Dubai property billionaire Hussain Sajwani says his Anthropic stake earned him as much in under two years as 30 years of business did.
Sajwani told Forbes that DAMAC put $50 million into Anthropic in 2024. Anthropic is set to list on Nasdaq next week at a valuation that could reach about $1.4 trillion. Sajwani says he bought in at $18 billion. Entrepreneur Middle East reports that the founder and chairman of DAMAC Group put that leap in personal terms at the Bloomberg Invest Dubai forum on Thursday, 12 November.
What I made in 30 years, I made from Anthropic in less than two years.
Hussain Sajwani, founder and Chairman, DAMAC Group
His 30-year run ran from his first business, in catering in 1983, to December 2013, when he took DAMAC public on the London Stock Exchange. Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index estimates Sajwani’s net worth at more than $13 billion, driven in part by Dubai’s long property boom.
What DAMAC put in, and what it might be worth
DAMAC hasn’t published the size of its Anthropic holding, its ownership percentage or any sale, so the comparison is Sajwani’s own estimate. The cost is clearer. Khaleej Times reports that Sajwani told Forbes he invested $50 million in Anthropic in 2024, alongside a stake in Elon Musk’s xAI. DAMAC announced the investment at the time.
FourWeekMBA, working from a court sale notice, says Damac Capital agreed in May 2024 to buy 1,666,416 Anthropic Series B shares from the FTX bankruptcy estate for $49,999,979. On its arithmetic, those shares would be worth about $1.23 billion at $74, the midpoint of the IPO range, or about 24.7 times the price paid. Neither DAMAC nor Anthropic has confirmed that figure.
Anthropic isn’t the only AI company Sajwani has bet on. He said DAMAC sits on the cap table of Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Databricks, ByteDance, Together AI, Reflection, and “30 other companies”. At the forum, he said his stakes in Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX are making “huge money”. He didn’t say how that splits between the three.
How big the Anthropic IPO will be
Anthropic plans to sell 825 million shares at $70 to $78 each, with pricing expected on 18 November and trading on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT on 19 November. CNBC reports that at the top of the range, the offering would raise up to $64.35 billion. AMD, Broadcom, Google, Micron, Microsoft, Nvidia, and TSMC have also agreed to buy $26 billion of stock in a separate private placement at the IPO price. Together, that brings the total to up to $90.4 billion. Bloomberg reported the offering was about six times oversubscribed.
The valuation depends on how the shares are counted. Forbes notes that Anthropic’s filing states no valuation. On a fully diluted basis, which includes employee options and other equity awards, the company could be worth up to $1.405 trillion. Counting only the shares outstanding, Reuters calculated up to $1.02 trillion. Sajwani’s $1.4 trillion matches the fully diluted top end.
He also mentioned “a US$2 trillion valuation” a few weeks earlier. That figure matches Wall Street estimates from early October, not a price anyone paid.
The company’s numbers are large on both sides. Anthropic reported $16.3 billion in revenue in the first half of 2026, alongside a net loss of $80.7 billion. The founders keep 50.1% of the vote through a special class of stock.
The climb has been steep. In April, Google committed $40 billion at a $350 billion valuation, and Amazon agreed a $25 billion investment alongside a $100 billion AWS commitment. In late May, a $65 billion Series H round lifted it to $965 billion.
Where the rest of the Gulf’s AI money sits
Sajwani isn’t the only Gulf investor holding Anthropic. AGBI reports that QIA, Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, and MGX, the Abu Dhabi AI investor, both joined May’s round. MGX, founded by Mubadala and G42, closed its first fund on 1 July at $49 billion and holds pieces of OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI. In Saudi Arabia, the Public Investment Fund backs HUMAIN, the kingdom’s own AI company.
DAMAC is also building the infrastructure AI runs on. According to Entrepreneur Middle East, its data-centre arm, DAMAC Digital, launched in 2021 and operates in 13 countries. In January 2025, Sajwani announced a $20 billion investment in US data centres with Donald Trump. Sajwani said about $9 billion of it has been invested so far. He’s also in “serious negotiations to purchase land in the UK and Australia”.
For now, Sajwani’s windfall is on paper. The number that decides how big it really is arrives on 18 November, when Anthropic sets its price.
