Mohammed Alardhi does not flinch when you present the region's worst decade of headlines to him.
Sitting in his office in London's Mayfair days before he is due to chair a closed-door session with the former head of MI6, Sir Richard Moore, the executive chairman of Investcorp answers the volatility question with a number, not a feeling.
“The investors that know the region know that this is a volatility, but the fundamentals have not changed,” he says.
“In 1980, the total GDP of the whole GCC was about $180 billion. Now it's really going towards $3 trillion in the next few years. In 1980, sovereign funds had about $100 billion, now they have over $5 trillion. So anybody that bet against the Gulf in the last 50 years lost.”
That confidence is not rhetorical. While markets were fixated on the Middle East conflict and the disruption through the Strait of Hormuz, Mr Alardhi did the opposite of hunkering down. Investcorp closed four significant deals in as many months, deploying capital across sectors that read like a bet on the region's next decade.
Last month, the company invested in Metra, a UAE-based IT distributor, and also bought the majority stake in UK-based facilities management company Smart Managed Solutions.
In May, the company acquired a diversified US industrial property portfolio worth more than $200 million. The portfolio comprises 19 industrial properties, totalling approximately 1.4 million square feet, across Dallas–Fort Worth, Chicago, Indianapolis and Cincinnati.
That announcement came after Investcorp in April said it was acquiring one multifamily and two senior housing properties in Los Angeles and New York for about $200 million.
It was not only capital going out, either. On March 5, the Strategic Capital Group closed Investcorp Strategic Capital Partners II on commitments of more than $1.25 billion, with investors backing the same window Mr Alardhi was buying into.
It is the clearest evidence of the ambition Mr Alardhi lays out for Investcorp: from $63 billion in assets under management today to $100 billion within five to seven years.
“We're really not done,” he says. The firm's bet on where that growth comes from – private credit, infrastructure, data centres, cybersecurity – lines up almost exactly with where the capital went during the four months the region was going through a war.
Structurally different Gulf
What has changed, he argues, is not just the size of the sovereign balance sheet, but the relationship with Washington. American investors' understanding of the region has deepened significantly.
“You just see the US corporations that are present in the Gulf. Fifteen, 20 years ago, they wouldn't even think about it. They were coming just to raise capital. Now they are really partners in the future of the Gulf.”
That shift from capital-raising outpost to genuine partnership is, in his opinion, the story of $2 trillion in Gulf-US tech and AI commitments now flowing both ways.
It is not a one-way flow of conviction either. Educated at Harvard, Mr Alardhi is candid about how much of Investcorp's own trajectory is backed by the US. “Without America, I don't know if Investcorp would be where it is.”
'We cannot afford to miss this one'
If there is a single line that explains why Investcorp has been buying rather than waiting, it this one. Mr Alardhi is blunt about the region's track record with technological change and even blunter about what happens if it repeats itself. “The Gulf has missed many technological breakthroughs in the past. We cannot afford to miss this one, because if we do, it will be very difficult to catch up.”
According to him, artificial intelligence “is not going to be a sector you can own”.
The winners, in his view, will be “those who take those tools and embed them in everything they do, in their businesses, in their investment, in their focus”.
That applies as much to Investcorp itself as to the market. The firm has already rolled AI out across every level of the business, not as a pilot programme, but as a standard tool. “We democratised the use of AI in the firm,” he explains. “Those who need to use it, they have it.”
The next phase, already under way, is more deliberate on AI use and will focus on going through the business “process by process”. It's a roll-out built explicitly around augmentation, not replacement.
“This is not something we want to replace humans,” Mr Alardhi says. “This is something that's going to make us really super productive. This will need our judgment and this will need our interjection at times when we need to change and we need to do something differently.”
Are we in an AI bubble? Not according to Mr Alardhi. Pressed on comparisons to the dot-com crash and the financial crisis, he does not dodge the framing, he dismantles it: “I don't think so. I think our fundamentals are much more stronger now. Anthropic is making money now, so it's not just on the hype.”
Calculated risk is key
The calm is not an accident. Before Investcorp, Mr Alardhi was flying fighter jets for the Royal Air Force of Oman, rising to command the entire force as Air Vice Marshal. He rejects the Top Gun mythology of the reckless flyer: “No fighter pilot just walks into risk. I think calculated risk, yes.”
The habit that stuck, he says, is his preparation to be composed under pressure and an almost total dependence on the people around you.
“As a fighter pilot, you can't go alone in anything. Somebody has got to look after your six, and you look after their six as well as looking forward.”
That is the same instinct that now governs how he runs a $63 billion investment firm: trust the team, then get out of the way.
“When you have the right team, you trust them. You will be amazed how good the decisions they take [are] when you're not around.”
The full interview with Mohammed Alardhi will be featured on the next episode of The Inside Brief
