Gulf

1. Saudi takes precautions
2. Aramco weighs gas unit
3. MGX on global AI hunt
4. Abu Dhabi’s Man City woes
5. Tadawul’s new fixer

A Saudi artist’s rubber-stamped soccer ball.

Saudi Arabia faces uncertain threats

Saudi Arabia is increasingly on the front line of the US-Iran war, after Tehran-backed Houthis routed Riyadh’s allies in Yemen and launched missile and drone attacks on the kingdom. Diplomatic efforts are ongoing, but the region is stuck between war and peace in a “protracted crisis” that will take time to “disentangle,” Anwar Gargash, diplomatic adviser to the UAE president, recently said on the Foreign Affairs podcast.

For now, however, Saudi Arabia is hardening its rhetoric and preparing for the worst. The kingdom’s top cleric issued a call to soldiers to be prepared to sacrifice themselves in the fight against the Houthis. Authorities in Riyadh canceled in-person school on Sunday for a week, and then reversed the decision on Monday.

Amid this uncertainty, oil prices rose as Washington and Tehran seemed no closer to reaching a durable truce. US President Donald Trump rejected a peace proposal from Iran on Friday; he told Axios he believed talks would resume this week, though The Wall Street Journal reported he told aides he expects to bomb Iran again after November’s midterms. Some Gulf exporters are benefiting from surging crude: September volumes from the Middle East were the highest since the war began, though overall sales remain well short of pre-conflict levels.

Aramco’s gas spinoff

Saudi Aramco is considering spinning off its growing gas business into a new division and listing part of it, a sign of the pressure the company faces to raise cash for the government and draw foreign investment into the kingdom.

The state-controlled oil producer plans to create a third business segment for gas, alongside its upstream and downstream operations, Reuters reported. The firm has also been working on plans to raise as much as $35 billion by monetizing other assets, Bloomberg reported earlier this year. It has previously weighed spinning off its trading unit, insurance arm, and airline.

Aramco is in the midst of a $100 billion push to develop the Jafurah field, part of a plan to boost its gas output by more than 80% by 2030, and is also looking to buy stakes in gas assets abroad. Gas has become a major focus for Gulf energy companies, which expect demand for the fuel to last for decades beyond peak sales of oil.

— Matthew Martin

MGX eyes Asia data centers

Abu Dhabi-backed technology investor MGX is looking east for data center assets as the UAE capital’s deep pockets become central to the global AI buildout. The fund is an investor in the BlackRock-backed AI Infrastructure Partnership, which together with Australia’s IFM Investors is in exclusive talks for Stack Infrastructure’s Asia Pacific data centers, a portfolio expected to be valued at as much as $25 billion, Bloomberg reported. Stack, owned by US alternative asset manager Blue Owl Capital, has sites in Australia, Japan, and Malaysia.

The potential deal comes as Oracle invoked force majeure at another Blue Owl-backed US data center — part of the Stargate venture to build AI infrastructure — after permitting delays held up efforts to bring power to the site. Oracle, the project’s anchor tenant, said the development remains on schedule, and Blue Owl said the notice does not change its financial commitments. MGX is also a backer of the $500 billion Stargate venture; the first 250 megawatts of a Stargate cluster in Abu Dhabi is expected to be completed this year.

— Kelsey Warner

Man City verdict mars UAE soft power

Manchester City, owned by a member of Abu Dhabi’s royal family, was found guilty on Friday of breaching Premier League financial rules, tainting one of the emirate’s greatest soft-power successes. Fans of rival soccer clubs have framed the verdict as proof Manchester City — and by extension the UAE — bought its way to the top. Penalties could range from compensating rival clubs to points deductions. But the stakes are also diplomatic: UK-UAE ties have warmed under Prime Minister Andy Burnham, a former Manchester mayor who has called Abu Dhabi “huge partners” for their investment in the city’s poorest areas.

Burnham also recently met with Khaldoon Al Mubarak, the club’s chairman and Mubadala Investment Co.’s chief executive. Diplomats and analysts cited by the Financial Times say the two governments, whose bilateral trade is worth $31.8 billion annually, will likely work to contain any political fallout. In a letter to fans, Al Mubarak vowed to challenge the ruling.

View: Al-Sudairi starts reshaping Tadawul

Mazen Al-Sudairi, Saudi Arabia’s recently appointed Capital Market Authority chairman, must not only attract more companies and investors to the kingdom’s stock exchange, but also fix the structural problems that have kept its benchmark index below its 2006 peak, independent commentator and Saudi economy specialist Wael Mahdi writes for Semafor.

The regulator reports to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, which gives Al-Sudairi “the institutional weight to make bold decisions,” Mahdi writes. In his first weeks in office, Al-Sudairi issued circulars targeting liquidity and corporate governance, marking a break with previous practices. His success will ultimately be judged “by whether companies list in Saudi to build rather than whether their owners come simply to leave.”

Diplomacy

• The US has proposed that the UAE host technical-level talks between Kyiv and Moscow, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, though a date has not yet been set. The first two rounds of negotiations were held in Abu Dhabi earlier this year, before moving to Geneva. — Reuters

Energy

• ADNOC’s international investment arm XRG approved the next phase of the Absheron gas field in Azerbaijan’s Caspian Sea, where it holds a 30% stake alongside Azerbaijan’s state oil company SOCAR and France’s TotalEnergies. The field is due to start production in 2029.

Food and Bev

• Abu Dhabi grocery and property group Mair agreed to buy a 70% stake in the owner of Turkish coffee chain Espressolab, which runs more than 400 cafés in 21 countries. It is Mair’s first acquisition abroad since listing on the ADX in 2024. — Enterprise News

Logistics

• Older supertankers are now selling for more than new ones for the first time on brokers’ records, with several pre-2016 ships fetching $150 million or more against about $135 million for a new build. Freight rates between the Gulf and Asia are at a record $1.2 million a day, and state-owned energy companies are expanding their fleets to move more crude through the Strait of Hormuz. — Financial Times

Abdulnasser Gharem spent his army years stamping papers — and his civilian ones turning them into art. The former lieutenant colonel, one of the pioneers of Saudi conceptual art, has a new solo show in Berlin, Rebecca Anne Proctor writes in Al-Monitor. Its centerpiece is a regulation soccer covered in stamps reading Approved, Rejected, Under Review, and Confidential. The piece, which Gharem calls The Unscored Goal, is an exploration of bureaucracy and sportswashing as stadium contracts flow in the kingdom ahead of the 2034 men’s soccer World Cup.

Gharem has always preferred the long way around: For a 2015 piece also on display, he dismantled a mannequin in Dubai and reassembled it in Riyadh to restage an 18th century Viennese drawing class. Saudi art, especially the critical kind, has long found its audience abroad, in Paris residencies and Venice pavilions, rather than at home.