Poring over the SpaceX IPO prospectus, a recurring theme surfaces: the massive, quiet influence of Middle Eastern finance in the most ambitious IPO in history.
Sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, their AI subsidiaries and the technology companies building data centers as part of these deals were all in the document.
SpaceX lists on Nasdaq June 12 at a $1.75 trillion valuation. The S-1, as the IPO filing is known, shows Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite company is looking to sell up to $75 billion in shares. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund alone is in talks to put in $5 billion.
ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok, three of the most widely used AI tools in the U.S., are all partly funded by Middle Eastern governments. For the millions of U.S. professionals who open these tools at work, the source of that money matters.
Unlike venture capital, sovereign wealth comes with conditions, and those conditions almost always involve building AI infrastructure on the investing country’s own soil. Those deals are putting AI data centers in the Middle East, not in the U.S.
Where the deals lead:
- MGX (UAE) has a stake in OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI/SpaceX. G42 is now building a data center campus in Abu Dhabi.
- Humain (Saudi) put $3 billion into xAI earlier this year. A joint AI data center in Saudi Arabia came with the deal.
- Microsoft committed $15.2 billion for data centers in the UAE through G42 subsidiary Khazna.
Deal by deal, capital is flowing from the Middle East to Silicon Valley, and computing power is getting built at the other end, on sovereign soil, under the watch of the governments writing the checks. Data center jobs, tax revenue, and the economic activity that comes with building AI infrastructure are going to the Middle East instead of to communities in the U.S.
The prospectus also shows how strong the ties between individual Gulf investors and Musk’s empire have grown over the past 15 years.
In 2011, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, a Saudi billionaire, put $300 million into X (then Twitter). When Musk bought the company in 2022, Alwaleed rolled his stake in rather than selling. When Musk folded X into xAI and merged xAI with SpaceX, that stake became shares in the rocket company.
Kingdom Holding, Alwaleed’s investment firm, now values the position at $10.6 billion at the expected IPO price. A social media bet placed 15 years ago has multiplied many times over, landing in a spacecraft business.
Until this month, most of these arrangements were private. The SpaceX prospectus is the first public filing to put them on the record.
