Ray Dalio, founding father of Bridgewater, chatting with CNBC on the Future Funding Institute 2025 summit in Riyadh on Oct. twenty eighth, 2025.
CNBC
The Center East is quick rising as one of many world’s strongest AI hubs, Bridgewater Associates’ founder Ray Dalio stated Monday, evaluating the area’s rise to Silicon Valley’s pull for all issues tech.
Talking to CNBC, Dalio stated the United Arab Emirates and its neighbors have mixed huge swimming pools of capital with an inflow of world expertise, making a magnet for funding managers and AI innovators alike.
The UAE and Saudi Arabia have this yr launched multibillion-dollar initiatives to construct cloud, knowledge facilities and different AI infrastructure, underpinned by sovereign-wealth capital and world tech partnerships.
A $10 billion settlement between Google Cloud and Saudi Arabia’s Public Funding Fund introduced this yr goals to create a “world AI hub” within the nation, as a part of a broader push to host data-centers and AI workloads regionally.
Earlier this yr, know-how giants OpenAI, Oracle, Nvidia and Cisco mixed forces to construct a serious Stargate synthetic intelligence campus within the United Arab Emirates.
When requested if he thinks that the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar will be leaders within the AI race, Dalio stated, “What they’ve finished is to create gifted folks. So this [region] is sort of turning into a Silicon Valley of capitalists … So now persons are coming in … cash is coming in, expertise is coming in.”
Dalio, who has been visiting Abu Dhabi for greater than three many years, stated the Gulf’s transformation is the results of deliberate statecraft and long-term planning. He described the UAE as “a paradise in a world that is troubled,” citing its management, stability, high quality of life and ambition to construct a globally aggressive monetary ecosystem.
“There is a buzz right here, the way in which there is a buzz in San Francisco, locations like that, about AI or know-how. It is similar to that,” Dalio stated.
‘Precarious’ subsequent two years
The Bridgewater founder warned that the worldwide economic system was headed towards an unsure future within the close to time period attributable to a confluence of a number of forces, reiterating his considerations about markets being in bubble.
“The following yr or two sooner or later goes to be extra precarious,” he stated, pointing to the convergence of what he calls the three dominant cycles: debt, U.S. political battle and geopolitics.
The world debt overhang is already forcing stress into pockets of the market.
“We’re seeing cracks within the markets in numerous methods, personal fairness, enterprise capital, debt that is being refinanced, and all of these. So we’re in a bubble, I imagine, by virtually all of these measures,” Dalio stated, highlighting similarities with the 2000 bubble however not the one in 1929.
He additionally expects U.S. politics to develop into extra disruptive heading into 2026. “As we go into the 2026 elections … you will notice much more battle in numerous methods,” Dalio stated, including that elevated rates of interest and concentrated market management compound the vulnerability.
“Each nation … can not proceed to build up the debt they’ve, but politically they can not increase taxes and so they cannot reduce advantages. In order that they’re caught.” That fiscal bind feeds right into a broader rise in home polarization: “We now have populism of the left and populism of the fitting … which suggests irreconcilable variations.”
Dalio reiterated his view that the AI rally is in bubble territory, however suggested traders to not rush for exits simply because valuations are stretched.
Issues about an AI bubble have been swirling in latest months, with notable voices comparable to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman suggesting that the AI market was in a bubble. Investor Michael Burry, who referred to as the 2008 subprime mortgage crash, has forecast the unreal intelligence market bubble may collapse within the subsequent two years.
“All of the bubbles befell in occasions of nice technological change,” Dalio stated. “You do not need to get out of it simply due to the bubble. You need to search for the pricking of the bubble.”
The catalyst for that “pricking,” he stated, often comes from a tightening of cash or a pressured have to promote wealth to satisfy obligations.
He additionally warned of stress in enterprise capital, personal fairness and business actual property, sectors the place low cost debt is now rolling over at increased charges.