quickest in just over three. Firms remain pessimistic about the year ahead, though less so than in July.
Kuwait’s government can now borrow directly from its Future Generations Fund (FGF), a move it has used only once before in 1990, Arab News reports. The new change was codified in a government decree issued on 1 September, amending the law governing the country’s sovereign wealth fund, the Kuwait Investment Authority (KIA).
The amendments will open a new liquidity lever for the public treasury, alongside debt markets and the General Reserves Fund (GRF).
The borrowing comes with guardrails. Annual loans are capped at 100% of the FGF’s five-year average returns, and the outstanding balance can’t exceed 10% of net asset value. The borrowings are repayable as and when the budget swings to surplus, and are impossible to write off without new legislation.
The two pots, and the sovereign umbrella: Kuwait’s sovereign wealth fund KIA manages more than USD 1 tn across two sub-funds built for opposite jobs. The GRF is historically Kuwait’s fiscal shock absorber, drawn down routinely to cover deficits and most recently through the 2020-22 oil crash. The FGF was built as its opposite: 10% of state revenue flows into it every year by law for a mandate focused on long-term savings and investments, and any withdrawal for budget purposes requires its own fresh legislation, and fiscal rules tightened a few years ago to restrict transfers between the two funds to surplus years only.
Kuwait has historically underutilized its potential in accessing debt. The country has solid sovereign ratings from credit rating agencies and its debt-to-GDP ratio is the lowest in the GCC at about 22% now, against Bahrain’s 152%, Qatar’s 43, Oman’s 33%, Saudi’s 32%, and UAE’s 31%, according to IMF data.
That’s why Kuwait has been making moves recently to improve its debt optionality. The government finally passed the public debt law in March 2025, raising its debt ceiling to KWD 30 bn (c. USD 97 bn), an equivalent of some 60% of the country’s GDP in 2025. This effectively allowed the government to resume issuing sovereign bonds after an eight-year hiatus, raising USD 11.3 bn in September 2025 and USD 4.3 bn later in July of this year.
IN CONTEXT- Kuwait reached the KWD 10 bn ceiling stipulated in the earlier law in 2017, and the Parliament had killed all attempts to raise the ceiling since then until it was dissolved in 2024. Kuwait has been on a drive to reform economic policies since the dissolution of the Parliament, where several regulatory changes needed to push diversification efforts, like the public-private partnership bill, were stalled due to political deadlock.
Why now: Kuwait’s FY 2025-26 budget closed with a KWD 7.1 bn (USD 22.9 bn) deficit — 15% of GDP, the country’s widest shortfall since the Covid pandemic and almost double what the IMF expected. Revenues fell 25% y-o-y, driven almost entirely by oil revenues collapsing 30% to KWD 13.6 bn (USD 43.8 bn), 11% below budget. Average realized crude prices held near the USD 69/bbl budget assumption, but the miss was on volume as the Hormuz closure choked exports. The current outlook looks even worse: BMI now projects an 8.1% GDP contraction in 2026 and a deficit at 18.9% of GDP in FY 2026-27 — the widest in the GCC. With that outlook and Kuwait already drawing big sums from its debt ceiling since the passage of the debt law last year, the FGF is emerging as an emergency backdrop.
REMEMBER-SWF Global flagged this exact scenario in a note published in the war’s early weeks, warning that a prolonged conflict could pull Gulf sovereign funds into plugging state budget gaps. Kuwait just became the test case.
Savvy Games’ Brian Ward is the latest executive to cycle out of his position in Saudi Arabia as the PIF continues to pull back from speculative wagers. Ward (LinkedIn) has stepped down as CEO, with PIF Deputy Governor and international investments head Turqi Alnowaiser (LinkedIn) stepping in as interim, Bloomberg reports. Alnowaiser is a familiar name in gaming — he fronted PIF's USD 55 bn takeover of Electronic Arts, which closed last month.
The Savvy scorecard: Ward ran the Kingdom’s USD 38 bn gaming strategy since 2021 with uneven results — Scopely’s USD 4.9 bn acquisition handed Savvy the studio behind Monopoly Go, which raced to USD 6 bn in revenue, but esports ended in layoffs and shelved expansion.
It’s a rare morning in which there is no real thread or running theme in our region’s markets or the dealflow that’s emerging. A Saudi bank has found a buyer willing to pay better than double book to take a credit-card JV off its hands, a year on from the fee-cap regime that made the business harder to run — and Helios Investment Partners has now had two Egyptian deals die on it inside seven weeks. Everything else on the page is capital formation, from Riyadh, Kuwait City, and Cairo.
SAIB is exiting its card JV at a premium. The Saudi Investment Bank (SAIB) is selling its 50% stake in American Express Saudi Arabia to its JV partner, Amex Middle East, for SAR 1.43 bn (USD 381.4 mn) upfront, plus deferred consideration, and is exiting the venture entirely, according to a Tadawul disclosure. The value of the transaction is more than double book value, with a roughly SAR 792.4 mn gain expected.
SAIB is cashing out of a steady earner as economics tighten. Sama’s 2025 reforms capped credit-card fees — international transaction charges at 2% and withdrawals at 3% — are squeezing issuer margins even as Saudi Arabia’s cashless shift accelerates.
Raya Holding’s board walked away from Helios’ bid for its frozen-food unit, according to an EGX disclosure (pdf), marking the UK-based, Africa-focused PE firm’s second collapsed local transaction in under two months. Raya’s BoD resolved yesterday not to proceed with Helios Investment Partners’ amended offer for 100% of Raya Foods, citing unmet conditions required to complete the transaction.
Helios had been circling Raya Foods since last year, opening with a bid for 49% before moving on the whole company. Its other Egyptian transaction died the same way: Telecom Egypt scrapped the sale of a 75-80% stake in its Regional Data Center Hub — a USD 230 mn transaction — on 17 July, its board finding that Helios hadn’t satisfied conditions tied to third parties.
Al Rajhi Bank has priced a USD 600 mn Tier 2 social sukuk at a 6.232% profit rate, according to Zawya. That's subordinated capital for the Kingdom's largest Islamic bank, raised in a labelled format Al Rajhi has leaned on before — it billed a 2024 deal as the first sustainable AT1 capital sukuk issuance in the market, and followed it with a USD 1 bn AT1. Social- and sustainability-labelled paper has become the default wrapper for Saudi bank capital, not the exception.
Kuwait International Bank (KIB) is in the market with a five-year benchmark USD sukuk, a senior unsecured Reg S issuance off KIB Sukuk Limited’s USD 1.5 bn trust certificate issuance program, Zawya reports. The lender, rated A (stable) by Fitch, earned Central Bank of Kuwait sign-off in early August to issue up to USD 600 mn under the program through a Cayman-incorporated SPV.
Synergy Capital and Nawy Now have raised EGP 1 bn (USD 19.6 mn) in under a year on Egypt’s first Ijarah-based fixed-income fund. The second issuance closed at EGP 633 mn (USD 12.4 mn) — the second tranche under a five-year, EGP 5 bn (USD 98 mn) program. The two rounds together hit c.21% of that target in under 12 months. The fund is a Shariah-compliant, lease-to-own structure backed by real-estate mortgage receivables from Nawy Now’s loan book. It’s the first fund of its kind in Egypt or the Middle East. MFIC, Synergy Capital’s asset-management arm, runs it.
Dubai-born fitness tech platform Enhance raised USD 18.2 mn in equity and venture debt to grow its operational footprint across the US from 700+ locations, according to a press release (pdf). Enhance is targeting 850 US locations by the end of 2026, with faster deployment planned for 2027 through new strategic partnerships, Enhance founder Tarek Mounir says. Dubai-based Global Ventures led the equity tranche, while the venture debt was structured by India’s Stride Ventures.
In the US, Enhance’s entry point is enterprise SaaS — per-location licensing. Where gyms want more, Enhance runs personal training end-to-end, tying its revenue to the gym’s PT income rather than its software budget. The GCC remains its largest revenue base, with Saudi Arabia being its fastest-growing market.
ALSO WORTH KNOWING TODAY-
Egyptian education platform 3C Coding School raised USD 3 mn in a seed round led by MRG Economic Group, with participation from angel investors. The edtech plans to put the proceeds toward entering the Saudi market and accelerating the development of an AI-powered learning platform.
Riyadh-based agentic AI platform Cofe Tech closed a pre-IPO round valuing the firm at USD 178 mn, targeting a Tadawul listing by 2029; the round was co-led by Waed Ventures, Aditum Investment Management, Masarrah Investment, and Alyasra Foods.
Travel technology platform FlyAkeed secured SAR 94.3 mn in growth funding — an equity round led by Sanabil Investments, Artal Capital, stc’s corporate VC fund, and Aljazira Capital, plus a separate Murabaha sukuk financing led by Artal Capital — earmarked for its deferred-payment offering, AI and analytics capabilities, and GCC expansion.
GCC equities bounce back in August: The MSCI GCC index, which tracks big and mid cap equities, rose 3.9% in August after a three-month losing streak as regional geopolitical tensions eased, according to Kamco Invest’s monthly report (pdf). The rally tracked a broader global rebound: the MSCI World Index gained 2.6% on a healthy earnings season.
Saudi Arabia did the heavy lifting: The Tadawul All Share Index rose 5.1% — its best month since January — after four consecutive monthly declines, pushing YTD returns to 6.1%. Oman’s MSX 30 came next at a 4.5% increase, followed by Kuwait’s All Share Index (+1.6%). Abu Dhabi added 0.9% and Dubai 0.7%. Meanwhile, Qatar (-1.1%) and Bahrain (-1.0%) were the only markets to close the month lower.
The rally was broad-based across sectors, led by hotels and leisure (+10%), materials (+8.2%), and ins. (+7.5%). Telecom rose 5.0% and banking 4.7% — the region’s most heavily weighted sectors. One outlier: energy stocks, despite elevated and volatile oil prices tied to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, gained just 1.2% — the weakest of any sector.
But the YTD scorecard tells a different story: Oman is the region’s best-performing market by a wide margin, up 29.6% year-to-date (YTD) on the strength of solid performances in February (+16.8%) and March (+10.5%). Saudi came second with a 6.1% surge, followed by the distant third Abu Dhabi(+0.1%). The rest of the markets remain at a worse place than when they started the year, with Qatar down by 8.9%, Bahrain by 6.3%, and Dubai declining by 3.5%.
And it gets complicated in some jurisdictions when you break down the performance by cap size. In Kuwait, the Main 50 Index, the mid-cap benchmark, gained 9.3% in August, its second-best month of the year, and is up 26.6% YTD, while the large-cap Premier Market Index rose by just 0.8% in August and is down 2.2% YTD.
Kuwait moves to close money-laundering loopholes flagged by global watchdog: The Kuwaiti government is banning cash transactions for the purchase of gold, precious stones, metals, and real estate, according to decrees No. 172 and No. 173 from the Commerce and Industry Ministry. Under the new rules, payments now must run through central bank-approved non-cash channels, which effectively also bans non-cash gold and metal exchange between consumers and businesses.
The decisions also introduce enhanced know-your-customer (KYC) requirements for high-risk or high-value transactions in precious metals and real estate. That means tighter due diligence for transactions involving politically exposed persons and nationals from high-risk jurisdictions as identified by the Kuwait Financial Intelligence Unit, as well as sales worth more than KWD 3k (USD 9.7k) in the case of gold, precious stones and metals. The new rules also require traders and brokers to keep transaction records for five years after their close.
Why it matters: The AML global watchdog Financial Action Task Force (FATF) added Kuwait to its gray list last February, a status that complicates cross-border banking and makes it harder for foreign players to do business in listed jurisdictions. The recent rewrite of compliance rules aims to address the concerns that FATF flagged in its decision: weak supervision on non-banking sectors like gold dealers and real estate brokers. Since then, Kuwait ramped up its crackdown on violators, issuing KWD 141.5k in fines against businesses in these sectors in 2Q.
Rehabilitation loading
The Syria Petroleum Company (SPC) restarted two natural gas wells at the Conoco field in Deir Azzor Province in eastern Syria, after the field’s wells were severely damaged over ten years ago during the civil war. The restart could add as much as 1.5 mn cbm of gas per day, helping Syria plug in more gas into its national networks that are now dependent on gas imports.
Oil fields in the eastern province are coming next, SPC CEO Yousef Qiblawi told Syria’s state news agency Sana, while gas from the restarted two fields will be pumped to power electricity generation in southern provinces. Syria is aiming to double its local gas production to 15 mn cbm / d by the end of 2026, up from 7 cbm / d, Syrian Energy Minister Mohammad Al Bashir said last December.
IN CONTEXT- Syria’s central government regained control over oil and gas fields in Deir Azzor last January after reaching an agreement with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) which controlled the area since ISIS’ defeat in 2019. The Conoco field has five wells, and rehabilitation is currently ongoing in the remaining three wells.
Temporary relief
Baghdad’s private electricity generators are set to get fuel at subsidized rates for September, providing them with temporary relief as the government pushes for fuel subsidies reform that entered into effect on paper on 1 September. Iraq’s Prime Minister Ali Al Zaidi issued the decision on Wednesday, stipulating a provision rate of IQD 400 per liter of fuel — the same subsidized rate that still goes to household consumers.
The move came after a standoff that saw private operators turn off their generators on Tuesday in protest, citing the government’s “inadequate support,” Iraqi daily Shafaq reported. The government is aiming to limit dependence on private operators in Baghdad to just four hours a day — an ambitious target given how critical their generators have been in filling in the shortage in grid-supplied electricity.
The carve-out for private electricity generators is a real test for the reform push. Several Iraqi governments have made several attempts to reform the country’s fuel and electricity subsidy systems, but failed to get to the finish line amid public backlash and pressure from powerful interest groups that benefit from the subsidies, we reported this week in our deep dive into the subsidies reform push. The current push spares households, but ends fuel subsidies for commercial, industrial, and the power generation sectors. Whether Al Zaidi persists or succumbs to pressure on this reform is a key thing to watch.
Guards up
Turkey is mulling a full membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) — the China-led economic and security bloc founded in 2001 and now includes Central Asia nations(except Turkmenistan), Pakistan, India, Iran, and Belarus. “Turkey’s prospect of (full) membership to the organisation does not imply a breakaway from any other bloc or from the West,” President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told journalists.
Turkey, a member of the West-aligned defense alliance Nato, has been increasingly diversifying its political and defense alliances, despite concerns that some of these moves might come at odds with its position in Nato. Last month, the country signed a Joint Defense Agreement with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan that treats an armed attack on one of them as an attack on all — an alliance that Turkey said is still open for new members like Egypt. The move comes on top of Turkey announcing its intention to become one of the founding members of a Canada-led initiative to launch a multilateral defense-focused bank called the Defense, Security and Resilience Bank (DSRB). The new bank aims to raise up to USD 134 bn in capital and secure a triple-A credit rating that would allow it to lend cheaply to member states to support industrial spending on defense.
On the water
Gulf money is circling Cairo’s Nile front. The Housing Ministry is weighing bids from Gulf investors to build residential, office, and hotel projects in the Maspero Triangle and along the Corniche, a government source tells us. The steer is toward equity partnerships that leave the state holding a stake rather than selling the land outright — though there are no names, figures, or timelines attached yet.
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