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WWE’s “Friday Night SmackDown” will return to NBCUniversal’s USA Network in October 2024.
The deal comes out to an average of $287 million per year, a total value of over $1.4 billion, people familiar with the matter told CNBC.
Share of TKO Group Holdings dropped following the announcement.

Shinsuke Nakamura and Karrion Kross wrestle during the WWE SmackDown at Coliseo de Puerto Rico José Miguel Agrelot on May 5, 2023, in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Gladys Vega | Getty Images Sport | Getty Images

WWE’s “Friday Night SmackDown” will return to USA Network in October 2024 as part of a five-year domestic media rights partnership between TKO Group Holdings and NBCUniversal, WWE said Thursday.
Shares of TKO dropped more than 14% following the announcement.

The deal comes out to an average of $287 million per year, a total value of over $1.4 billion, people familiar with the matter told CNBC. WWE does not expect to reach a rights agreement for its flagship show “Raw” until next year.
“SmackDown” has been on Fox since October 2019, with a rights agreement for $205 million per year in a five-year deal. The new agreement is roughly a 40% increase. “SmackDown” last appeared on USA Network from 2016 to 2019.
WWE is a component of TKO Group Holdings, which was created after a merger between WWE and Endeavor’s UFC. TKO began trading on the NYSE last week.
WWE will also produce four prime-time specials per year to air on NBC beginning in the 2024-2025 season.
“It’s a privilege and thrill to continue NBCU’s decades-long partnership with WWE which has helped cement USA Network’s consistent position as the top-rated cable entertainment network in live viewership,” said Frances Berwick, chairman of NBCUniversal Entertainment. “With Friday nights on USA, primetime specials on NBC, and the WWE hub on Peacock, we’ll continue to use the power of our portfolio to super-serve this passionate fanbase.”
Disclosure: NBCUniversal is the parent company of CNBC. More

Rupert Murdoch is stepping down as chairman of News Corp. and Fox Corp.
The news comes as the 92-year-old’s empire, which includes Fox News, gears up for the 2024 election.
Earlier this year, Fox paid $787.5 million to settle defamation claims by voting tech company Dominion.

Rupert Murdoch is stepping down as chairman of the board of both Fox Corp. and News Corp., the companies said Thursday. The move will be official in November.
Murdoch, 92, will be appointed chairman emeritus of each company. Lachlan Murdoch, one of his sons, will become sole chairman of News Corp. and will continue as Fox Corp.’s executive chair and CEO.

“Our companies are in robust health, as am I,” the elder Murdoch said in a note to employees. “We have every reason to be optimistic about the coming years – I certainly am, and plan to be here to participate in them. But the battle for the freedom of speech and, ultimately, the freedom of thought, has never been more intense.”
Murdoch is stepping away from the boards after a tumultuous year at Fox’s TV network, soon after the company agreed to pay a $787.5 million settlement in the Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit over false claims that the company’s machines swayed the 2020 election between President Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
Murdoch’s continued role behind the scenes at Fox News was highlighted in the months leading up the Dominion settlement. In his deposition for the lawsuit, Murdoch said some of the network’s anchors parroted false claims in the months following the election.
Until the settlement, Dominion was calling for Murdoch, his son, and other top Fox talent and executives to take the stand if a trial occurred. At the time, Fox had opposed having the elder Murdoch — as well as other top Fox executives — appearing in person, citing his age. A Delaware judge rejected the argument, and had said Fox wouldn’t have been able to argue hardship given Murdoch’s engagement that was later called off and his publicly discussed travel plans.
Since July 2022, Murdoch had worked from his home in Montana rather than going into Fox or News Corp. offices, according to a securities filing.

Fox News also saw top talent Tucker Carlson exit earlier this year, followed by a dip in ratings for a period before he was replaced.
Murdoch’s departure also comes a year ahead of the upcoming U.S. presidential election. News Corp. owns newspapers The Wall Street Journal and New York Post, among other publications, while Fox is the parent company of right-leaning TV networks Fox News and Fox Business.
The Australian media mogul got his start in the industry nearly 70 years ago in 1954, after taking control of what was called News Ltd., which owned the No. 2 newspaper in Adelaide, Australia. His father was a war correspondent and regional newspaper owner.
From there he built his newspaper empire, stretching to racy tabloids in Britain and later the U.S.
In the 1980s, he entered the television business, and bought oil tycoon Marvin Davis’ 50% stake in Twentieth Century Fox in 1985. He became a U.S. citizen that year in order to meet the requirement for owning TV stations in the country.
In 1996 the Fox News Channel was launched, and has since become a top-rated cable network.
“For my entire professional life, I have been engaged daily with news and ideas, and that will not change,” Murdoch said in his note to employees, adding it was time for him to take on different roles.
Nearly a year ago, Murdoch explored reuniting Fox and News Corp., a move that would have allowed leadership to be consolidated in his media empire, as well as cutting costs. Murdoch had split up News Corp. and Fox in 2013.
The proposal had come as audiences shrink for both print media and cable TV, while readers and viewers increasingly get their news and entertainment from online news, social media and streaming.
However, Murdoch called off the proposed merger in January. Murdoch had withdrawn the proposal for the reunion, saying in a letter to the board that he and his son “determined that a combination is not optimal for the shareholders” of either of the companies at the time.
The Murdoch family trust controls roughly 40% of the voting rights of both companies. The family is said to have amassed a fortune of more than $17 billion as of 2023.
Fox and its broadcast and pay TV networks are left over from the $71.3 billion Twenty-First Century Fox sale to Disney in 2019. The media company has focused on news and sports — primarily for its traditional TV networks — as well as the free, ad-supported streamer Tubi, rather than jumping into the direct-to-consumer subscription streaming business like its peers.
Fox, which saw its stock move up slightly on Thursday, has a market cap of more than $15.5 billion. News Corp. has a market cap of more than $11 billion.
The Murdochs’ time and power in media has been chronicled over the years in books, as well as considered to be loosely portrayed in the HBO series “Succession.” In coming days, Michael Wolff’s “The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty,” will be released and is said to include more revelations about the Murdoch family, U.S. politics and Fox News.
Read Murdoch’s full note to employees:
Dear Colleagues,
I am writing to let you all know that I have decided to transition to the role of Chairman Emeritus at Fox and News. For my entire professional life, I have been engaged daily with news and ideas, and that will not change. But the time is right for me to take on different roles, knowing that we have truly talented teams and a passionate, principled leader in Lachlan who will become sole Chairman of both companies.
Neither excessive pride nor false humility are admirable qualities. But I am truly proud of what we have achieved collectively through the decades, and I owe much to my colleagues, whose contributions to our success have sometimes been unseen outside the company but are deeply appreciated by me. Whether the truck drivers distributing our papers, the cleaners who toil when we have left the office, the assistants who support us or the skilled operators behind the cameras or the computer code, we would be less successful and have less positive impact on society without your day-after-day dedication.
Our companies are in robust health, as am I. Our opportunities far exceed our commercial challenges. We have every reason to be optimistic about the coming years – I certainly am, and plan to be here to participate in them. But the battle for the freedom of speech and, ultimately, the freedom of thought, has never been more intense.
My father firmly believed in freedom, and Lachlan is absolutely committed to the cause. Self-serving bureaucracies are seeking to silence those who would question their provenance and purpose. Elites have open contempt for those who are not members of their rarefied class. Most of the media is in cahoots with those elites, peddling political narratives rather than pursuing the truth.
In my new role, I can guarantee you that I will be involved every day in the contest of ideas. Our companies are communities, and I will be an active member of our community. I will be watching our broadcasts with a critical eye, reading our newspapers and websites and books with much interest, and reaching out to you with thoughts, ideas, and advice. When I visit your countries and companies, you can expect to see me in the office late on a Friday afternoon.
I look forward to seeing you wherever you work and whatever your responsibility. And I urge you to make the most of this great opportunity to improve the world we live in. More

Sales of previously owned homes fell 0.7% in August from July to a seasonally adjusted, annualized rate of 4.04 million units.
Higher mortgage rates and lower inventory levels are hitting homebuyers hard.
Sales continue to be weakest on the lower end of the market, where there is the least supply.

A “For Sale” sign is displayed in front of a home in Arlington, Virginia, on August 22, 2023.
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds | AFP | Getty Images

Sales of previously owned homes fell 0.7% in August from July to a seasonally adjusted, annualized rate of 4.04 million units, according to the National Association of Realtors. Sales were down 15.3% from August of last year.
This read is based on closings for contracts likely signed in June and July, when the average rate on the popular 30-year fixed mortgage was in the high 6% range. It moved over 7% toward the end of July and stayed there, hitting affordability hard.

“Home sales have been stable for several months, neither rising nor falling in any meaningful way,” said Lawrence Yun, chief economist at the NAR, in a release. “Mortgage rate changes will have a big impact over the short run, while job gains will have a steady, positive impact over the long run.”
It is not, however, just higher rates hitting potential buyers. They are also not finding much on the market. There were just 1.1 million units for sale at the end of August, down 0.9% for the month and down just more than 14% year over year. Inventory is now at a 3.3-month supply. A six-month supply is considered balanced between buyer and seller.
Tight supply has turned prices decidedly higher again. The median price of a home sold in August was $407,100, up 3.9% from a year ago and the highest reported price for the month of August.
Yun said supply needs to double to moderate these price gains.
“Homeowners are in fine shape. It’s Realtors and mortgage brokers that are challenged, and renters are frustrated,” said Yun.

Sales continue to be weakest on the lower end of the market, where there is the least supply. While sales were down across all price points, they were nearly flat for homes priced above $1 million, and in that range they were actually higher in both the South and the Midwest.
“Already, rising homebuying costs and falling rents have tipped the monthly rent vs. buy tradeoff in favor of renting in the overwhelming majority of the 50 largest metropolitan areas,” said Danielle Hale, chief economist at Realtor.com, in a release. “This is true not only in tech hubs like Austin and San Francisco, but also affordable markets like Columbus, Ohio.”  More

Olive Garden owner Darden Restaurants saw its net sales rise more than 11% in its fiscal first quarter.
But same-store sales for its fine dining segment fell more than expected.
Its quarterly same-store sales don’t yet include Ruth’s Chris Steak House, which it acquired for $715 million this summer.

A customer carries an Olive Garden shopping bag in Pittsburg, California, US, on Friday, Dec. 9, 2022. 
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Darden Restaurants on Thursday reported earnings and revenue that topped analysts’ expectations for its first quarter as the owner of Ruth’s Chris Steak House.
But same-store sales for Darden’s fine dining segment fell more than expected, signaling that consumers are spending less on upscale restaurant meals.

Shares of the company fell more than 1% in premarket trading.
Here’s what the company reported for the quarter ended Aug. 27 compared with what Wall Street was expecting, based on a survey of analysts by LSEG, formerly known as Refinitiv:

Earnings per share: $1.78 adjusted vs. $1.74 expected
Revenue: $2.73 billion vs. $2.71 billion expected

Darden reported fiscal first-quarter net income of $194.5 million, or $1.59 per share, up from $193 million, or $1.56 per share, a year earlier.
Excluding its acquisition of Ruth’s Chris, integration costs related to the deal and other items, the restaurant company earned $1.78 per share from continuing operations.
Net sales rose 11.6% to $2.73 billion.

Darden’s same-store sales, excluding those of Ruth’s Chris, rose 5% in the quarter.
The company won’t include Ruth’s Chris in its same-store sales results until it has owned the steakhouse chain for 16 months. The $715 million acquisition was completed in mid-June.
LongHorn Steakhouse was the top performer in Darden’s portfolio this quarter. The chain reported same-store sales growth of 8.1%, topping StreetAccount estimates of 6.1%.
Olive Garden, which accounts for roughly 45% of Darden’s revenue, reported same-store sales growth of 6.1%, meeting expectations.
Darden’s fine dining restaurants saw same-store sales shrink 2.8%, wider than expectations of a 1.8% decline. The segment includes The Capital Grille and Eddie V’s, but its same-store sales metric doesn’t yet include Ruth’s Chris.
Darden also reiterated its outlook for fiscal 2024. The company is forecasting net sales of $11.5 billion to $11.6 billion, same-store sales growth of 2.5% to 3.5%, and adjusted earnings per share from continuing operations of $8.55 to $8.85. More

Scholars of happiness have found that close relationships are one of the critical ingredients of a contented life. What is true in general is also true of the workplace, according to research by Gallup. The pollster finds that having a “best friend at work” is closely associated with all manner of good things, from greater employee engagement to higher retention and better safety records.At some level, that is unremarkable. Spending time with people you like makes most things more appealing, including work. If a job is sufficiently humdrum, camaraderie among colleagues can be the main draw. The support of friends can also encourage people to try new things. A study from 2015 by Erica Field of Duke University, and her co-authors, looked at the impact of business training given to Indian women. Women who attended the course with a friend were more likely to end up taking out loans than those who came alone.The reverse also applies. Antagonistic relationships with co-workers are always likely to make working life miserable. A study conducted by Valerie Good of Grand Valley State University found that loneliness has an adverse effect on the performance of salespeople. Among other things, they start spending more on wining and dining their customers. The only thing worse than a salesperson who sees you as a way to make money is one who wants your company.So friends matter. The problems come when managers see the words “higher employee engagement” and leap to the conclusion that they should try to engineer work friendships. In a report published last year Gallup gave the example of an unnamed organisation which has a weekly companywide meeting that spotlights one employee’s best friend at work. It’s not known if, in the Q&A, others pop up to sob: “But I thought we were best friends at work.”Startups also offer services to encourage work friendships. One monitors the depth of connections between people in different teams. It identifies shared interests (gluten-free baking, say, or workplace surveillance) between employees who don’t know each other and arranges meetings between them. You thought life was bad? At least you are not making crumpets with a stranger in finance.It is a mistake for managers to wade into the business of friend-making, and not just because it royally misses the point. The defining characteristic of friendship is that it is voluntary. Employees are adults; they don’t need their managers to arrange play-dates. And the workplace throws people together, often under testing conditions: friendships will naturally follow.The bigger problem is that workplace friendships are more double-edged than their advocates allow. They can quickly become messy when power dynamics change. The transition from friend to boss, or from friend to underling, is an inherently awkward one (“This is your final warning. Fancy a pint?”).And friendships have the potential to look a lot like cronyism. A clever study by Zoe Cullen of Harvard Business School and Ricardo Perez-Truglia of University of California, Berkeley, found that employees’ social interactions with their managers could give their career prospects a boost relative to others.The researchers looked at promotions of smokers and non-smokers who worked for a large bank in South-East Asia, hypothesising that sharing smoking breaks with managers who also indulged might give workers a leg up. And so it did. Smokers who moved from a non-smoking boss to a puffer were promoted more quickly than those who moved to another non-smoker. The authors found that social interactions did not just help smokers; socialising between male managers and male employees played a large role in perpetuating gender pay gaps. If firms are going to make friendship their business, they should worry about its downsides, too.Companies should facilitate interactions between employees, particularly in a world of hybrid and remote working. Social gatherings and buddy systems are reasonable ways to encourage colleagues to meet each other and to foster a culture. But a high-quality work relationship does not require friendship. It requires respect for each other’s competence, a level of trust and a desire to reach the same goal; it doesn’t need birthday cards and a shared interest in quiltmaking. Firms should do what they can to encourage these kinds of relationships. If individuals want to take it further, it’s entirely up to them. ■Read more from Bartleby, our columnist on management and work:Who is the most important person in your company? (Sep 14th)Networking for introverts: a how-to guide (Sep 7th)The best bosses know how to subtract work (Aug 31st)Also: How the Bartleby column got its name More

AROUND THE world, dealmaking is in a rut. A combination of higher interest rates, geopolitical tensions and economic uncertainty has put a hold on joint ventures, mergers and acquisitions. One exception is targets with AI in their name. Another, less obvious one, involves a less catchy initialism: ADCs.Makers of these antibody-drug conjugates, to give them their full name, are all the rage among the world’s biggest drugmakers. Pfizer is paying $43bn for Seagen, which in turn has just teamed up with Nurix Therapeutics, a smaller biotechnology firm, to work on this class of drugs. Amgen, AstraZeneca and Merck have also placed billion-dollar bets on ADCs. In the past five years licensing deals worth $60bn have been signed for such therapies. The number of such deals tripled in that period, to 26. So far this year 18 have been signed, outpacing similar deals involving other emerging cancer drugs.ADCs aren’t new. The first was approved in 2000 for types of leukaemia. They act like guided biological missiles: a payload of toxic chemotherapy is carried by antibodies able to seek out cancer cells directly. Because they bypass normal tissue and go straight for their targets, they let patients receive higher doses that would otherwise cause too much collateral damage.Two developments explain the frenzied stockpiling of these anti-cancer weapons of late. One is increased clinical confidence. Enhertu, an ADC developed by AstraZeneca and Daiichi Sankyo, a Japanese biotechnology company, was first approved in America in 2019. But after another set of trials in 2022 showed that it allowed breast-cancer patients to live almost twice as long without relapse as those treated with standard chemotherapy, its approval was extended to different types of breast and lung cancer. Regulators have cleared a dozen other ADCs, which are now routinely used to treat some of the deadliest cancers, including leukaemia, lymphoma and breast cancer.image: The EconomistMore than 140 new ADCs are currently in clinical trials. Bristol Myers Squibb and Sanofi all have therapies in late-stage tests. AstraZeneca and Merck have each formed a joint-venture with biotech firms in China, to take advantage of Chinese regulators’ more relaxed rules for early-stage trials, which helps accelerate the drugs’ development. Susan Galbraith, who oversees oncology research and development at AstraZeneca, says that the timeline for drug testing in China has been significantly reduced in the past decade.Clinical success has, in turn, boosted commercial confidence. Sales of Enhertu exceeded $1.2bn in 2022. Revenue from Trodelvy, a similar drug approved for advanced breast cancer and sold by Gilead Sciences, rose by 79% last year, to $680m. Kadcyla brought in $1.1bn for its Swiss developer, Roche, in the first half of this year. Evaluate, a provider of health-care data, forecasts that ADC sales could reach nearly $30bn by 2028, up from around $7.5bn last year (see chart). Some of these wagers could misfire. It is unclear just how well the drugs will work in combination with others, such as immunotherapies. They are also complex to make. Any deals involving Chinese partners could unravel if Sino-Western tensions increase. For now, though, ADCs are a global arms race worth cheering. ■To stay on top of the biggest stories in business and technology, sign up to the Bottom Line, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter. More

Climate Week NYC got off to an early start in California. In the days running up to the launch of the annual jamboree in New York City, America’s most populous and economically powerful state seized the initiative by hurling two thunderbolts at carbon-intensive businesses.The most eye-catching was a lawsuit filed on September 15th by the Democrat-led state government accusing five big oil companies—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and Shell—of lying about the dangers of climate change. Two bills passed days earlier by the state legislature may have a bigger impact. They could, for the first time in America, force big business to make climate-related disclosures. Governor Gavin Newsom vowed to sign both, after a few tweaks.The two approaches—legal and legislative—were hailed by climate campaigners as tipping points in American law. The lawsuit against “big oil” aims to make the defendants pay for the alleged environmental damage suffered in California as a result of the use of their products. The firms reasserted their commitment to decarbonisation and said that the courts were not the right place to tackle such a momentous problem. It is the latest and most significant of dozens of court cases filed by states and cities against fossil-fuel producers in recent years. Those lawsuits proceed slowly and, as yet, no firm has lost. But in April the Supreme Court dealt a blow to oil producers by rejecting their efforts to move such cases from state to federal courts.The two laws are likely to have bigger, and more immediate, consequences. They require large firms that do business in California to disclose their greenhouse-gas emissions and climate-related vulnerabilities. They are the first of a kind in America—and will, like the state’s vehicle-emissions standards, probably have implications far beyond California’s borders.One applies to more than 5,000 companies with global annual revenues of over $1bn, and obliges them to disclose direct and indirect emissions, known as scope 1 and scope 2, beginning in 2026. A year later, they must also reveal their scope 3 emissions, which include those generated by their suppliers and end users. For example, carmakers will have to account for the emissions of those who provide them with parts and those who drive their cars. Scope 3 emissions are hard to calculate and can be many times the direct emissions, making some firms loth to calculate them. The second measure applies to 10,000 or so companies with revenues above $500m. Starting in 2026 they must file reports every other year on the financial impact of climate change on their business. Some companies, such as Microsoft, a tech giant, and Patagonia, a clothing brand, threw their support behind the measures. The California Chamber of Commerce, a lobby group, opposed them, arguing that they would push up compliance costs for firms without curbing emissions. Even so, companies will find it hard to resist the lure of California’s giant market. The climate-disclosure requirements come shortly before America’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a regulator, is expected to launch something similar at a federal level. Michael Gerrard of the Sabin Centre for Climate Change Law at Columbia University points out that the SEC’s rule is narrower in scope than California’s, only affects publicly traded companies above a certain size, and may be more legally vulnerable.Internationally, California is not alone. Many American multinationals will soon have to comply with even further-reaching climate-disclosure requirements by the European Union. America’s Republican states may growl about extraterritoriality. But when it comes to standard-setting, businesses know they must take California and the EU seriously. ■ More

OVER RECENT decades the oil-rich economies of the Gulf have shown a taste for flashy government projects with dubious payoffs. In the early 2000s Dubai spent an estimated $12bn building an artificial archipelago shaped like a palm. Last year Qatar splurged around $220bn hosting the football World Cup. Saudi Arabia, the region’s gorilla, is building a pair of 120km-long skyscrapers in the desert—for roughly $1trn.Amid the vanity projects, some serious efforts at economic diversification are also being pursued. One such endeavour is under way in Abu Dhabi, where earlier this month a government research institute released Falcon 180B, its latest massive artificial-intelligence (AI) model, which is impressing technologists around the world with its performance.Abu Dhabi has even bigger AI ambitions. “We are entering the game to disrupt the core players,” says Faisal al-Bannai, secretary-general of the Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), the government agency which houses the institute that created Falcon. He says that later this year the ATRC will announce the launch of a state-backed AI company to go head to head with the field’s leading lights, such as OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT. Though it will face an uphill battle, the Emirati outfit could yet emerge as a credible competitor. Its success will be closely watched both by rivals and by other governments seeking to carve out a role in an AI economy currently dominated by America and China.The Technology Innovation Institute (TII), the applied-research arm of the ATRC, employs around 800 staff of 74 nationalities, working on subjects from biotechnology and robotics to quantum computing. Launched in 2020, it has been experimenting with ChatGPT-like “generative” AI for some time. It released Noor, an Arabic-based AI model, in April last year, and then Falcon 40B, the first iteration of its flagship open-source model, in May this year.Falcon 180B, as its name hints, is a beefed-up version of its predecessor. Comparing the performance of AI models is notoriously tricky, but going by a selection of commonly used benchmarks compiled by Hugging Face, a library of models, TII’s latest release bests the previous open-source champion, Meta’s LLaMA 2. A blog post by Hugging Face staff suggests the model is “on par” with Google’s PaLM 2.Why make such a powerful model freely available? Mr Bannai talks of “democratising” access to a transformational new technology, and warns against power falling into the hands of a small clique of companies, as has happened in the internet economy. But opening up access to Falcon 180B also allows software engineers to play around with a model that is not quite at the technological frontier, and suggest improvements. According to tii, some 12m developers experimented with the first generation of Falcon.Giving away the model also opens up other opportunities for monetisation. Consider Stability AI, a startup whose open-source Stable Diffusion model was behind 13bn of the 15bn images generated by AI in the year to August, according to Everypixel, a software firm. Emad Mostaque, Stability AI’s founder, says that its open-source strategy makes “commercial sense” for the firm “because the models are adopted far more quickly and widely than proprietary models”. Although the company generates revenue directly through its DreamStudio text-to-image generator, that tool accounts for a small fraction of the pictures produced using Stable Diffusion. It also makes money from developers opting to build applications based around the model (or others created by the company) on top of its computing platform, and by building tailored solutions for customers.Mr Bannai has a similar vision. He pictures an “end-to-end platform for AI developers”, pointing to Shopify, an e-commerce platform used by merchants to build online shops, as his inspiration. He says the company will also build new proprietary models and applications tailored for specific fields, such as medicine and law, while keeping access to its core model open. It will experiment, too, with “multimodal” AI systems that incorporate many types of data (from text and images to audio) and “edge” models that can run on smaller devices such as phones.Abu Dhabi may not seem like an obvious hub for AI talent, but big (and tax-free) salaries have already started luring tech whizzes from abroad. The emirate has also been training local brainboxes, including at the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, founded in 2019. And although it will be a late entrant to an already crowded race, the Emirati firm will have some advantages, too.One is a tight-knit business milieu. Many bosses are still grappling with how best to harness generative AI. By teaming up with local businesses and using them as test cases, Mr Bannai reckons his agency’s AI company will quickly be able to learn what works and what doesn’t.Another advantage is the emirate’s deep pockets. Abu Dhabi’s various sovereign-wealth funds hold around $1.5trn in assets, which makes even OpenAI’s $40bn valuation look like chump change. With frontier AI models becoming more computationally intensive and data-guzzling, access to cash could become decisive, especially in a world of higher interest rates.If the endeavour succeeds, it will be a favourable omen for the long-term prospects of the Gulf as the demand for oil declines. Countries that harbour similar hopes of becoming an AI superpower, including Britain, will be watching along with interest—and, perhaps, envy. ■To stay on top of the biggest stories in business and technology, sign up to the Bottom Line, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter. More