Blackstone Opens Dubai Office to Grow Its Private Wealth Business Across the Gulf

The Dubai office will focus on selling Blackstone's private-market funds to wealthy individuals, family offices and other investors through the regional banks it already works with. The firm said its private wealth arm has more than 40 distributor relationships across the region, and that the new office would help grow that network.

The move shows Blackstone, which manages close to $1.4 trillion, trying to raise money from private Gulf investors as well as the sovereign funds it has long courted. Four Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Kuwait Investment Authority, Public Investment Fund and Qatar Investment Authority, hold a combined $3.7 trillion, according to Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute figures cited by AGBI.

"The UAE has built an extraordinary position as a global finance and investment hub and is becoming an increasingly important center for wealth management," Jon Gray, Blackstone's president and chief operating officer, said in a statement. He said the office would let the firm "deepen our partnerships and broaden access to alternatives" for investors in the GCC.

Blackstone has operated in the UAE since 2010 and earlier upgraded the licence for its Abu Dhabi office, first secured in 2019, to support deal origination. It announced plans this year to open an office in Kuwait and said on Thursday that it expects to expand further in the region over the coming year.

The firm has been investing in the Gulf as well as raising money there. Since 2025, its regional deals have included an investment in the Humain-AirTrunk AI data centre campus, a stake in property portal Property Finder, a pipeline transaction with Kuwait Oil Company, the Glide logistics venture with Abu Dhabi's Lunate, and a deal with Dubai Aerospace Enterprise's Equator, according to AGBI.

Chief executive Steve Schwarzman told The National last month that Blackstone had committed more capital to the Gulf in the past 12 months than at any time in its history and planned to invest more despite the US-Iran conflict. He said the firm aimed to substantially raise the share of its assets under management in the Gulf by the end of the decade.

Arif Amiri, chief executive of the DIFC Authority, said Blackstone's choice of Dubai for its regional private wealth office reflected the emirate's role as "the gateway for global investment firms seeking to capture opportunities across the region." He said DIFC hosts the region's largest concentration of wealth and asset management firms.

Blackstone joins a run of large US asset managers deepening their ties with Gulf capital. Last month, Apollo Global Management agreed to buy a minority stake in Mubadala Capital, the asset management arm of Abu Dhabi's Mubadala.