By admin 
- US restrictions on outbound investments to China hang in balance amid spending bill talks
- Yankees’ Investment In Paul Goldschmidt Should Prove To Be Wise
- AWS expands Ohio investment by $10 billion in major AI, cloud push
- Vor Bio Secures $55.6M Investment Led by Reid Hoffman, Extends Runway for Key 2025 Trial Results
- Charleston County marks historic year with $1.28B of capital investment
The U.A.E. real estate tycoon and friend of Donald Trump’s has a history of flamboyant marketing and audacious projects, but will he be able to come up with the promised $20 billion? Hussain Sajwani makes his case from Mar-a-Lago.
By Giacomo Tognini, Forbes Staff
President-elect Donald Trump is scoring deals and making headlines even before he returns to the White House. On Tuesday, he held a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida to announce a promised $20 billion investment in U.S. data centers from fellow real estate mogul Hussain Sajwani. That makes Sajwani, a Dubai-based property developer and longtime Trump business partner, the latest foreign billionaire to announce a headline-grabbing deal with Trump since his election victory in November. Last month, Japan’s Masayoshi Son, who founded investment firm Softbank, promised to put $100 billion in the U.S. over the next four years.
You are viewing: Can Hussain Sajwani Really Come Up With $20 Billion To Invest In U.S.
What’s the attraction for Sajwani? It’s surely one way to curry favor with Trump, with whom he’s done business before. Plus the AI boom. “We’ve been studying the market and we think it’s the right time now. There’s a huge demand for AI,” Sajwani, 71, told Forbes on Tuesday afternoon, speaking on a video call from a wood-paneled room at Mar-a-Lago, where he has been staying for the past nine days. “I think the new administration will be more pro-business and we’re excited about the coming four years.”
Sajwani told Forbes that he had been mulling an investment in U.S. data centers last year but decided to press forward with his plans after Trump’s election victory in November. “We wanted to see a more friendly administration,” he says. “When I arrived [at Mar-a-Lago] for the new year, I spoke to [Trump] and he welcomed the idea.”
Another billionaire Sajwani met at Mar-a-Lago was Elon Musk, who has been spending much of his time by Trump’s side since the November election and was also named by Trump to co-lead a new advisory body, the Department of Government Efficiency. Since 2022, Sajwani says he’s put up to $2 billion into American private equity firms and startups, including investments in Musk’s SpaceX in 2023 and in his artificial intelligence firm xAI last year.
“He’s a genius, a legend,” says Sajwani of Musk. “Some of his companies we’ve invested in, like SpaceX, we’ve made three to four times our money in less than two years with the new valuations.”
But $20 billion is an awfully big number for a billionaire worth just over $5 billion, by Forbes estimates. Most of Sajwani’s fortune lies in his 100% stake in Damac Properties, the luxury real estate developer he founded in 2002. Damac sells high-end villas and apartments and builds golf courses in its resort communities in the U.A.E., Jordan, London, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
“Damac has sold quite well in the last four years in Dubai and a lot of cash will be coming out of escrow in the coming four years as we deliver those projects,” says Sajwani. “Part of that cash will be used for funding the data centers.”
Damac had about $5.1 billion in cash and bank balances as of June 2024, largely from sales of luxury properties in Dubai, according to the company’s financial statements shared with Forbes. Damac’s revenues grew to $1.4 billion in the fiscal year through June, up from $689 million over the same period a year earlier and on track to surpass the $2.4 billion recorded for all of 2023. And Dubai’s real estate market had another banner year in 2024 with $142 billion in total sales—27% more than in 2023, which had set the previous record.
The investment will be done through his data center company Edgnex, which he launched just four years ago in 2021 and is part of Damac. Sajwani says he plans to invest $20 billion over four to five years to build data centers in eight U.S. states—Arizona, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Ohio, Oklahoma and Texas. That outlay, he says, will be financed in part by putting in $7 billion to $8 billion of his firm’s own cash, with the remaining roughly two-thirds financed through bank loans, without disclosing which banks.
Trump and Sajwani have known each other for more than a decade. “The relationship [with Trump] started in 2011 when we made an agreement for the golf course in Dubai. The chemistry clicked and we became friends more than partners,” says Sajwani, who first teamed up with Trump to launch a Trump-branded complex of luxury villas in 2014. Shortly before Trump’s first inauguration in January 2017, Trump said at a press conference that Sajwani had offered him $2 billion for several business deals in Dubai, but that he turned him down. Weeks later, Trump’s sons Eric and Donald Jr. attended the opening ceremony for a Trump-branded golf course at a Damac development in Dubai.
According to Sajwani, all of the Trump-branded villas have been sold. Four-bedroom villas in The Trump Estates Park Residences, which Damac launched in 2017, went for a little over $800,000. But prices in Dubai have risen since: Another Trump-named project launched by Damac that appears to have recently been completed, BelAir at the Trump Estates, is currently marketing rooftop terrace villas with a starting price of $4.6 million.
The two business partners share a penchant for flashy marketing. While Trump has plastered his name on everything from bibles to bottles of wine, Sajwani has partnered with brands including Versace, Fendi and Bugatti to sell lavish villas and offer perks like complimentary Lamborghinis to customers who buy apartments during the annual Dubai Shopping Festival in January. Not all of the pair’s projects together have come to fruition: another Trump golf club that was set to open in one of Damac’s developments in 2018—featuring an 18-hole course designed by Tiger Woods—has been in limbo for years.
Besides Musk’s xAI, Sajwani says he’s invested $50 million in AI startup Anthropic last year and also backed French outfit Mistral. Sajwani’s investment in AI firms goes hand-in-hand with his focus on data centers, given the rapidly growing demand for more storage capacity for data produced using the high-end chips that power AI models. He says his firm Edgnex has already spent nearly $1 billion acquiring land for data centers in 10 countries in Europe, Asia and the Middle East, and it has three centers up and running in Saudi Arabia and Thailand plus another 15 already under construction.
So far all of that investment has come from Damac’s balance sheet, says Sajwani, although his firm has also partnered with local companies in Greece, Thailand and Turkey. He’s planning to spend more outside the U.S. too, pledging to invest $3 billion for new data centers in Southeast Asia plus more than $400 million in Spain.
See more : How to Invest in Paycor (PYCR)
As the business scales up, Sajwani says he is also looking to outfit his data centers with chips from Nvidia, one of the biggest winners of the AI boom. “We’re in dialogue with Nvidia,” he adds. “We met some of the senior management and we’re looking to host Nvidia chips in some of our data centers around the world.”
Sajwani isn’t the only one planning to spend billions of dollars on data centers. Microsoft announced last week that it was on track to spend $80 billion on data centers for AI in 2025 alone. These structures are notoriously energy-hungry and use enormous amounts of water, but Sajwani is convinced that Trump’s policies will bring costs down. “If the administration helps investment in creating more electricity, that’s the only thing you need because the U.S. has plenty of land,” he says. “Land is not an issue, it’s the electricity.”
Trump appeared to back that promise at the press conference announcing Sajwani’s $20 billion pledge, saying that his administration would help Damac “move quickly through the environmental process” with “expedited reviews.” He also said a streamlined process would be available to any company investing $1 billion in the U.S.
For now Edgnex is still part of Sajwani’s wholly-owned Damac, but Sajwani doesn’t rule out seeking external investors or taking the firm public in the future. Damac was listed on the London and Dubai stock exchanges for nine years—in part to raise the firm’s profile and help it raise bonds—and its market capitalization peaked at $6.6 billion in 2017. Sajwani took the firm private again in 2022 for $2.2 billion, a decision he chalks up to low demand for the stock at the time. “The option of bringing outside investors is there, we could go public. Why can’t we list Edgneq on NASDAQ for $100 billion one day?” he says, chuckling.
He’s also open to more real estate deals with the Trump Organization. “If an opportunity comes and both organizations see an added value, why not?” he says, pointing to his close relationship with Eric Trump, who has led the Trump Organization since his father first entered the White House in 2017. “We’ve been dealing with [Eric], and he’s been one of the best partners I’ve experienced in 40 years. Very easy to deal with, very easy to access.”
Besides meeting Musk and making the announcement with Trump, Sajwani’s extended stay at Mar-a-Lago rubbing shoulders with billionaires might be good for his real estate business, too. “Dubai is attracting a lot of talent and a lot of wealthy people,” he says. “In the last week I’ve already met half a dozen people—their net worth is north of $5 to $6 billion each—who want to move to Dubai.”
MORE FROM FORBES
Source: https://magnacumlaude.store
Category: News