Sovereign wealth funds crossed $15tn in 2025 and the Gulf 7 drove 43% of all sovereign dealmaking — increasingly into AI and compute. Plus: Indonesia's INA joins the data-centre boom, and the Gulf spends into the dislocation. Sovereign capital crosses $15tn · Indonesia joins data centres · The Gulf keeps deploying. Full brief: https://www.universalassetowners.com
Transcript
This is the Universal Asset Owners daily video brief for Tuesday, May twenty-sixth. Three things for the people who allocate long-horizon capital.
Sovereign wealth funds passed fifteen trillion dollars last year, with a record two hundred and seventy-eight billion in deals. The seven largest Gulf funds drove a hundred and nineteen billion of that — forty-three percent of all sovereign dealmaking, and a growing share of it is going into AI and compute. State capital is now the marginal buyer of the assets the rest of us must hold.
Today, Bloomberg reports Indonesia's sovereign fund is moving into data centres — about four point two billion dollars deployed, roughly a third into digital infrastructure. The Gulf's compute-as-strategy playbook is now being run in Asia, and more state demand is chasing a finite pipeline of power, land and chips.
Even with a Middle East energy shock lifting the region's risk premium, the Gulf is deploying. Qatar's QIA pledged five hundred million alongside General Atlantic, and Mubadala posted assets up seventeen percent to three hundred and eighty-five billion on a record year of deployment. They're treating the dislocation as an entry point.
Here's the chart. Of the two hundred and seventy-eight billion dollars sovereign funds deployed in twenty twenty-five, the Gulf's seven largest funds accounted for a hundred and nineteen billion — forty-three percent of the total, up forty-three percent on the year.
Our take: the question is no longer how large these funds have become. It's that they're now the marginal buyer of the assets the rest of us hold. Co-investing beside state capital can de-risk a deal — or import objectives that aren't yours. Price the alignment, not just the entry multiple.
The full brief, the chart, and The Universal Owner podcast are at universalassetowners dot com. Back tomorrow.
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Produced with the UAO Content Engine. AI-assisted; editorially reviewed before release. Not investment advice.