THIS MORNING: Damac’s data center arm hunts for land in UK and Australia + Emaar’s sales are down over 50% this year

Good morning, nice people. The Gulf has spent two decades exporting capital. Now it’s doing the opposite: asking for more foreign money to help fund its projects at home.

Officials, global investors, and capital allocators alike were singing the praises of the region and its resilience even in crisis at Bloomberg Invest yesterday. The stance now seems to be that the region’s capital needs are only growing and that sovereign investors can’t — and shouldn’t — foot the bill alone. Yes, sovereigns and quasi-sovereigns might allocate more capital to domestic assets than international ones, but what we’ll also see much more of is partnerships with foreign investors.

“I see [room] to attract third-party capital in ways we haven’t in the past,” Investment Minister Mohamed Hassan Alsuwaidi said on stage. The projects on offer include energy routes around the Strait of Hormuz, new ports on the east coast, data centers, and AI.

Speakers argued the war has made the case for investing in the region stronger, not weaker. It exposed how much the region needs to diversify where its money comes from and the routes its exports take.

Global money managers are happy to oblige. Blackstone has deployed more capital in the region this year than ever before, Global Chief Operating Officer for Private Wealth Farhad Karim said. On AI infrastructure, he says the firm is “doubling, tripling, quadrupling” down, despite the concerns around infrastructure resilience after Amazon Web Services’ data centers in Dubai and Bahrain were targeted earlier this year.

Still, the region’s developers are increasingly putting theirs to work abroad. Alabbar says India is on its radar over the next five years. And Damac’s Hussain Sajwani said the developer’s data center arm is in talks for data center land in the UK and Australia, on top of the three US sites the company has already secured.

In today’s issue: Our Lede asks whether the UAE’s roads and rules are ready for driverless cars, after a robotaxi was filmed stuck facing the wrong way this week. Plus: An ADGM court has found NMC founder B.R. Shetty and former CEO Prasanth Manghat liable for an eight-year fraud, with USD 5.4 bn as the starting point for what they may owe. And earnings season brings us more results from Adnoc L&S, Emirates Global Aluminium, Emsteel, and more.

Waiting out the winter

Emaar’s sales are down over 50% this year, Emaar founder Mohamed Alabbar said at Bloomberg Invest yesterday. The drop comes off a high base: sales had been growing about 50% a year. Alabbar said the developer “does not believe in [markdowns]” and hasn’t cut prices to move units, which explains the drop. He insisted that won’t slow Emaar down in the UAE, adding that we are “in a winter” globally.

The slowdown is showing up across the business. Footfall at Emaar’s malls is down about 10%, after growing roughly 10% a year for the past five years, while hotel occupancy has slipped to around 65% from 80%, he said.

Construction isn’t slowing, though: Materials are still coming in, despite costs going up about 5%. Emaar is helping contractors absorb the increase, and Alabbar says they’re still delivering ahead of schedule.

…with the exception of one tower: Alabbar said he’s holding back on tendering one tower until the “situation cools down.” He didn’t mention which one, but in January, he said the Dubai Creek Tower would go to tender within three months. In June, port closures pushed up material costs, and the tender slipped another three to four months, as we reported at the time. Emaar had been expected to spend more than AED 14 bn on the tower and the adjoining Creek Mall.

Damac Digital is hunting for land in UK, Australia

Damac’s data center arm will buy more land outside the US over the next 18 months, and it’s in advanced talks for a parcel of land in the UK and another in Australia, founder Hussain Sajwani said at Bloomberg Invest yesterday. Both would be new for Damac Digital, Damac’s data center arm, which already has operations or projects in 14 countries.

The US is still the core: Sajwani expects the US to remain the world’s biggest market for AI infrastructure, and Damac has already secured three parcels of land there. He’s committed USD 20 bn to the US and would “love to do more,” he said yesterday. That pledge was announced alongside US President Donald Trump in January 2025, with an option to double it to USD 40 bn. By January, Damac said it had secured about USD 12 bn of the USD 20 bn in land and power: around 1 GW across sites in Ohio and New Jersey.

The near-term target is 10 GW: Sajwani hopes Edgnex will reach 10 GW of capacity worldwide within 18 months, he said. He added that Damac is currently one of the largest markets in terms of data infrastructure land banks. The firm had been targeting 300 MW+ of operational capacity by 2026 as of last year.

It has a solid pipeline: Outside the US, Damac’s build-out so far has been in Asia and southern Europe. It committed about USD 3 bn to Southeast Asia in late 2024, including a USD 2.3 bn, 144 MW campus in Jakarta. Closer to home, it has 500 MW of future capacity planned in Saudi Arabia. Its European projects are smaller: a 40 MW site in Madrid, a 12.5 MW first phase outside Athens, and a 4 MW facility in Izmir that opened in September and is set to scale to 20 MW. It also has a planned site in Milan and a pipeline across Finland through its acquisition of Hyperco.

Six years on, NMC's multi-bn-USD reckoning is taking shape

An ADGM court has found NMC Health founder B.R. Shetty and former CEO Prasanth Manghat liable for participating in an eight-year fraud that helped bring down the healthcare group in 2020, according to a 5 November court judgment (pdf). Both men were found liable for fraudulent and wrongful trading, with the court setting about USD 5.4 bn as the starting point for working out how much they should contribute to NMC’s assets. That isn’t a final award, and the amounts will be decided at a further hearing.

What the court found: Between 2012 and 2020, bns of USD were diverted from NMC while undisclosed borrowing and misleading financial statements concealed the group’s true financial position. The court found that Shetty knowingly received improperly transferred funds, while Manghat helped facilitate transfers benefiting both men and others. He also helped hide the group’s borrowings from its auditors, Ernst & Young, The National reports.

The court also upheld a ruling in favor of Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank in a separate claim against Manghat, establishing more than USD 1.2 bn in damages linked to unpaid liabilities and lost earnings, subject to adjustments.

REMEMBER- NMC’s collapse has been keeping the courts busy: The hospital operator entered administration in 2020 after a short-seller report triggered scrutiny that uncovered bns of USD in hidden debt. It subsequently restructured and settled a dispute with Dubai Islamic Bank in 2024, while Shetty sued Bank of Baroda for USD 15 bn last month over alleged misconduct linked to the collapse, which the bank denies. The latest ruling is a significant step toward determining who must reimburse NMC, although a further hearing — and the question of how much creditors can ultimately recover — remains outstanding.

Data point

AED 36.7 bn — that's how much gross bank credit grew in September, up 1.3% m-o-m to AED 2.9 tn, according to the Central Bank of the UAE’s latest monetary and banking developments report. Domestic credit did much of the heavy lifting, rising 1.6% to AED 2.3 tn, with lending to the government up AED 11.1 bn and corporate borrowing increasing by AED 10.8 bn. Lending to individuals grew by a more modest AED 5.2 bn (+0.8%). That’s a shift from July, when individuals accounted for the largest increase in domestic credit.

And deposits lagged slightly again: Total bank deposits rose 0.9% m-o-m to AED 3.6 tn, with resident deposits up 0.6% to AED 3.2 tn and non-resident deposits rising 4.1% to AED 317.9 bn. Government-related entities provided much of the momentum within resident deposits, climbing 9.6% to AED 378.2 bn. Private-sector deposits held largely steady from August at AED 2.35 tn, and government lending edged down 0.2% to AED 460.4 bn.

PSA

Ras Al Khaimah (RAK) reopened seven public and resort beaches after nearly three weeks of closures following an oil spill from the Gem No.2 tanker off the UAE’s northern coast, local authorities announced. Flamingo, Dahan, and Al Mairid beaches and Al Rams Corniche are now open, alongside beaches at the Anantara Mina Al Arab, InterContinental Mina Al Arab, and Cove Rotana resorts.

Beaches in Sharjah were also reopened after containing pollution from an oil spill, authorities said in a separate announcement. Authorities said beaches were now safe to visit and they would continue to monitor the environmental conditions.

REMEMBER- The spill came at an awkward time for RAK’s tourism industry: As we reported in October, authorities closed beaches across RAK, Umm Al Quwain, and parts of Sharjah just as the winter tourism season was getting underway.

The waters off the northern emirates are still a risk for shipping: Maritime security player Ambrey said a projectile hit a merchant vessel north of RAK on Wednesday, Reuters reports. There were no injuries, and Ambrey didn’t specify where the projectile was launched from. Earlier this week, an Adnoc L&S vessel was struck and damaged in an attack in the Arabian Gulf, but the firm also didn’t specify where it came from.

WEATHER- Temperatures are down to 30°C during the day and 24°C overnight in both emirates, according to our favorite weather app.

The big story abroad

Jensen Huang’s resignation from Nvidia briefly rattled markets yesterday, but investors quickly concluded the AI boom is bigger than one man. Nvidia shares fell 14% at the open after Huang stepped down over a series of affairs, including one with a woman US intelligence suspects of spying for China.

The stock recovered to close down 4.3%, as investors weighed AI demand and looked for companies that could benefit from the turmoil, Bloomberg reports. Rival chipmakers Broadcom and AMD were among the S&P 500’s biggest gainers on bets they’ll pick up any business Nvidia loses. CFO Colette Kress is now interim CEO while the board looks for a permanent replacement.

The bigger worry is for the companies Huang helped build. Over the past few years, Huang used Nvidia’s profits to fund dozens of AI firms, many of them also its customers. Investors are now asking how much of that support continues without him. AI cloud providers took the hardest hit: Nebius fell 16.8% and CoreWeave 6.9%, Reuters reports.

ALSO:

• Anthropic’s IPO is about six times oversubscribed, Bloomberg reports. Nvidia has agreed to buy about USD 10 bn of shares in it. More in Planet Finance below.
• A Microsoft outage disrupted Outlook, Teams, and other 365 apps for more than five hours, with nearly 130k reports at its peak. Microsoft says there’s no sign of a cyberattack, the Guardian reports.

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