Mubadala beats PIF in global sovereign spend in 2024

Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Investment Company outpaced Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund in spending last year after the PIF reduced its global investments in 2024.

Mubadala and its subsidiaries invested $29.2 billion in 2024, up from $17.5 billion in 2023, Reuters reported citing the preliminary data from research company Global SWF.

That accounted for nearly 20 percent of the $136.1 billion spent globally by sovereign wealth funds, while the PIF’s investments declined by 37 percent to nearly $20 billion in 2024, down from $31.6 billion in 2023.

In October, the PIF governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan said the fund plans to reduce its foreign investments to around a fifth of its total assets under management and will focus on domestic funding and artificial intelligence. 

“Initially we had less than 2 percent of investments internationally, that was with $150 billion assets under management,” Yasir Al-Rumayyan told a roundtable at the Future Investment Initiative (FII) in Riyadh. 

“Then it increased from 2 percent to 30 percent. Now our target is to bring it down to 18 to 20 percent,” he said.

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The UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia sovereign funds invested a record $82 billion in 2024, a more than 10 percent rise from the previous year.

While Canada’s Maple 8, Singaporean funds, and Australian superannuation funds were more active last year than in 2023, they remained below the peaks in 2021 and 2022.

Globally, sovereign funds’ assets under management (AUM) rose by 6.1 percent in 2024 to $13 trillion, while public pension funds’ AUM grew by 6 percent to $25 trillion.