The Chess-Obsessed Spymaster Who Bought His Way Into the Global AI Race
Back in the mid-2000s, a refrigerator-sized rig housed in Abu Dhabi earned a reputation as the most formidable chess player on the planet. Named Hydra, it was a compact supercomputer: a cabinet packed with industrial-grade processors and custom-built chips, linked via fiber-optic cables and connected to the global internet.
At a time when chess still served as the primary testing ground for man-versus-AI competition, Hydra and its undefeated streak became the stuff of legend. The New Yorker ran a thoughtful 5,000-word deep dive exploring its seemingly emergent creative play; WIRED branded Hydra “terrifying”; and chess outlets covered its wins with the same fiery energy as pro wrestling commentary. Reporters called Hydra a “monster machine” that “slowly strangled” human grandmasters.
True to its monster nickname, Hydra was also an isolated, unusual oddity. Other top chess engines of the era—Hydra’s competitors—ran on standard consumer PCs and were free for anyone to download. But Hydra’s full 32-processor processing power could only be used by one person at a time. By the summer of 2005, even Hydra’s own development team could barely get time to test their own creation.
The reason for that access crunch was the project’s backer: a 36-year-old Emirati businessman who’d funded the team and Hydra’s high-end hardware, and was too busy reaping the benefits of his investment to share access. In 2005, Hydra’s Austrian lead designer Chrilly Donninger wrote on an online chess forum that their patron was the world’s biggest “computer chess enthusiast.” “The sponsor,” he noted, “loves to play day and night with Hydra.”
Logging into online chess tournaments under the username zor_champ, the Emirati sponsor competed as part man-part Hydra, and more often than not, he crushed every opponent he faced. “He loved the power of combining human skill with machine capability,” one engineer who worked on the project told me. “He just loved to win.”
Hydra was eventually outpaced by newer chess computers and retired in the late 2000s. But zor_champ would go on to become one of the most powerful, least well-understood men in the world. His real name is Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed al Nahyan.
A lean, bearded figure who almost never appears in public without dark sunglasses, Tahnoun serves as the United Arab Emirates’ national security advisor—the top intelligence official of one of the world’s wealthiest, most surveillance-heavy small states. He is also the younger brother of the UAE’s hereditary autocratic president, Mohamed bin Zayed al Nahyan. Most remarkably for a career spymaster, Tahnoun also holds official control over the vast majority of Abu Dhabi’s massive sovereign wealth. Bloomberg reported last year that he directly oversees a $1.5 trillion investment empire—more assets under management than almost any other individual on Earth.
In public and private, Tahnoun cuts a figure that is one part Gulf royal, one part fitness-obsessed tech founder, one part classic Bond villain. Among his wide-ranging business holdings, he leads a sprawling technology conglomerate called G42 (a nod to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where 42 is the supercomputer’s answer to the ultimate question of “life, the universe, and everything”). G42 operates across sectors from AI research to biotechnology, with particular focus on state-sponsored hacking and surveillance technology. Tahnoun is an obsessive fan of Brazilian jiu-jitsu and cycling; he keeps his sunglasses on even at the gym due to a light sensitivity, and surrounds himself with UFC champions and mixed martial artists.
According to a businessman and a security consultant who have met Tahnoun, visitors who get past his layers of loyal security staff often only get a one-on-one meeting after cycling laps with the sheikh around his private velodrome. The consultant says Tahnoun regularly spends hours in a flotation tank for recovery, and has flown top longevity health expert Peter Attia to the UAE for personal consulting. One businessman who was present for a private conversation between the two leaders says Tahnoun even inspired Saudi Arabia’s powerful Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to cut out fast food and join his quest to live to age 150.
In recent years, though, a far larger ambition has consumed most of Tahnoun’s time and attention. His early obsession with chess and cutting-edge computing has grown into something much bigger: a $100 billion push to turn Abu Dhabi into a global AI superpower. And this time, the key partner he is seeking to buy access to is the U.S. tech industry itself.
In the high-stakes strategic game that is the global AI arms race, the U.S. currently holds the upper hand for one simple reason. A single American chipmaker, Nvidia, produces the graphics processing units (GPUs) required to train the world’s most competitive AI models—and the U.S. government has restricted access to these advanced chips for buyers outside the country’s borders. To capitalize on their shaky lead over China, the CEOs of America’s biggest AI firms have crisscrossed the globe courting the world’s richest investors—men like Tahnoun—to fund an unprecedented global boom in AI infrastructure.
Behind every viral AI podcast and piece of AI-generated content sits a massive, power-hungry data center: row after row of server cabinets the size of Hydra, running computing processes that are tens or hundreds of times more energy-intensive than a standard web search. Even more energy and computing power go into the data centers that train large foundational AI models. To keep up with exploding demand, AI companies need new data centers all over the world—plus land to build them, water to cool their servers, electricity to power them, and chips to run them. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has predicted that tech firms will invest a total of $1 trillion in new AI data centers over the next five years.
Put simply, building the next generation of AI requires staggering amounts of capital, land, and energy—and the Gulf states, with their massive oil wealth and abundant energy resources, have all three in spades. Over the past two years, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar have all launched large AI-focused investment funds. But the UAE has emerged as a particularly attractive potential partner for a range of reasons, from its unmatched wealth to its new nuclear power supply to the relative sophistication of its domestic AI sector.
But there is a catch: Any U.S. AI partnership with the UAE is, in effect, a direct partnership with Tahnoun himself—and for years, many of Tahnoun’s most important tech partners were Chinese.
This alignment made perfect sense: Tahnoun is a top spy chief with deep commercial interests in state-controlled high tech, so a close relationship with Beijing was a natural fit. Throughout the early 2020s, Tahnoun built deep personal and business ties with China, to the point that many G42 products were nearly indistinguishable from Chinese offerings. For example, a G42 subsidiary called Presight AI sold surveillance software to police forces around the world that was nearly identical to systems used by Chinese law enforcement. Chinese telecom giant Huawei had even deeper ties to G42. In the early days of the generative AI boom, Huawei engineers had free access to Abu Dhabi’s most sensitive tech facilities as they helped design massive AI training centers.
But in August 2023, Washington issued an ultimatum. It expanded export restrictions on Nvidia GPUs to the Middle East—the exact hardware Abu Dhabi needed to achieve its AI ambitions. Any company using Huawei equipment would be blocked from accessing the chips. So Tahnoun made a sharp, immediate pivot. In early 2024, G42 announced it was cutting all ties with China and removing all Chinese-made equipment from its facilities. Chinese workers began quietly leaving Abu Dhabi’s tech sector soon after.
At the same time, U.S. and UAE leaders entered a frantic period of mutual courtship. Dozens of PR consultants, lawyers, and Washington DC lobbyists set to work rebranding Tahnoun as a reliable, trustworthy steward for U.S. technology and investment. Marty Edelman, the UAE’s most trusted American legal advisor, led the strategy from New York, while UAE Ambassador to Washington Yousef Al Otaiba used his extensive political capital to vouch for Tahnoun. For their part, U.S. government and tech leaders worked to direct the flood of Emirati capital into U.S. companies to meet the AI sector’s growing need for investment.
The first public sign of a deal came in an unusual agreement that saw investment flow the other direction. Brokered largely by Biden administration officials, Microsoft announced in April 2024 that it would invest $1.5 billion in Tahnoun’s G42, taking a minority stake in the firm. According to a Biden administration official who helped steer the deal, the goal was to position Microsoft as G42’s partner “as an alternative to Huawei.” Under the first phase of the partnership, G42 would gain access to Microsoft’s AI computing power via the Azure cloud platform, hosted at a data center inside the UAE. Microsoft President Brad Smith also joined G42’s board of directors—a sort of U.S. oversight representative inside the company.
The big wave of Emirati investment was still to come, as was approval for Nvidia to sell chips to Abu Dhabi. But the Microsoft deal served as a U.S. government stamp of approval for deeper business ties with the UAE. In summer 2024, Tahnoun launched a charm offensive across the U.S., visiting Elon Musk in Texas and training jiu-jitsu with Mark Zuckerberg. Meetings with Bill Gates, Satya Nadella, and Jeff Bezos followed quickly. The most high-stakes meetings, though, took place at the White House, with top officials including national security advisor Jake Sullivan, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, and President Joe Biden himself.
As Tahnoun’s rebranding gained traction and the U.S. appeared poised to loosen chip export controls for the UAE, many within the U.S. national security establishment are frantically sounding the alarm. One of their top fears is that U.S. intellectual property could still end up leaking to China. “The Emiratis are master hedgers,” a former senior U.S. security official told me. “The question everyone is asking is: Are they playing both sides?” In a July open letter, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Michael McCaul called for “significantly more robust national security guardrails” to be put in place for the UAE before the U.S. exports any sensitive technology to the country.
The second major fear centers on the UAE itself: an authoritarian state whose vision for using AI as a tool of state control is not all that different from China’s. “The UAE is an authoritarian state with a dismal human rights record and a long history of using technology to spy on activists, journalists, and dissidents,” says Eva Galperin, cybersecurity director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “There is no doubt that the UAE wants to shape the future of AI development” in ways that prioritize the needs of police states, not democracy or shared human values, she adds.
This past summer, around the time Tahnoun was visiting U.S. tech leaders and gyms, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman hosted many of the world’s top AI thinkers—including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt—at his large South African hunting estate, Ekland. The group visited game reserves, were served by personal butlers, and discussed Saudi Arabia’s future role in global AI.
Not long after, Schmidt visited the Biden White House to share his concern that the U.S. cannot generate enough electricity to compete in the global AI race. His solution? Closer business and financial ties with Canada, which has abundant hydroelectric power. “The alternative is to have the Arabs fund [AI],” he told a group of Stanford students in a recorded talk the following week. “I like the Arabs personally … But they’re not going to follow our national security rules.”
These concerns about the Gulf states’ reliability as allies—and their history of unsavory actions like targeting journalists and waging proxy wars—have not stopped their capital from flowing into U.S. tech companies. Earlier this year, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign Public Investment Fund announced a $40 billion AI-focused investment fund, backed by a strategic partnership with Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Kingdom Holding, an investment firm run by a Saudi royal deeply loyal to the crown prince, has also become one of the largest investors in Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI.
The New York Times wrote that the new Saudi fund made the kingdom “the world’s largest investor in artificial intelligence.” But in September, the UAE surpassed that milestone: Abu Dhabi announced that a new AI investment vehicle called MGX would partner with BlackRock, Microsoft, and Global Infrastructure Partners to invest more than $100 billion, among other things, in building a network of AI data centers and power plants across the United States. MGX, which is part of Tahnoun’s sovereign wealth portfolio, has also reportedly held early talks with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman about his proposed $5 to $7 trillion ambitious chipmaking project that would create an alternative to Nvidia’s limited supply of GPUs.
Emirati capital was now fully open for business. And within days of the MGX announcement, news site Semafor reported that the U.S. had approved Nvidia to sell advanced GPUs to G42. Some of the chips were already being deployed in Abu Dhabi, the outlet reported, including “a sizable order of Nvidia H100 models.” The U.S. had finally given Tahnoun the hardware he needed to build his next Hydra. That leaves two pressing questions: What kind of game is Sheikh Tahnoun playing this time around? And how did he end up controlling so much of the UAE’s wealth?
Nearly every story about Gulf royalty is ultimately a story about succession: about ruling families navigating external threats, and the internal rivalries that emerge when inherited power is up for grabs.
Tahnoun and his brother Mohamed are both sons of Zayed bin Sultan al Nahyan, the UAE’s first president and the iconic founding father of the nation.
For most of Zayed’s early life, what is now Abu Dhabi city was a harsh, seasonal fishing village with brackish water, a brutal climate, and a nomadic population of only around 2,000. The rest of the emirate was home to just a few thousand more Bedouin people. As rulers, the al Nahyan family collected tributes and taxes, and served as stewards of the emirate’s shared resources. Their lifestyle was not much more comfortable than that of their fellow tribesmen. But the top spot was always dangerous: before Zayed took power, two of the last four Abu Dhabi sheikhs were assassinated by their own brothers, and another was killed by a rival tribe.
Zayed seized power from his older brother in a bloodless 1966 coup backed by the British, just as oil and its transformative wealth began flowing into Abu Dhabi. While his brother resisted spending the emirate’s new fortune, Zayed pushed hard for modernization, development, and a vision to unite multiple regional tribes under a single independent state—laying the groundwork for the founding of the United Arab Emirates in 1971.
When the UAE was formed, Tahnoun was almost 3 years old. A middle child among Zayed’s roughly 20 sons, Tahnoun is part of the so-called Bani Fatima—the six sons of Zayed’s most beloved wife Fatima, who are the ruling family’s most important heirs. Zayed prepared these sons to study abroad, gain global experience, and eventually lead the UAE. But even as he built a state that carefully distributed new oil wealth among Abu Dhabi’s Bedouin communities, Zayed discouraged his heirs from pursuing private business and personal enrichment. Mindful of the history of coups and assassinations that preceded his rule, Zayed wanted to avoid any perception that the al Nahyan family was unfairly profiting from their role as the nation’s stewards.
In the mid-1990s, Tahnoun was living in Southern California. One day in 1995, he walked into a Brazilian jiu-jitsu gym in San Diego asking to train. He introduced himself as “Ben,” and according to an article on the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Eastern Europe website, he went out of his way to act humbly: arriving early to class and helping clean up the mats after practice. Only later did he reveal he was an Abu Dhabi prince.
As Zayed’s health declined in the late 1990s, his sons began taking on larger public roles, and many broke from their father’s guidance to launch their own private businesses. It was around this time that Tahnoun founded his first holding company, the Royal Group—the same entity that would later develop the Hydra chess computer. He also launched a robotics company that built a humanoid robot called REEM-C, named after an Abu Dhabi island where he made a series of real estate investments.
When Zayed died in 2004, Tahnoun’s oldest brother Khalifa became ruler of Abu Dhabi and president of the UAE, while Mohamed, the oldest of the Bani Fatima, became crown prince. The other sons received a range of official titles, but their roles remained vague.
I worked as a reporter based in Abu Dhabi from 2008 to 2011, and like many other correspondents, I picked up the hobby of “sheikh watching”—a Gulf royal version of Kremlinology that involves reading between the lines of official announcements, and talking to palace insiders who occasionally leak small secrets. Back then, Tahnoun seemed like a fascinating amateur who was far from real power: he held no major government role, and seemed focused on growing his personal fortune, tinkering with new tech, and reshaping Abu Dhabi’s skyline.
That all changed when Tahnoun emerged as the royal family’s go-to expert for a fast-growing new tool for nation-states: cyberespionage.
In July 2009, thousands of BlackBerry users across the UAE noticed their phones were getting dangerously hot. The issue was traced to a supposed “performance update” pushed by Etisalat, the UAE’s largest telecom provider. In reality, it was spyware—an early mass surveillance experiment that blew up when BlackBerry’s parent company exposed the plot.
I experienced this firsthand on a drive from Abu Dhabi to Dubai: I held my BlackBerry to my ear and it was so hot it nearly burned my face. It was my first direct personal encounter with the UAE’s hidden police state. But anyone who has spent time in the Gulf states knows this reality exists under the surface: violent crime is almost nonexistent, and daily life can be smooth and even luxurious. But when push comes to shove, these states can turn extremely dangerous, especially for residents who dare to hint at dissent.
The 2011 Arab Spring revolutions—which saw four Middle Eastern autocrats ousted by massive crowds organized on social media—only strengthened the UAE’s resolve to stamp out any early signs of pro-democracy activism. When a small group