Latest news with #sovereignwealthfunds
Gulf Business
15-07-2025
- Business
- Gulf Business
These 3 GCC sovereign wealth funds now have AUM over $1tn each: Global SWF
Image: Getty Images/ For illustrative purposes The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) is now home to three sovereign wealth funds with assets under management (AUM) exceeding $1tn each, according to the July 2025 rankings published by Topping the GCC list is Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF), with AUM estimated at $1.15tn, followed by the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) with $1.11tn, and Kuwait Investment Authority (KIA), which just crossed the $1tn threshold with $1.002tn. Globally, the top sovereign investor remains Norway's Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM), managing $1.76tn in assets. It is followed by China's SAFE Investment Company and the China Investment Corporation, managing $1.41tn and $1.33tn, respectively. PIF sees AUM increase among GCC SWFs despite profit drop Despite a 60 per cent year-on-year drop in net profit, attributed to rising interest rates and mounting costs from delayed or scaled-down mega-projects, PIF saw its AUM increase by 18 per cent from SAR3.66 tn ($977bn) last year. According to Global SWF data, 37 per cent of the fund's portfolio is committed to alternative assets including real estate, infrastructure, hedge funds and private equity. PIF, which backs signature Saudi initiatives such as NEOM and the Red Sea Project, also holds major positions in Saudi Aramco, Saudi National Bank, and Softbank. It is targetting $2tn in AUM by 2030, a milestone that would make it the world's largest sovereign wealth fund. Close behind is the UAE's ADIA, ranked fifth globally, with 32 per cent of its portfolio in alternative investments. Global SWF describes it as one of the world's largest investors in real estate, infrastructure and private equity. In its most recent annual review, ADIA stated a strategic shift in investment focus: 'Our approach has moved toward maximising total returns across the portfolio, rather than relying on individual asset classes to outperform benchmarks.' Kuwait's KIA, ranked sixth worldwide, continues to diversify its holdings. With 23 per cent of its portfolio in alternative assets, the fund maintains stakes in leading international firms including BlackRock and Mercedes-Benz Group. Global SWF's July rankings reflect the shifting dynamics in sovereign wealth, with GCC funds increasingly commanding a larger share of global institutional capital, and positioning themselves as pivotal players in alternative investments and global economic transformation. Read:
Zawya
14-07-2025
- Business
- Zawya
Wealth funds warm to active management - and China - to weather volatility, report shows
LONDON: The world's sovereign wealth funds are turning to active fund management and investments in China, while central banks are diversifying reserves to weather a volatile global environment, an Invesco survey of sovereign funds and central banks managing $27 trillion in assets showed. Still, the dollar reigns supreme, with the bulk of central banks saying it would take two decades to dethrone it - if ever - as the top reserve currency despite growing concerns. "Institutions with greater than $100 billion - so the pretty large institutions - those are the ones that were most interested in moving more to active management," said Rod Ringrow, Invesco's head of official institutions. Whereas funds liked passive management in predictable market conditions, predictable was "no longer the case," he added. "I think that frames the whole approach... in this move to active management." On average, wealth funds made returns of 9.4% last year, the joint second-best performance in the survey's history. Nevertheless, market volatility and de-globalisation concerns have spiked - and over the 10-year horizon, big worries centre around climate change and rising sovereign debt levels. Over 70% of the 58 central banks polled said rising U.S. debt is negatively impacting the dollar's long-term outlook. Two thirds said they are looking to build larger, more diversified reserves to manage volatility. Nevertheless, 78% think it will take more than two decades for a credible alternative to the greenback to emerge. That is a jump from 58% last year while just 11% of central banks now view the euro as gaining ground compared to 20% last year. CHINA FOMO The survey was carried out between January and March - before U.S. President Donald Trump's "Liberation Day" tariff announcements and at the peak of excitement around DeepSeek AI's emergence in China. Wealth funds are seeing a major resurgence in interest in Chinese assets with nearly 60% intending to increase allocations there in the coming five years, specifically the tech sector. That number jumps to 73% in North America despite the worsening U.S.-Sino tensions, whereas in Europe it sits at just 13%. Wealth funds, the survey said, were now approaching China's innovation-driven sectors with the "strategic urgency they once directed toward Silicon Valley." "There's a little bit of a FOMO," Ringrow explained, a view that "I need to be in China now" as it shapes up to be a global leader in semiconductors, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, electric vehicles and renewable energy. Private credit has also emerged as a key focus for funds seeking alternative sources of income and resilience. It is now adopted by 73% of wealth funds, up from 65% last year, and with half actively increasing allocations. "This represents one of the most decisive trends in sovereign asset allocation," the report said. There is also growing interest, especially among emerging market wealth funds, in stablecoins - a type of cryptocurrency that is most commonly pegged 1:1 to the dollar. Almost half of funds said stablecoins were the type of digital assets they were inclined to invest in, although that was still behind the likes of bitcoin, where the share was 75%.
South China Morning Post
14-07-2025
- Business
- South China Morning Post
Global sovereign wealth funds increasing allocations to Chinese assets: Invesco
Global sovereign wealth funds are increasing their allocations to Chinese assets, betting on the country's prowess in digital technologies, renewable energy and advanced manufacturing to drive returns and hedge geopolitical risks, according to an Invesco study. Nearly 60 per cent of sovereign wealth funds said they planned to increase their investments in China over the next five years, higher than in 2024, the study revealed on Monday. The Invesco Global Sovereign Asset Management study was conducted between January and March, just before the US rolled out tariffs on its trading partners , including China. The study also coincided with global excitement over China's home-grown, cost-effective chatbot from DeepSeek Interest in Chinese assets was particularly pronounced among sovereign funds in Asia-Pacific and Africa, with 88 per cent and 80 per cent, respectively, expressing intentions to increase their investments. Around 73 per cent of North American funds, which are focused on long-term structural opportunities, showed a willingness to increase their exposure to China. The global funds cited several factors when justifying their increased China investments. Some 71 per cent identified strong returns made in China, 63 per cent said they wanted to diversify and 45 per cent cited increased market access for foreign investors. The most attractive sectors for investment in China were digital technology and software, advanced manufacturing and automation, and clean energy and green technology, the report said.
Bloomberg
14-07-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Sovereign Wealth Funds Fear Missing China Tech Boom, Survey Says
Global sovereign wealth investors managing $27 trillion in assets are increasingly bullish on China's tech sector because they don't want to miss out on the next waves of innovation, according to an annual survey by Invesco Asset Management. Some 59% of respondents see China as a high or a moderate allocation priority over the next 5 years, up from 44% last year, the survey conducted among 83 sovereign wealth funds and 58 central banks during the first quarter of 2025 showed.
Yahoo
11-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
A Blueprint for Redistributing AI's Profits
Credit - Getty Images Welcome back to In the Loop, TIME's new twice-weekly newsletter about the world of AI. We're publishing installments both as stories on and as emails. If you're reading this in your browser, you can subscribe to have the next one delivered straight to your inbox. Let's say, sometime in the next few years, artificial intelligence automates most of the jobs that humans currently do. If that happens, how can we avoid societal collapse? This question, once the stuff of science fiction, is now very real. In May, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white collar jobs in the next one to five years, and send unemployment rising to up to 20%. In response to such a prediction, you might expect states to begin seriously drawing up contingency plans. Not so. But a growing group of academic economists are working on this question. A new paper, published this Tuesday, suggests a novel way for states to protect their populations in a world of mass AI-enabled job loss. Sovereign wealth funds — The paper recommends that states invest in AI-related industries via sovereign wealth funds, the same type of financial vehicles that have allowed the likes of Norway and the United Arab Emirates to diversify their oil wealth. This isn't strictly a new idea. In fact, the UAE has already been investing billions of dollars from its sovereign wealth funds into AI. Nvidia, the semiconductor company, has been urging states to invest in 'sovereign AI' for years now. But unlike those examples, which are focused on yielding as big a return on investment as possible, or exerting geopolitical influence over AI, the paper lays out the social reasons that this might be a good idea. AI welfare state — The paper argues that if transformative AI is around the corner, the ability of states to economically provide for their citizens may be directly tied to how exposed they are to AI's upside. 'Such investments can be seen as part of the state's responsibility to safeguard public welfare in the face of disruptive technological change,' the paper argues. The returns on investment could be used to fund universal basic income, or a 'stabilization fund' that could allow states to 'absorb shocks, redistribute benefits, and support displaced workers in real time.' Reasons to be skeptical — To be sure, this approach has risks. States investing billions in AI could paradoxically accelerate the very job-automation trends that they're seeking to mitigate. On the flipside, if AI turns out to be less transformative than expected, piling in at the top of the market could bring losses. And just like retail investing, any potential upside is correlated with how much money you have available in the first place. Rich countries will have the opportunity to become richer; poor countries will struggle to participate at all. 'As [transformative AI]-generated wealth risks deepening global inequality, it may also be necessary to explore new models for transnational benefit-sharing,' the paper notes, 'including internationally coordinated sovereign investment vehicles that allocate a portion of AI-derived returns toward global public goods.' Person in the news – Elon Musk, owner of xAI Late Wednesday night, with the launch of Grok 4, the AI race got a new leader: Elon Musk. At least, that's if you believe the benchmarks, which show Grok trouncing competition from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic on some of the industry's most difficult tests. On ARC AGI 2, a benchmark designed to be easy for humans but difficult for AIs, Grok 4's reasoning mode scored 16.2%—nearly double that of its closest contender (Claude Opus 4 by Anthropic). Unexpected result — Musk's xAI has not traditionally been seen as a 'frontier' AI company, despite its huge cache of GPU chips. Previous releases of Grok delivered middling performance. And just a day before Grok 4's release, an earlier version of the chatbot had a meltdown on X, repeatedly referring to itself as 'MechaHitler' and sharing violent rape fantasies. (The posts were later deleted.) Episodes like this had encouraged hopes, in at least some corners of the AI world, that the far-right billionaire's attempts to make his bot more 'truth-seeking' were actually making it more stupid. Musk on Grok and AGI — On a livestream broadcast on X on Wednesday night, Musk said Grok 4 had been trained using 10 times as much computing power as Grok 3. 'With respect to academic questions, Grok 4 is better than PhD level in every subject, no exceptions,' he said. On the subject of artificial general intelligence, he said: "Will this be bad or good for humanity? I think it'll be good. Most likely it'll be good. But I've somewhat reconciled myself to the fact that even if it wasn't gonna be good, I'd at least like to be alive to see it happen." What Musk does best — If Grok 4's benchmark scores are borne out, it would mean that Musk's core skill — spinning up cracked engineering teams that are blindly focused on a single goal — is applicable to the world of AI. That will worry those in the industry who care about not just developing AI quickly, but also doing so safely. As the MechaHitler debacle showed, neither Musk nor anybody else yet knows how to prevent current AI systems from going badly out of control. 'If you can't prevent your AI from endorsing Hitler,' says expert forecaster Peter Wildeford, 'how can we trust you with ensuring far more complex future AGI can be deployed safely?' Where is AI? Last year, I wrote about a group of researchers who had attempted to answer that question. Now, the team at Epoch AI have gone one step further: they've built an interactive map of more than 500 AI supercomputers, to track exactly where the world's major AI infrastructure is located. The map confirms what I wrote last year: AI compute is concentrated in rich countries, with the vast majority in the US and China, followed by Europe and the Persian Gulf. As always, if you have an interesting story of AI in Action, we'd love to hear it. Email us at: intheloop@ They Asked an A.I. Chatbot Questions. The Answers Sent Them Spiraling by Kashmir Hill in the New York Times Large language models are mysterious, shapeshifting artifacts. Their creators train them to adopt helpful personas—but sometimes these personas can slip, revealing a darker side that can lead some vulnerable users down conspiratorial rabbit holes. That tendency was especially stark earlier this year, when OpenAI shipped an update to ChatGPT that inadvertently caused the bot to become more sycophantic—meaning it would egg-on almost anything a user said, delusional or not. Kashmir Hill, one of the best reporters in the business, spoke to many users who experienced this behavior, and found some shocking personal stories… including one that turned out to be fatal. Write to Billy Perrigo at
