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Tariffs imposed by US President Donald Trump represent an “unquestionable” long-term policy shift that will affect the global economy over the next 18 months, Mubadala’s Khaldoon Khalifa Al Mubarak said Thursday.
“This is happening very fast,” said Al Mubarak, who is managing director and group CEO at Mubadala, an Abu Dhabi-based sovereign wealth fund. “You’re going from a different tariff environment… to a new tariff environment. So I think that is unquestionable.”
How much that shift will affect economic growth is an open question, he told Semafor’s Justin Smith at the World Economy Summit in Washington, DC.
“We will all have different opinions on it,” al Mubarak said, “but there is an impact.”
Al Mubarak is credited with transforming Mubadala into a global powerhouse, driving investments in finance, health care, and artificial intelligence.
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Al Mubarak said Thursday that he’s a “huge believer” in AI, and predicted that the technology “is going to transform the world.”
At Mubadala, “AI is pretty much in every aspect we do, in the way we decide, in the way we analyze, in the way we operate,” he said.
“I don’t attend any investment committee right now without our AI vector being part of it,” he said. “Today it’s non-voting, but at some point we’re going to make a decision on that, whether we will make it a voting member of our investment committee.”
Al Mubarak said Mubadala’s evolution from a firm that was once “100% energy” mirrors the UAE’s diversification away from energy, which once made up 70% to 80% of its GDP but now represents less than 30%.
The Semafor View
European markets have suffered from a lack of competitiveness with the US and China, with just a handful of tech startups to come out of the continent. But countries everywhere are facing similar business challenges as they transition to cleaner energy and chase technological dominance.