A look at The Guardian article on the rise of the man connecting the UAE’s wealth, intelligence apparatus, and the world’s data centers.
#️⃣ Part One
🪪 Who is Tahnoun bin Zayed?
The Guardian published a lengthy article by Jack Shenker about Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan and his vast artificial intelligence project.
The writer explains that Tahnoun is the youngest son of Fatima al-Ketbi, the third and favored wife of UAE founder Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan.
Tahnoun and his six brothers belong to what is often known as the “Bani Fatima”, the branch of the ruling family that holds many of the country’s key centers of power.
As the youngest brother, Tahnoun was not seen as a likely candidate to inherit the throne of Abu Dhabi — and therefore the presidency of the UAE. Instead, he was entrusted with managing his father’s “private office,” which oversaw Sheikh Zayed’s extensive personal assets, including palaces, farms and overseas real-estate holdings such as Berkeley Square in London.
The role required a mixture of charm, coercion and the strategic deployment of money — skills Tahnoun refined until he became one of the most powerful financial figures in the UAE.
🪙 The Financial Empire
After Sheikh Zayed’s death in 2004, Tahnoun established Royal Group as a principal investment vehicle for the family. Its assets are now estimated at around $300 billion.
He now oversees an economic empire estimated at roughly $1.5 trillion — comparable to the entire economic output of countries such as Indonesia or Turkey.
That network includes the country’s largest sovereign wealth fund, First Abu Dhabi Bank, the Alterra climate-investment fund, as well as investments in Thames Water, Scottish wind farms, spacecraft ventures in Texas, Rihanna’s lingerie business and Ivy restaurants.
Record of Repression and the Surveillance Project
The article cites documented accounts concerning the Al Nahyan family’s record of political repression and surveillance operations extending beyond the UAE’s borders.
It notes that the UAE has a long record of enforced disappearances, secret detention facilities and retaliation against relatives of dissidents living in exile — practices widely documented by international human-rights organizations.
Among the cases mentioned is that of British academic Matthew Hedges, who was detained at Dubai airport in 2018, subjected to harsh interrogation and sentenced to life imprisonment before receiving a presidential pardon.
The article also discusses Ahmed Mansoor, the Emirati engineer and human-rights activist who was targeted by security agencies for years. His devices were hacked, and he was reportedly caught by a malicious email attachment that transmitted his data to a server registered to P.O. Box 5151 in Abu Dhabi — the postal address associated with Sheikh Tahnoun’s personal office. Mansoor has remained in solitary confinement since being sentenced to ten years in prison in 2017.
The writer adds that repression was not limited to political activists.
In 2011, after a group of Emirati judges, lawyers and journalists signed a petition calling for modest democratic reforms, most of the signatories were arrested. Dozens remain imprisoned to this day, according to the article.
Migrant workers, who make up the overwhelming majority of the UAE’s population, are also described as living under severe legal insecurity. Thousands of deaths each year are officially left unexplained, while human-rights organizations attribute many of them to heat stress, construction accidents and poor working conditions.
Also in 2011, the Bani Fatima reportedly assembled a paramilitary force of 800 Colombian and South African mercenaries to reinforce their hold on power, while substantially greater resources were poured into cyber-intrusion capabilities.
Normalization with Israel
As a senior security official, Tahnoun played a leading role in breaking the longstanding Arab taboo surrounding normalization with Israel.
With Israel also being a major regional power in cyber-surveillance, it had much to offer the Emiratis — including access to Pegasus, one of the most advanced spyware systems ever developed, capable of penetrating Apple and Android devices without the user’s knowledge and effectively turning them into permanent pocket-sized surveillance tools.