Gulf

1. UAE doubles down on the US
2. Aramco’s LatAm expansion
3. Saudi Vision 2030 risks
4. Doha gains in airport wars
5. Gulf hits China with duties

Moon dust, made in the UAE.

UAE’s $1.4 trillion US investment plan

There is now a price tag on the deluge of deals the United Arab Emirates plans in the US. The UAE has committed $1.4 trillion over the next decade to “substantially increase… existing investments” in artificial-intelligence infrastructure, semiconductors, energy, and manufacturing, according to a White House statement. The agreement follows UAE National Security Advisor Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed’s visit to Washington, where he met with President Donald Trump and top US officials, as well as industry titans like Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and BlackRock’s Larry Fink.

The UAE has already deployed more than $1 trillion in the world’s largest economy, from a stake in Chicago’s parking meters to a majority of Nasdaq-listed chipmaker GlobalFoundries. Emirates Global Aluminium said last week it plans to invest in a new aluminum smelter that will nearly double US production.

The commitment by the Gulf state echoes what Trump hopes to extract from Saudi Arabia. In January he said Riyadh should spend as much as $1 trillion in the US economy over four years, linking the investment to a proposed visit to the kingdom.

Aramco buys Peru gas station chain

The amount reportedly paid by Aramco to acquire South American fuel distributor Primax. According to Peruvian outlet Gestión and Reuters, the deal gives the world’s biggest oil exporter a distribution network of 2,185 petrol stations across Peru, Colombia, and Ecuador. Aramco recently agreed to buy a 25% stake in Unioil Petroleum Philippines, following earlier retail acquisitions in Chile and Pakistan. The deals are part of the energy giant’s global push to control more of the retail and distribution of its oil and lubricants.

Analysis: Vision 2030 challenges

Falling oil prices and rising national debt could constrain Saudi Arabia’s government spending, delay infrastructure projects, and complicate budget management — posing risks to the kingdom’s private sector growth, Wael Mahdi, a long-time former energy and business correspondent, writes in a Semafor column.

“Many firms, particularly those working on government contracts, report longer payment cycles, leading to liquidity concerns for suppliers that could ripple across the private sector,” Mahdi wrote. This is “chilling for Saudis looking to start firms, or for foreign firms coming to the country.”

Doha airport boosts its capacity

Qatar’s main gateway, Hamad International Airport, has solidified its position as the Gulf’s second-largest after Dubai. The facility added 17 aircraft gates across two new concourses, boosting its capacity to 65 million passengers per year. In 2024, it handled 53 million passengers — still well behind the 92 million that passed through Dubai International Airport. Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE are all expanding their airlines and airports in a bid to lure more tourist and transit traffic. The sector is a key growth area in their economic diversification strategies.

Gulf to block cheap Chinese aluminum

Gulf governments are trying to shield local aluminum producers from their Chinese rivals by imposing new anti-dumping duties on imports from Beijing. Industry ministers approved the measure at a meeting in Riyadh last week. Some 6.5 million tons of aluminum was produced in the Gulf last year, according to the Gulf Aluminium Council, around 9% of the global market. However, no major new investments are expected this year. It is unclear what levels the new duties will be set at, but in November the Gulf Cooperation Council imposed extra duties on imports of electrical components from China, ranging from 11% to 42%.

Technology

• Keen to get ahead of more extreme weather in the Gulf, Abu Dhabi’s G42 is working with US chipmaker Nvidia to develop a hyper-local forecasting system using AI.

Entertainment

• Warner Bros. Discovery has entered the Middle East streaming wars with a plan to pay $57 million for a minority stake in Dubai’s OSN Streaming. The deal, subject to regulatory approvals, will see the American media conglomerate back locally made productions. — Bloomberg

Checking In

• Aman Group, purveyor of the world’s most luxurious — and expensive — hotel rooms, is reportedly trying to raise up to $2 billion to finance more than 20 projects in its pipeline that includes properties in Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The Swiss hospitality firm may tap familiar names in Gulf capital: Previous investors include Public Investment Fund, Mubadala Capital, and Alpha Wave Ventures. — Bloomberg

Economy

• Salaries don’t tend to linger long in Gulf bank accounts. The region is second only to the US as a remittance source, with $131.5 billion sent back home in 2024. — Gulf Business

Space agencies often use deserts as test beds for their lunar missions, but the UAE’s abundant fine sands didn’t quite cut it. Researchers at the New York University Abu Dhabi Space Exploration Laboratory have cooked up artificial “moon dust” that mimics the lunar surface using local rocks rich in anorthosite. The so-called Emirates Lunar Simulant can be used to test how well vehicles and instruments might cope when they land on the Moon. It’s a small, but crucial, step toward the UAE’s ambition of landing an Emirati astronaut on the Moon within the next decade.

It was Pi Day — March 14 — when Max Levchin was celebrating Affirm Holdings’ 13th anniversary. He chose that date in 2012 to incorporate his buy-now-pay-later fintech because he’s “a little bit obsessed with mathematical constants,” he explained to Semafor’s Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson.

Math runs through Levchin’s thinking about Affirm, his biggest venture since he built PayPal with Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, and the rest of what became known as the PayPal Mafia.

Levchin has been telling investors for 13 years that if Affirm can make a sufficient margin on each transaction to cover credit losses, fraud losses, and costs like offices and employees, it will be “a self-sustaining machine.”