Saudi Arabia might not be known for having first mover status, but when they set their minds to it they enter a market with the intention of dominating.
They’ve now set their sights on the AI industry, and are moving forward with an aggressive $40 Billion plan to invest in A.I. technology with the goal of becoming one of the largest AI players in the world.
If you’re an oil rich kingdom with designs on being the biggest investors in an industry who would you partner with?
The answer is one of the largest and most successful Venture Capital funds in the world: Andreessen Horowitz.
It turns out Ben Horowitz and Yasir al-Rumayyan, the governor of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, are friends which I’m guessing gave Andreessen Horowitz the inside track when Saudi Arabia first decided they wanted to begin investing in the A.I. industry a la SoftBank style funding rounds.
Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund oversees a $925 billion investment fund, and have deployed capital across the world including purchasing a $3.5 billion dollar stake in Uber, investing $45 billion dollars in SoftBank’s Vision Fund, and provided $20 billion dollars for the private-equity Blackstone’s $40 billion dollar infrastructure fund, as well as a $2 billion dollar investment to help kick-start LIV Golf to compete with the PGA.
Andreessen Horowitz is one of Silicon Valley’s largest venture capital firms with $35 billion dollars in assets under management as of March 2022. In January of 2022 Andreessen Horowitz closed on their largest VC fund to date worth $9 billion dollars, which will allocate that to a $1.5 billion dollar Biotech fund, a $5 billion dollar Growth fund, and $2.5 billion dollar Venture fund, coupled with the $2.2 billion dollar Crypto Fund and $400 million dollar Seed Fund that they raised in 2021.
Saudi Arabia in talks with Andreessen Horowitz to create a $40 billion AI fund