THIS MORNING: Indian, Chinese buying spree drives up UAE crude costs + Abu Dhabi property market sales eclipse last year’s total

Good morning, lovely people. We’ve made it through the first week of September and its raging traffic. While it’s been business as usual domestically, the war next door is still the elephant nobody quite wants to name over coffee.

Behind the scenes, the phones have been busy. President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed took a call from US President Donald Trump yesterday, with the two going over the UAE-US relationship and the latest on the region. That came just days after Steve Witkoff, White House envoy, reportedly sat down with National Security Adviser Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed on the sidelines in Sardinia, according to Axios, to talk through next steps on Iran as Washington leans harder on Tehran's last remaining trade lifelines.

The cost of that pressure campaign (and the ongoing war) is showing up at home. The UAE halted all trade, commercial exchange, and financial transactions with Iran days before Washington's sanctions push went public — no small matter, given Dubai alone did some USD 28 bn in trade with Iran in 2024 and has long served as its go-to re-export hub.

And Jebel Ali, the port that built modern Dubai, is still nowhere near recovered: The Financial Times reports that container volumes there plunged more than 90% at the worst of the war and have barely come back, with Hormuz transits still running at a fraction of pre-war levels — averaging 17 vessels a day against roughly 135 before the conflict.

The UAE isn’t sitting still. It’s building out its East Coast infrastructure (read: this morning’s Planet Finance) and developing its infrastructure links with the rest of the Gulf. Businesses are adapting too — this morning's PMI data show non-oil firms increasingly turning to domestic suppliers to insulate themselves from exactly the kind of disruption Jebel Ali just went through. Still, experts speaking to the FT argue that the infrastructure built around Jebel Ali cannot be replicated. That remains open to debate — our take? This country has surprised bigger skeptics before.

Dubai Ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid put it plainly this week at a cabinet meeting: The government won't wait for “perfect conditions” to keep projects, markets, and the economy moving. It’s set to meet for the annual government meetings on 8-10 November, themed — pointedly — around “readiness and resilience.”

Also on deck at the cabinet meeting

The cabinet approved an AI adviser system set to assess policies and legislation and their economic, financial, social, and environmental impacts, state news agency Wam reports. It also approved: sharing its AI curriculum for schools with other countries; rules covering autonomous-vehicle testing, inspection, registration, and licensing; a national ecotourism policy; federal cloud migration for finance and HR systems; and a framework for financial sustainability standards. Wam did not provide rollout timelines for several of the newly approved measures.

Air France does an about-turn on Dubai

Air France has briefly suspended flights to and from Dubai until today, with flights from Dubai suspended until tomorrow, as it “monitors the situation in the Near and Middle East,” according to an update. The airline had resumed flights only last week.

BACKGROUND- Others, including Lufthansa, have sworn off Dubai for at least a couple of months, while some have delayed their return until next year.

Indian, Chinese buying spree drives up UAE crude costs

UAE crude's costly climb: Indian and Chinese refiners are once again stepping up spot purchases of Middle Eastern crude, pushing physical premiums sharply higher as they compete with buyers in Japan and South Korea for limited supplies, Bloomberg reports.

The clearest sign of the squeeze is Abu Dhabi’s flagship Murban crude, which now has a premium of more than USD 30 per barrel over benchmark Dubai crude for delivery to East Asia, traders said. That makes Murban at least USD 10 per barrel more expensive than shipping US WTI crude to the region. Dubai futures have climbed to nearly USD 100 per barrel, the highest since May.

BACKGROUND- Unlike most Gulf grades, which still move largely through Hormuz via ship-to-ship transfer — shuttle tankers that have to risk crossing the strait before offloading further out — Murban can travel via Adnoc's Habshan-Fujairah pipeline straight to the Gulf of Oman. The line currently carries up to 1.8 mn bbl / d, and Adnoc is expanding it to 3.6 mn bbl / d by 2027.

Why this matters: The premium shows that access to crude outside the chokepoint is now priced as a scarce commodity. Refiners are paying more for barrels carrying lower transit risk, and Murban is currently one of the few Gulf grades that can offer that at scale.

Data point

AED 155 bn (USD 42.2 bn) — that’s the value of property transactions recorded in Abu Dhabi YTD, surpassing the AED 142 bn (USD 38.7 bn) registered during all of 2025, according to the Abu Dhabi Real Estate Center. Foreign direct investment transactions came in at AED 16 bn, up from AED 8.2 bn last year. Sales values reached AED 107.3 bn, up from AED 99.4 bn last year, and mortgage values saw a slight dip, at AED 42.3 bn, down from AED 42.7 bn in 2025.

The results build on momentum from the first half, when FDI into real estate spiked 309% y-o-y to AED 13.8 bn as new development projects and licensed professionals came to the emirate.

PSA

WEATHER- The mercury is set to peak at 41°C today in Dubai before dropping to a low of 34°C overnight, while Abu Dhabi is seeing a high of 39°C and a low of 32°C.

The big story abroad

AI is making headlines on three fronts this morning: Nvidia bought deeper into open-source AI, OpenAI leapfrogged Anthropic on paper with its latest model, and Anthropic built its IPO war chest.

• Nvidia is paying roughly USD 13 bn to acquire Hugging Face, the open-source platform at the center of a recent OpenAI-linked security breach, which it had already backed — a move it’s touting as a way to protect open-source AI developers;
• OpenAI released its latest model: GPT-6 Astra, which it says beats rivals on software engineering, science, and cybersecurity — a launch president Greg Brockman called a “generational leap in capability.”
• Anthropic is finalizing a USD 15 bn credit facility ahead of an IPO that’s set to eclipse SpaceX’s as the largest one in history, with annualized revenue already topping USD 65 bn.

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