Saudi Arabia opens large investment summit, focuses on urban megaprojects and AI

Saudi Arabia on Tuesday kicked off the ninth Future Investment Initiative (FII) in Riyadh, focusing on artificial intelligence (AI) and urban megaprojects. The major Saudi global business conference, often described as “Davos in the Desert” — a reference to the elite annual gathering in Davos, Switzerland — is being held at the King Abdulaziz International Conference Center, a former royal palace.

Some 20 heads of state, including China’s Vice President Han Zheng and Syria’s interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa, are expected to attend the Saudi conference, alongside numerous business leaders and government ministers from around the world. Donald Trump Jr. and the heads of U.S. investment giants JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and BlackRock are also attending the event.

“We have taken Saudi Arabia to the world and now the world is coming to Saudi Arabia,” stated Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the head of the large Saudi Public Investment Fund. He revealed during his opening keynote speech that foreign investments increased by 24% last year and reached $31.7 billion. 

Robert Mogielnicki, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, explained the importance of the Saudi business conference. 

“FII is an important annual opportunity to drum up foreign investments to help finance the expensive and at times challenging economic transformation agenda,” Mogielnicki assessed. 

“There is clearly a recalibration of spending priorities going on. So investors will be looking for where the money is headed going forward,” he continued. 

“Some of Saudi Arabia’s new tech companies are rather nascent entities, so they’ll be looking to assure audiences that the kingdom’s tech ambitions are very real, feasible and exciting,” Mogielnicki predicted. 

The high-profile Saudi conference was opened merely weeks before the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) is scheduled to visit the United States for the first time since 2018, the same year when the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. During his visit in Washington DC, MBS is expected to discuss the $600 billion investments in the U.S. economy that he pledged during President Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia in May. 

The major business conference is part of the Saudi crown prince’s strategic plan to modernize Saudi Arabia and diversify its traditional oil-based economy. In March 2022, MBS turned to Wall Street to raise some $500 billion to fund his futuristic mega city NEOM. The high-tech city is currently being constructed on Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea coast and will be adjacent to the country’s border with Jordan. 

Saudi Arabia and Israel currently do not have any official diplomatic relations. However, Saudi Arabia reportedly played a leading role in advancing Trump’s historic Abraham Accords in 2020 between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan. Furthermore, Saudi Arabia has signaled that it is prepared to normalize its ties with the Jewish state if Jerusalem formally embraces a path towards a two-state solution. 

In September 2023, MBS confirmed that the normalization efforts with Israel were progressing. 

“Every day we get closer,” MBS said in an exclusive interview with Fox News anchor Bret Baier. However, merely weeks later, the terrorist organization Hamas launched its devastating Oct. 7 attack against Israel, which triggered the Gaza war and put Saudi Israeli normalization efforts on hold. 

In May 2025, a Wall Street Journal report based on retrieved Hamas documents, revealed that the terror group’s leaders specifically wanted to undermine the peace efforts between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

Despite the absence of formal relations, an Israeli government delegation is reportedly scheduled to attend an upcoming tourism conference in Saudi Arabia. 

This article originally appeared on ALL ARAB NEWS and is reposted with permission.