When Emirati billionaire Hussain Sajwani casually mentioned to his longtime business partner Donald Trump over dinner that he planned to expand into American data centers, the president-elect sensed an opportunity.
“He says, ‘I have a press conference in a few days and I’d like to announce it,'” Sajwani told the Financial Times in an interview last week at his man-made palm tree mansion in Dubai — a symbol of the market’s excess and its appeal to the world’s millionaires, from football players to former warlords.
At a news conference at Mar-a-Lago this month, the world’s most powerful man described Sajwani as a “big investor” as the two stood side by side to announce a planned $20 billion investment. This put the global spotlight on the Emirati entrepreneur, who started out in hospitality and built up parts of the Middle East’s glittering commercial hub through his company Damac, Dubai’s largest private residential development.
The plan to spend $20 billion over four years seems aspirational. Sajwani’s data center company Edgnex does not yet have agreements with tenants for its 2,000 MW of planned data centers in the US. The company, founded in 2021, is close to having 15 MW of operational data centers in Saudi Arabia and Thailand. The investment would be a large sum for Damac, which had $5 billion in cash on its balance sheet in June last year.
Sajwani says he expects to rely heavily on bank loans to fund the plans, adding that the $20 billion figure is estimated based on “how much we think we can take from management time, land acquisition and our own balance sheet capacity.”
Sometimes referred to as the “Donald of Dubai”, Sajwani is considered an outsider by the city’s business community. Belonging to the minority Shia Muslim sect, he is seen as a risk-taking entrepreneur who is firmly on the slide of Dubai’s boom-and-bust real estate market. “Dude [Dubai] the families don’t really like him,” said a Dubai-based director who worked with Sajwani.
Instead, the real estate mogul found an American ally. Sajwani and Trump have known each other since 2011, when Damac and the Trump Organization built the first Trump-branded golf course in the Middle East.
Plans for a second Tiger Woods-designed link in Dubai have fallen through, Sajwani said, although the project remains on the Trump Organization’s website. Regardless, the families remained connected: Trump’s sons attended Sajwani’s daughter’s wedding, and Sajwani said the women became friends.
The Emirati tycoon has connections elsewhere in Trump’s inner circle. He invested in SpaceX and Elon Musk’s xAI. The 72-year-old was pictured with both men at Trump’s New Year’s Eve party.
Since the Dubai Trump International golf course, the Trump Organization has sold its name to developments with other partners in the region: a resort in Oman is under construction, while two towers – one in the second Saudi Arabian city of Jeddah and the other in Dubai – are in the pipeline.
These Middle Eastern business ties have raised questions about potential conflicts of interest for the president-elect, even though he has distanced himself from the Trump Organization.
Trump’s sons, who run the conglomerate, hope to capitalize on strong post-Covid economic growth in the autocratic, hydrocarbon-rich Gulf region. “If you’re a developer, Dubai is almost your playground,” Eric Trump said in an interview with the FT last year, calling the region’s growth “explosive.”
Dubai’s latest boom has seen Damac sales jump. Revenue for the six months to June 2024, the latest available accounts from Damac Real Estate, reached $1.4 billion, more than doubling from $690 million in the same period a year earlier. Pretax profit jumped to $456 million, up from $297 million.
The soft-spoken Sajwani, whose net worth is estimated by Forbes to be more than $5 billion, is the son of a market trader and a door-to-door saleswoman. Local business people remember his first venture in the 1980s as a strip mall fast food joint. Sajwani then started an industrial catering company and bought land and property in Dubai as he established himself as a regional hub in the 1990s. He founded Damac in 2002.
The company barely survived the 2008 global financial crisis and the bursting of the Dubai real estate bubble. “We were struggling to pay our salaries,” Sajwani recalled. “I went to the banks in November 2008 and told them all that I was in a very bad state”. He said bankers restructured his debt while he negotiated with landowners and buyers.
“The guy has nine lives,” said an international banker based in Dubai. “He came close to imploding so many times”.
The company has been promoting its buildings from China to India in a bid to attract new buyers to Dubai’s volatile real estate market. But its reputation suffered due to its association with poor quality construction work. “We had a challenge in 2011 and 2010,” Sajwani said. “We launched some products [ . . .] in a mediocre place. And we sold them very cheaply.” He insisted on quality that matched the price, but admitted that customers may have expected better.
“Were we perfect? Not. There were buildings that, I agree, we could have done a much better job of,” Sajwani admitted. “We have learned our lesson. . . If you look at our buildings, which have recently been delivered over the past few years, I don’t think we’ve had any quality issues”.
Private Damac’s brash marketing techniques have shaken up a real estate market dominated by state-backed developers such as Nakheel and Emaar. In addition to complimentary flights to Dubai for potential investors, Damac promised free luxury cars to apartment buyers.
Such promotions were criticized as “unethical” 2014 Mohammad Alabbar, chairman of rival company Emaar. But Sajwani called the giveaway “the best and best idea.”
Damac has expanded beyond Dubai, with projects from Miami to the Maldives. However, Sajwani’s overseas adventures initially proved difficult: a 2006 land purchase in Egypt ended in a legal battle with the state after the 2011 ouster of dictator Hosni Mubarak. In 2011, Sajwani was sentenced to five years in prison in absentia on corruption charges, although Egypt’s chief prosecutor later suspended the sentence. Sajwani said the trial was politically motivated.
“After that I stopped investing in countries where you will have challenges,” Sajwani said.
The entrepreneur was not always liked by outside investors. In 2022, he delisted Damac’s shares from the Dubai Stock Exchange, resuming full control. Some investors complained that they had funded the company during the market downturn and were kicked out as the share price swung in their favor.
Sajwani denies he timed the deal to reap the rewards and said market “speculators” prompted the decision: “we didn’t see the public benefiting. We were getting a lot of negativity from speculators”.
US data centers are his latest risky bet. Edgnex said it initially plans to form joint ventures with established players or potentially buy existing facilities and land prepared for development. Even so, analysts say reaching the 2,000 MW target in the US will be difficult in such a crowded market.
“Once you’ve found strength, as a developer, especially someone new to the space, the challenge is finding a place in line to get all the equipment you need,” said Pat Lynch, head of CBRE’s data center for real estate advisors. The solution team.
“Often the biggest developers and hyperscalers [tech] companies bought their way up the ranks in a few years.”
One industry executive said even a $20 billion investment is unlikely to make a dent: “In the context of data centers, it’s almost a yawn.”
Sajwana is unlikely to be bothered by doubters. Like his presidential business associate, Sajwani insists that his critics are uncomfortable with his role as a disruptor: “People will tell you, ‘Hussain Sajwani . . . He is a difficult man.’ Which successful man is easy?”
