Portugal Colonial - 'The Donald of Dubai': property tycoon seeks to become data king

DAMAC Properties chairman Hussain Sajwani, who attended the US president's 2025 inauguration and is second on Forbes' Arab rich-list, sees "huge" potential in data as demand for computing power soars.

Sajwani, whose Instagram feed pictures him with the likes of Trump, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, rode Dubai's real estate rollercoaster to amass a net worth of $15.3 billion, according to Forbes.

"We're part vision and part being lucky, and thank God, today we're building a beautiful business," he told AFP by video call from the Datacloud Global Congress in Cannes.

He described how hours of video calls during the Covid-19 pandemic convinced him to pivot to data centres, before OpenAI's launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 set off a frenzy over AI.

Sajwani has earmarked sites in 13 countries across North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East which, if all completed, will have a total capacity of 6,000 megawatts, costing roughly $66 billion to build.

"The idea came during Covid, where everybody was locked down and I was spending a lot of hours on Zoom," Sajwani said.

"It was very obvious that Zoom and other businesses that were doing e-commerce were going to grow.

"So I thought the data centre business would have a future. Honestly, I never thought there would be such growth."

- Drone attacks -

A mix of opportunism and good fortune has made Sajwani one of the Middle East's biggest property developers, earning him the nickname "the Donald of Dubai".

He started in catering but moved into property in the 1990s, leaving him well-positioned for a real estate boom when Dubai opened its market to foreign buyers in 2002.

After surviving near-wipeout during the 2008 global financial crisis, DAMAC has built 60,000 properties with another 60,000 under construction and operates in a dozen countries, Sajwani said.

In 2017, he opened Dubai's Trump International Golf Club, and early last year he stood side-by-side with the newly inaugurated president to announce a $20 billion investment in US data centres.

DAMAC Digital, launched in 2021, has now completed sites in Thailand and Saudi Arabia, with eight in total expected to be operational by the year's end.

The footprint also includes Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Turkey, Greece, Spain, Italy, Finland and Sweden, as well as the United Arab Emirates.

Sajwani was unfazed by the Middle East war, where drones struck data centres in the UAE and Bahrain during the initial weeks of Iranian attacks.

"We took the decision four, five years ago to do data centres and we've continued," Sajwani said.

"The war has proven to us that UAE is quite resilient and the government did a great job of defending the country."

- 'Top in the world' -

Five "hyperscalers" have signed up as clients for DAMAC's data centres. Although DAMAC cannot disclose their names, hyperscalers are major players in cloud and AI services and include brands such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

Sajwani said DAMAC Digital was now on course to outstrip DAMAC Properties as the biggest company in his empire, which also includes investment and logistics arms.

"Now we have almost 6,000 (megawatts) landbank," he added, referring to parcels of land with enough power and fibre connectivity to support a data centre.

"If we build all that, that's huge."

Sajwani dismissed concerns about a potential AI bubble or oversupply, saying "in the coming three or four years, the demand is huge.

"And AI is going to create a revolution in every aspect of human beings' life."

He said DAMAC is setting its sights on one day overtaking Equinix, the world's biggest data centre provider with more than 280 sites.

"We want to be bigger than them. We want to be the top in the world," he said.

S.Caetano--PC