Damac's Sajwani Says Anthropic Stake Beat His 30 Years in Business Before Nasdaq Debut

Sajwani said Damac bought into the Claude developer at a valuation of US$18 billion. Anthropic is preparing to list on Nasdaq on Thursday, November 19, at a valuation estimated at between US$1.26 trillion and US$1.41 trillion. That range is roughly 70 to 78 times the price Damac paid, before any dilution from the funding rounds Anthropic has raised since. Damac has not disclosed the size of its holding today or what it is worth.

The remarks put a rough measure on what Gulf investors stand to gain from the largest technology listing of the year. Damac said in July 2024 that it had invested in Anthropic, Elon Musk's xAI and the French model developer Mistral. Regional business outlets reported at the time that the Anthropic stake cost about US$50 million and was bought from the estate of the collapsed crypto exchange FTX, the same seller from which Abu Dhabi's Mubadala acquired a US$500 million stake in March 2024.

Sajwani said a valuation of about US$2 trillion had been discussed for Anthropic a few weeks earlier, but added: "still, I'm happy with $1.4 trillion." He started his first business, a catering company, in 1983 and took Damac public on the London Stock Exchange in December 2013.

Damac Capital, the group's investment arm, backs companies in technology, finance and life sciences. Its portfolio includes Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI and more than 30 other companies, and Sajwani named Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX as the three where the group is "making huge money", according to the report. Mint also reported that he expects billions of dollars in profit from those stakes.

The property tycoon used the same appearance to describe how the AI boom is changing the economics of his data centre arm. Damac Digital, set up in 2021, operates data centres in 13 countries and has partnership agreements with five global hyperscalers, he said. It concentrates on facilities of 100 megawatts and above, mostly liquid-cooled and built for AI chips, close to large populations in the US, Europe and Asia.

Building costs have risen by about 30 per cent over the past couple of years and could climb another 20 to 30 per cent, Sajwani said. Europe and the US are the most expensive places to build, while Asia is cheaper, partly because of labour costs and access to some Chinese equipment. Europe's environmental and zoning rules can take years to resolve, he said, and the US is the better option for anyone who can find land with power, because of its rates.

Cost is not the main constraint in his view, because developers can pass increases on to the hyperscalers that lease the capacity. The harder problem is a supply chain that is "becoming more and more delayed", he said.

Sajwani announced in January 2025 that Damac would invest US$20 billion in US data centres over four to five years, targeting eight states. He now expects stricter US rules on data centres after the midterm elections, and said Damac is negotiating land purchases in the UK and Australia as a hedge.

Anthropic's order book has been running at six times the shares on offer, and pricing is expected before trading begins on November 19. That will set the first public mark on what Damac and Mubadala's FTX-era purchases are worth.