The weak links in the AI boom and the Middle East — OpenAI, Oracle, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) — are strengthening their ties even as the Ramadan War exposes their increasing vulnerabilities.
Spoiler alert: Despite OpenAI’s jarring strategic shifts last week, the UAE is still pouring money down that hole.
Let’s start with the newest news first.
Mr. Market Falls for Ceasefire Buzz Again
Waking up, checking in on Mr. Market and finding that the western monied classes remain in the grip of florid psychosis:
Don’t worry, be happy pic.twitter.com/QZ2CYRvsMe
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) April 6, 2026
And what, pray tell, has Mr. Market buying? Why, nothing less than the most reputable sources at Axios:
The U.S., Iran and a group of regional mediators are discussing the terms for a potential 45-day ceasefire that could lead to a permanent end to the war, according to four U.S., Israeli and regional sources with knowledge of the talks.
This part of the Axios piece doesn’t seem to have captured Mr. Market’s imagination, however:
“The Iranian officials made clear to the mediators they don’t want to be caught in a Gaza or Lebanon situation where there is a ceasefire on paper, but the U.S. and Israel can attack again whenever they want to.”
Mr. Market doesn’t seem to be quite as plugged in to Iranian sources like Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baqaei denying this ceasefire talk.
But while delusion reigns, there is grifting to be done and our heroes at OpenAI and the UAE are nothing if not hard workers.
UAE Pours More Money Into OpenAI
OpenAI has closed $122 billion in committed capital at an $852 billion post-money valuation, the largest private funding round in the history of the technology industry.
Abu Dhabi’s MGX co-led the round alongside SoftBank, Andreessen Horowitz, D.E. Shaw Ventures, TPG and T. Rowe Price, with anchor commitments from Amazon ($50 billion), Nvidia ($30 billion) and SoftBank ($30 billion). Microsoft, OpenAI’s longest-standing backer, also participated.
MGX’s role as a co-lead, rather than a participating investor, cements the Mubadala and G42-backed vehicle as one of the most consequential non-US capital allocators in frontier AI. Bloomberg reported last week that MGX was part of a group raising approximately $10 billion in additional commitments beyond the original $110 billion announced in February, with the final round closing at $122 billion. OpenAI’s own announcement named MGX alongside a16z, D.E. Shaw, TPG and T. Rowe Price as co-leads.
The co-lead position represents a deepening of a relationship that began in October 2024, when MGX participated in OpenAI’s $6.6 billion Series E. MGX subsequently joined the Stargate project, the $500 billion US-based AI infrastructure initiative alongside OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle, and increased its exposure through secondary market purchases.
In May 2025, G42 partnered with OpenAI, Nvidia, Oracle, Cisco and SoftBank to launch Stargate UAE, a 1-gigawatt AI compute cluster within a newly established 5GW UAE-US AI Campus, with MGX backing the US-based facility. Sam Altman visited Abu Dhabi in January to pitch state-backed funds ahead of the raise.
MGX, founded in 2024 and chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE’s national security advisor and brother to the president, has accumulated positions across all three of the world’s most prominent frontier AI labs.
Somewhere along the way, Sheikh Tahnoon and his brother Mohamed bin Zayed learned when in a hole, keep digging.
This diagram from the Drey Dossier helps illustrate the pre-existing UAE connections with OpenAI and also the Ellison family empire of Oracle and Paramount/WBD:
via https://t.co/5gX6clgCac pic.twitter.com/R5TdBGogJd
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) April 1, 2026
And for those who worried that Iran’s relentless pounding of weak links in the Gulf Cooperation Council (like Kuwait, Bahrain, and of course…the UAE) will impact their ability to invest in big bold projects like Paramount’s purchase of WBD, never fear.
Mr. Market Tries to Make Sense of the UAE’s Situation
While even the Atlantic Council understands that the Gulf has entered a new era, investors are struggling to understand WTF.
This summary from Plus 500 is illustrative:
UAE markets lost ~$120B in value despite rising oil prices near $110-$120/barrel, highlighting a growing disconnect between strong oil revenues and weakening investor confidence.
The ADX General Index declined about 7.13% in March 2026, closing at 9,521 points on 31 March. The Dubai Financial Market briefly entered bear-market territory, falling more than 20% from its February peak.
Brent crude rose more than 55% in March, with the May contract reaching near $119 per barrel, the biggest monthly gain on record for the contract.
S&P Global Ratings affirmed the UAE’s AA/A-1+ sovereign credit rating with a stable outlook on 6 March, citing a net asset position estimated at 184% of GDP.
The CBUAE approved a five-pillar Financial Institution Resilience Package on 17 March, backed by foreign exchange reserves exceeding AED 1 trillion.
The Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline (ADCOP) to Fujairah can transport up to 1.5 million barrels per day, bypassing the Strait of Hormuz.
While past performance does not reflect future results, it may be worth noting that higher oil prices have usually supported the UAE government’s revenues, especially in Abu Dhabi. The price of Brent crude went up from about $70 per barrel in late February to between $106 and $112 by the end of March, resulting in a significant financial gain for hydrocarbon-producing emirates.
However, sectors that help the UAE diversify its economy, such as tourism, aviation, logistics, and real estate, are currently under pressure (as are many of the world’s economies). The DFM Real Estate Index dropped about 30% from its peak in the two weeks after hostilities began, erasing 2026 gains. Dubai International Airport had to briefly close down after a drone incident in the vicinity of the airport that affected one of the fuel tanks; Emirates suspended flights, and the airport resumed a limited schedule only after 10:00 AM local time.
This seems to create a distinct divergence: while crude oil spikes normally lift Gulf equities, geopolitical proximity is currently decoupling that historical correlation.
So you’re saying the UAE is ill-positioned to profit off the current market disruptions? Weird.
But word of that doesn’t seem to have reached Wall Street or Hollywood.
UAE All-In on Paramount-WBD Merger and So Is Mr. Market?
The tell is the blithe confidence that the UAE and its fellow GCC states Qatar and Saudi Arabia still provide a reliable investment backstop.
The Wall Street Journal has the exclusive:
Paramount is in talks to secure signed equity commitments of close to $24 billion from three sovereign-wealth funds led by Saudi Arabia to help back its takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery WBD, according to people familiar with the matter.
Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund has agreed to provide roughly $10 billion of the nearly $24 billion to Paramount, run by David Ellison, the son of billionaire Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison.
The agreements with investors, including Qatar Investment Authority and Abu Dhabi’s L’imad Holding Co., are likely to be signed as soon as Monday, the people said.
…
Paramount had previously disclosed that three sovereign-wealth funds had committed to contribute about $24 billion to its bid. Paramount launched a hostile bid for Warner, which had opted to sign a deal to sell to Netflix instead. After months of jockeying, Paramount emerged victorious when it sweetened its offer for Warner, defeating Netflix.An early version of Paramount’s bid also initially included backing from Chinese company Tencent and Affinity Partners, the private-equity firm founded by President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. Affinity later backed out of Paramount’s deal. Tencent is also no longer in the deal, the people said.
Paramount has also received $54 billion of debt commitments from Bank of America, Citigroup and the private-equity firm Apollo Global Management, which it is beginning to syndicate out to other banks and investors.
Savvy investors all. After all, the Paramount-WBD deal is backstopped by a $40 billion promise from Larry Ellison himself whose wealth is in turn backstopped by his huge ownership stake in Oracle.
This Oracle, the one that laid off “up to” 30,000 employees last week.
Also this Oracle, the one whose corporate debt has exploded:
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) April 6, 2026
CDS = credit default swaps, ie. derivatives that basically function as insurance on a loan. The graph tells us that there is rapidly increasing worry about Oracle’s ability to pay off its debt.
The weird part is that according to 247WallSt, investors remain bullish on Oracle, see if you can parse the cognitive dissonance any better than I can:
is trading near $146 while Wall Street’s consensus analyst price target is up at $246.46, a gap of over 68%. The stock is down 24.9% year to date, falling from $197 at the start of 2026 to current levels.
…
Over the past two years (Oracle) has repositioned as a serious AI infrastructure player, competing with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft for cloud workloads. That repositioning drove the stock to a 52-week high of $345.72 before the current collapse.
The Motley Fool grapples with these questions and comes to a reassuring conclusion:
Shares of Oracle have fallen over 24% so far in 2026, as investors grow increasingly concerned about the company’s aggressive artificial intelligence (AI) investments.
Oracle’s AI infrastructure build-out is backed by plans to raise up to $50 billion in debt and equity. That has sparked fears about a dramatic increase in the company’s debt and the possibility of negative free cash flow over the next few years. Investors are also concerned about whether the company can execute at scale and convert these investments into durable, high-return cash flows.
Oracle exited its fiscal 2026’s third quarter (ended Feb. 28) with remaining performance obligations (RPO, a measure of contracted backlog) of nearly $553 billion, up 325% year over year. Demand for AI infrastructure continues to exceed available supply. As a result, management has indicated that Oracle is not building speculative capacity but is scaling primarily to meet this contracted AI demand. A significant portion of this capacity is already contracted and, in some cases, supported by partner or customer funding, which helps reduce balance sheet risk. If these contracts convert as expected, Oracle’s current valuation may see significant improvement.
Oracle has contracts to pay off its capex spending on data center capacity, so no need to worry, amirite?
As Ed Zitron has pointed out, those contracts Oracle has are largely with OpenAI.
Zitron cites analyst TD Cowen who says:
OpenAl’s ability to fund its =$1.4T in outstanding multi-year commitments, has led to multiple U.S. banks to pull back from lending to Oracle-linked data center projects. Furthermore, our channel checks indicate that multiple Oracle data center leases that were under negotiation with private operators struggled to secure financing, in turn preventing Oracle from securing the data center capacity via a lease.
Counterpoint, Oracle is launching a new AI Data Platform for the US government which Sean Paul Kelley calls an effort to “back door a Federal backstop, justifying it as a necessary AI upgrade to Fed databases, which is bullshit, but it might work.”
If you can’t count on POTUS Trump’s US federal government and OpenAI, who can you rely on?
I mean yea, OpenAI standing as the gold standard for the future is uh rock solid and stuff. Just check out the great press they’re getting.
When Ronan Farrow Is Covering Your Company That Ain’t Good
One part avenging Fury, one part relentless Hellhound, the son of Mia Farrow (and at one time Woody Allen, although he sure looks more like Frank Sinatra than Woody), has been credited with ending the careers of former Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, former CBS chairman Les Moonves, former NY AG Eric Schneiderman, and former MIT media lab head Joi Ito, and now he’s turned his attentions to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
From The New Yorker piece titled “Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted?”, Farrow co-authored with Andrew Marantz:
Altman is often described, either with reverence or with suspicion, as the greatest pitchman of his generation.
…
Altman has a relentless will to power that, even among industrialists who put their names on spaceships, sets him apart. “He’s unconstrained by truth,” the board member told us. “He has two traits that are almost never seen in the same person. The first is a strong desire to please people, to be liked in any given interaction. The second is almost a sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone.”The board member was not the only person who, unprompted, used the word “sociopathic.” One of Altman’s batch mates in the first Y Combinator cohort was Aaron Swartz, a brilliant but troubled coder who died by suicide in 2013 and is now remembered in many tech circles as something of a sage. Not long before his death, Swartz expressed concerns about Altman to several friends. “You need to understand that Sam can never be trusted,” he told one. “He is a sociopath. He would do anything.”
The piece is a classic New Yorker expose in which Farrow and Marantz look into and mostly dismiss the very ugliest allegations against Altman, but still dig up enough dirt to put off a mighty dustcloud.
But let’s close our look at this piece with the parts about Altman and the UAE:
By then, Altman was already eying another source of cash: the United Arab Emirates. The country was in the midst of a fifteen-year effort to transform itself from an oil state to a tech hub. The project was overseen by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the President’s brother and the nation’s spymaster. Tahnoon runs the state-controlled A.I. conglomerate G42, and controls $1.5 trillion in sovereign wealth. In June, 2023, Altman visited Abu Dhabi, meeting with Olama and other officials. In remarks at a government-backed function, he said that the country had “been talking about A.I. since before it was cool,” and outlined a vision for the future of A.I. with the Middle East in a “central role.”
Fund-raising from Gulf states has become customary for many large businesses. But Altman was pursuing a more sweeping geopolitical vision. In the fall of 2023, he began quietly recruiting new talent for a plan—eventually known as ChipCo—in which Gulf states would provide tens of billions of dollars for the construction of huge microchip foundries and data centers, some to be situated in the Middle East.
…many American national-security officials were anxious about concentrating advanced A.I. infrastructure in Gulf autocracies. The U.A.E.’s telecommunications infrastructure is heavily dependent on hardware from Huawei, a Chinese tech giant linked to the government, and the U.A.E. has reportedly leaked American technology to Beijing in the past. Intelligence agencies worried that advanced U.S. microchips sent to the Emiratis could be used by Chinese engineers. Data centers in the Middle East are also more vulnerable to military strikes; in recent weeks, Iran has bombed American data centers in Bahrain and the U.A.E. And, hypothetically, a Gulf monarchy could commandeer an American-owned data center and use it to build disproportionately powerful models—a version of the “AGI dictatorship” scenario, but in an actual dictatorship.
Will Reality, In the Form of Iranian Missiles, Intrude?
Let’s let Iran have the last word on our trio of the UAE, Oracle and OpenAI:
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) April 6, 2026
Never fear, the UAE claims near Ukrainian levels of missile interception so everyone’s money is safe.
Ladies and gentlemen, lay down your bets. Who ya got?
