Damac chief made billions from investing in Anthropic, with the billionaire making as much as 30-years worth from AI company’s IPO.
Hussain Sajwani, founder and chairman of Damac Properties, was an early investor in Anthropic, an artificial intelligence company founded by former OpenAI researchers in 2021. In 2024, he invested $50 million in the firm, the billionaire told Forbes in an interview, along with Elon Musk’s xAI.
“What I have made in 30 years, I made in Anthropic in less than two years,” Sajwani said, speaking at the Bloomberg Invest Dubai forum on Thursday.
The billionaire’s net worth is estimated be above $13 billion, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index, driven in part due to Dubai’s lengthy property boom despite a slowdown in recent months.
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Anthropic’s initial public offering is expected to be one of the biggest in history, drawing in big investors like Google and Amazon, which put in $33 billion and $18 billion, respectively. The company, which initially started as a startup from San Francisco, will be worth as much as $1.4 trillion.
“Today we are on the cap table of Anthropic, Open AI, cAI, Databricks, ByteDance, Together AI, Reflection, and 30 other companies,” he said. “In the only three companies, Anthropic, Open AI, and SpaceX, we’re making huge money.”
Damac to build data centres in UK and Australia
Damac is in talks to build data centres in the United Kingdom and Australia to its global data centre ambitions, with the mogul hoping to reach 10 gigawatts (GW) by the end of next year.
Damac Digital, a global infrastructure company backed by Sajwani’s Damac Group, made plans in June to develop 6,000 megawatts (MW) of IT capacity across more than 35 data centre sites in 13 countries.
Sajwani said that the company now has data centres in 14 countries, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Finland, and the United States, where it poured over $20 billion worth of investments across three plots of land.
“We committed $20 billion (in the US). We bought already three parcels of lands where we’re going to have about 600 mega IT load, which will cost us around $9-10 billion,” he said
“Would we reach $20 billion by end of the year? No. Would we reach that by our commitment by next year or in 18 months from today? Possibility,” the billionaire added.
Asked about whether there is an AI bubble, Sajwani said he doesn’t think so, but that there has always been a correction in the market.
Source: Khaleej Times