Saudi Arabia’s government plans to set up a roughly $40 billion fund to invest in artificial intelligence, according to three people briefed on the plans — the latest sign of the gold rush for a technology that has already begun reshaping the way people live and work.

In recent weeks, representatives of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund have discussed a possible partnership with Andreessen Horowitz, one of Silicon Valley’s top venture capital firms, and other backers, said the people, who were not authorized to speak publicly. They warned that plans could still change.

The planned technology fund would make Saudi Arabia the world’s largest investor in artificial intelligence. It would also spotlight the oil-rich country’s global business ambitions, as well as its efforts to diversify its economy and establish itself as a more influential player in geopolitics. The Middle East is pursuing these goals through its sovereign wealth fund, which has assets of more than $900 billion.

Saudi fund officials discussed the role that Andreessen Horowitz — already an active investor in AI and whose co-founder Ben Horowitz is friends with the fund’s governor — could play and how such a fund would work, the people said . The $40 billion target would dwarf the typical amounts raised by U.S. venture capital firms and would be eclipsed only by SoftBank, the Japanese conglomerate that has long been the world’s largest investor in startups.

The Saudi technology fund, which is being set up with the help of Wall Street banks, will be the latest potential entrant into an area already awash with cash. The global artificial intelligence frenzy has pushed up the valuations of private and public companies as bullish investors rush to find or build the next Nvidia or OpenAI. For example, startup Anthropic raised more than $7 billion in one year alone—a flood of money that is virtually unheard of in the venture capital world.

The costs of financing AI projects are high. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly did just that was looking for a large amount of money from the United Arab Emirates government to boost production of chips needed to power AI technology.

Saudi representatives have told potential partners that the country is looking to back a range of technology startups related to artificial intelligence, including chip makers and the expensive, sprawling data centers that are increasingly necessary to power the next generation of computers. according to four people with knowledge of these efforts, who were not authorized to speak publicly. It has even considered starting its own AI companies.

Two of the people said Saudi Arabia’s new investment push is likely to take off in the second half of 2024. A $40 billion fund could make both the Saudi Arabian government and Andreessen Horowitz key players in the race to corner several companies related to the field.

Mr. Horowitz and Yasir al-Rumayyan, the governor of the Public Investment Fund, have discussed the possibility of the Silicon Valley company setting up an office in the country’s capital, Riyadh, a person with knowledge of the talks said.

Other venture capitalists could join the kingdom’s technology fund, two people briefed on the plans said.

Partly because of its enormous financial strength and growing ambitions, people in international business circles are closely watching the moves of the Public Investment Fund, which was founded in 1971.

In 2018, just as Saudi Arabia was becoming a major destination for investment firms and entrepreneurs seeking financial support, the country’s agents murdered dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul, triggering a for a while seemed to damage the country’s reputation among international financiers. .

In 2022, the Saudi government invested billions in a company led, among others, by former President Donald J. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, which was seen by many as a political move. One of the recent deals to merge the LIV Golf upstart with the PGA Tour drew the ire of golfers, but the pact is also controversial in part because of Saudi Arabia’s human rights record.

Saudi Arabia, which invested $3.5 billion in Uber in 2016, has largely struggled with technology investments. It handed SoftBank $45 billion for the Japanese company’s $100 billion Vision fund, which was funneled to dozens of ventures including now-bankrupt real estate company WeWork and other failed startups such as robot pizza company Zume.

Many in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street have welcomed the nation back into their fold. At this year’s Super Bowl, Mr. Horowitz hosted Mr. al-Rumayyan, according to two people briefed on their activities.

The two men also spent time together before and after the match, the people said, with Mr. Horowitz giving Mr. al-Rumayyan tours of Las Vegas, his adopted city, and introducing the investor to his friends in music and sports.

Ce’Yann Irving, mother of a 1-year-old daughter, pays $990 a month for a two-bedroom apartment on the site of a former dairy processing plant in New Orleans’ Central City neighborhood. She has amenities, such as a 24-hour gym and a private community clinic, within easy reach.

“I’m a first-time mother, so if my daughter coughs for too long I try to take her to a doctor,” said Ms. Irving, 30, a disaster case manager for Catholic Charities. “Here I can literally walk to the clinic, and if there is a wait, I just wait in my own apartment.”

The 192-unit affordable housing complex, which opened in January, is a joint project of Alembic Community Development and the Gulf Coast Housing Partnership, an affordable housing developer formed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in hopes of improving Gulf Coast region to rebuild. The complex aims to be a model for communities across the country by linking stable housing to better health.

Aetna, a managed care organization operating in the region, invested $26.7 million in the $80 million project, called H3C, where the “H” stands for health and the “3C” stands for commerce, culture and community. Tenants and others in the community have access to a medical clinic operated by DePaul Community Health Centers on the ground floor. Researchers from the Louisiana Public Health Institute will study patient health outcomes, and consultants from Health Management Associates will use the anonymized data to determine more effective ways for health care systems to work with developers.

H3C is just one of many examples showing that healthcare systems are beginning to see more and more benefits in building affordable and safe housing, from the improved health of local communities to the extent to which managed care groups benefit financially from those healthier populations. These and other factors, including a shortage of housing for their own workers, have led health care systems to become partners and investors in affordable housing.

Such partnerships are “necessary,” said Peggy Bailey, vice president for housing policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a think tank. “It takes so many investors and so many types of financing to deliver affordable housing development.”

Hospitals “reinvesting in the places they serve is important,” she said, especially if they are in underserved communities.

Kaiser Permanente, a managed care giant in Oakland, California, has committed $400 million to finance affordable housing through its Thriving Communities fund, which aims to build or preserve 30,000 units by 2030. And the Healthcare Anchor Network, a national coalition formed in 2017. with more than 70 healthcare systems focused on investing in local economies, the country has poured more of its capital into housing, neighborhoods and commercial projects such as supermarkets. According to the group’s most recent data, the network invested $450 million in affordable housing projects from 2017 through the end of September 2022.

This type of long-term capital, usually in the form of low-cost loans, has become even more valuable during a period of higher interest rates, financial uncertainty and rising costs for builders. The cost of these developments is a huge undertaking. Funded from government and private sources, H3C was valued at $60 million before supply and inflation increased the budget by a third.

However, healthcare systems don’t act like banks, says David Zuckerman, president and founder of Healthcare Anchor Network. “They are filling the gap left by the financial sector not investing properly in affordable housing and the public sector not providing the necessary subsidies to make this all work,” he said.

Affordable housing has become a way for hospitals and healthcare systems to meet their nonprofit needs community benefits requirements and invest capital from their cash reserves, which healthcare nonprofits depend on to cover operating costs and unexpected expenses. (A strong reserve is an indicator of financial stability and helps improve the creditworthiness of nonprofit healthcare organizations.)

There are some early examples of health care systems investing in housing, particularly Catholic hospitals working with groups like Mercy Housing, an affordable housing organization.

But over the past decade, hospitals, health care systems and insurance groups, working with affordable housing developers, have expanded these efforts. They have built temporary housing for the most vulnerable people and established programs to temporarily house the homeless, especially those with serious mental health issues.

A recently expanded pilot program through Medicaid, called the 1115 waiver, allows certain health care providers to use Medicaid money to provide temporary housing. Washington State has used this model, with federal funding for rental assistance and $141 million in state funding, to build new homes as a means to target the population with the most needs.

And a shortage of available housing for hospital staff has also led to more developments. Kathy Parsons, a consultant and former vice president of CentraCare, a health care system in St. Cloud, Minnesota, said it was difficult to move health care workers to the area and that the network had explored ways to work with developers. . Housing shortages can be acute in rural areas. They can lead to longer commutes, significant costs due to overwork, staff burnout and the closure of hospital services in communities that need them most.

There are also more and more projects that want to build homes for people who need special care. In New Jersey, the Hospital Partnership Subsidy Program is beginning to see demand expand from big cities to suburbs, with proposals for specialized housing projects to support people with multiple sclerosis and Down syndrome. The program, which launched in 2018, provides millions of dollars in government grants to lay the foundation for hospital investments in housing projects.

Barclay Place, the first project completed under the state program, opened in Paterson in July. The 56-apartment complex has a wellness center on the first floor and a number of units are reserved for residents with chronic health conditions. The project was developed through a partnership between the New Jersey Community Development Corporation and St. Joseph’s Health, which will provide supportive services to residents.

In Minnesota, the Greater Minnesota Housing Fund, which has built 20,000 affordable housing units since 1995, offers some sort of additional focus on health care in about 20 percent of its projects, said Eric Muschler, the fund’s director of housing and health equity. The organization’s new initiative is to educate healthcare professionals about the importance of housing solutions for healthcare equity and provide loans to developers to help close gaps in a project’s overall financing plan.

“We continually need more capital to build more housing,” Mr. Muschler said. “We have a housing system that is broken, and we need to look beyond subsidies.”

Hospitals can also tap into another important resource: their own land and property. Boston Medical Center and Trinity Health both have plans to build affordable housing complexes on their own properties.

John Vu, Kaiser’s vice president of community health strategy, said this was the first phase in solving the housing problem. In the next phase, he said, data collected from the developments will be used to determine how future partnerships can better address the health and housing needs of communities.

Numerous studies of pediatric researchers and groups like Health watch for children have shown how housing support can help the homeless families that have members with a chronic illness or disability, or who require more than normal health care.

And Kaiser is partnering with Enterprise on the Housing for Health initiative, which connects developers with public health groups to evaluate how housing determines health based on 30 factors.

Stephany De Scisciolo, vice president at Enterprise Community Partners, a national nonprofit developer that has worked with Kaiser on some of its housing investments, said the program has been collecting data for four years.

The corporate tax cuts that President Donald J. Trump signed into law in 2017 have boosted investment in the U.S. economy and provided modest pay increases for workers, most said. rigorous and detailed study thout of the consequences of the law.

However, those benefits are less than Republicans promised, and they come at a high cost to the federal budget. The corporate tax cuts did not nearly pay for themselves, as conservatives insisted. Instead, they are adding more than $100 billion annually to the $34 trillion U.S. national debt, which is still growing. for the quartet of researchers from Princeton University, the University of Chicago, Harvard University and the Treasury Department.

The researchers found that the cuts produced wage gains “an order of magnitude lower than” what Trump officials predicted: an average of about $750 per worker per year over the long term, compared with promises of $4,000 to $9,000 per worker.

The study is the first to use vast amounts of data from corporate tax returns to draw conclusions about the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which passed only with Republican support. The findings of this research could help shape the debate on the renewal of parts of the law that are about to expire or be phased out.

That includes a key provision targeting investments, which the authors say is the most cost-effective business cut. That benefit, which allowed companies to immediately deduct capital expenditures from their income taxes, would be extended as part of a bipartisan tax bill passed by the House of Representatives in January.

It also challenges the narratives about the bill from both sides of the aisle. Democrats argue that the tax cuts only reward shareholders and do not benefit the economy. Republicans call them a free boon for the middle class. Both appear to have been wrong.

“The evidence that taxes matter for investment is really there,” Gabriel Chodorow-Reich, a Harvard economist and one of the paper’s authors, said in an interview. “And the evidence that corporate tax cuts are expensive is also there. They are both just features of the data.”

Republicans passed the tax package on a party-line vote in late 2017. The law included income tax cuts and other benefits for individuals. But it revolved around cuts for companies, including a reduction in the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent.

For a limited time, companies could immediately deduct new investments from their income taxes, rather than deducting them over a period of several years. And it changed the way multinational companies were taxed, effectively lowering the rate many companies paid on income earned abroad.

Republicans said these incentives would lead to more investment and economic growth in the United States, increasing workers’ take-home pay.

Measuring the truth of these claims has been difficult. In the years after the law was passed, investment grew, but at about the same pace as in the years before its enactment. That trend could be deceptive; Without the law, investment growth might have slowed. That’s why the authors of the new paper — Mr. Chodorow-Reich, Matthew Smith of the Treasury Department, Owen Zidar of Princeton and Erik Zwick of Chicago — set up a closer investigation.

The researchers relied on anonymous data from 12,000 corporate tax returns from before and after the law, along with a new model of global investment behavior, to estimate how the law’s corporate provisions affected companies. They found that companies that took advantage of the law increased their investments significantly more than those that did not.

Both the reduction in the corporate tax rate and the possibility of immediately writing off all domestic investments stimulated more investment. But the researchers found that the immediate spending was a much more efficient incentive and came at a lower cost to taxpayers. That’s because it rewarded companies for making new investments rather than lowering their taxes on profits from long-ago investments.

“It’s better value for money,” Mr Zwick said.

The researchers also found that lowering taxes on income earned abroad boosted multinational companies’ investments abroad and in the United States. They said this could be because companies’ spending in other countries, such as improving supply chains, could unlock new efficiencies or free up more money to spend domestically.

Total additional investment helped expand the size of the economy by about 0.1 percentage points per year, translating into a long-term increase in average wages of about $750, the researchers concluded. Both are well below the Trump administration’s forecasts.

The study also contradicts conservatives’ claims that increased growth through the law would fully offset federal revenues lost from lower corporate taxes, by boosting additional individual income and corporate profits that would be subject to federal taxes. It suggests that the law will have reduced corporate tax revenues by 40 percent over the course of a decade. In the long term, the reduction is slightly smaller: about a third.

The economists did not analyze the individual tax cuts, including a large cut for owners of certain businesses, such as law firms, that pay individual income taxes on their share of corporate profits. Those cuts lowered taxes for a wide range of American workers, but even conservative supporters of the law rarely claimed they would increase investment.

Republicans have decided that many of the individual cuts will expire at the end of next year to contain the budget costs of the 2017 law. Whether to extend them in whole or in part will be an immediate challenge for President Biden, if he wins re-election in November, or for Mr Trump, if he manages to return to the White House.

Congress is already wrestling with whether to extend the immediate spending provision, which was phased out last year. A bipartisan bill to extend it for two years, coupled with a temporary increase in the generosity of a parent tax credit, passed the House earlier this year but stalled in the Senate.

Mr. Zidar said in an interview that the new study suggests a possible compromise for lawmakers who want to stimulate investment in the most efficient way without further widening the budget deficit: extend the spending provision, but pay for it by raising corporate interest rates.

German football fans had thrown everything they could at the problem, often in a quite literal sense: at various times in recent weeks they protested the specter of a private equity giant taking a stake in the country's domestic league by to rain tennis balls. chocolate coins and even marbles in fields across the country.

The demonstrations forced the postponement of the games, embarrassed authorities and may have helped convince one of the world's largest financial companies not to strike a deal. But it was thanks to an escalation of technology that the final victory was secured: Remote-controlled cars were once usedbelching smoke and disrupting yet another game, the league relented.

The end came in an emergency board meeting, where the league's clubs voted to halt talks with CVC Capital Partners, a Luxembourg-registered private equity firm, over a deal that would have given teams a $1 billion cash injection in exchange for a portion of the league's broadcast revenue over the next twenty years.

“Given current developments, a successful continuation of the process no longer seems possible,” Hans-Joachim Watzke, chairman of the league's supervisory board, said on Wednesday.

The vote was a comprehensive – if increasingly rare – victory for fans' interests at a time when the sport has proven unable to resist the overtures of deep-pocketed investors. That the supporters of several dozen German football clubs seemed to have won the battle through a mixture of anger and humor somehow made their victory even more remarkable.

CVC Partners has signed agreements similar to the German proposal with a number of teams and leagues in recent years. The company already has interests in it La Ligathe elite football league in Spain, and League 1its equivalent in France, as well the WTA tour and the prestigious Six Nations Rugby League.

The DFL, the body that oversees German football's two top divisions, had originally voted in December to follow suit, narrowly backing a motion that would allow the league to explore a “strategic partnership” with CVC or Blackstone, one of the largest players in the world. largest private equity funds. Black stone withdrew from the trial earlier this month, leaving CVC as the only contender.

The turning point for the proposed German investment, most agreed, came on Sunday, when two remote-controlled cars were unleashed during a second division match between Hansa Rostock and Hamburg. They each had a smoke bomb on their back that spewed blue and white fumes into the air. The race was stopped for several minutes while stewards attempted to chase the cars.

By then, the protests and subsequent furor were calling into question “the matchday operations, the matches themselves and the integrity of the competition,” Mr Watzke said.

The prospect of even indirect private investment in a league where clubs must, by law, be majority controlled by fans has proven to be a toxic prospect.

The protests broke out almost immediately after news of the league's intention to make a deal became public in December, and as fans made it clear they did not want to follow the path set by the English Premier League, where clubs are bought and sold by oil companies. magnates, venture capitalists and nation states.

Some games started against a backdrop of eerie silence as fans held back their cheers. Others saw banners outlining the fans' position, often in explicit terms, unfurled in the stands. Various objects were thrown onto the fields to interrupt the game.

Thomas Kessen, spokesman for Unsere Kurve, an umbrella group that advocates for fans, described the protests as “comprehensive, creative and peaceful.”

Ultimately, the protests proved so frequent and so intense that the DFL had little choice but to back down.

“For all active football fans and all members of the clubs, this is a great success, which shows that German football is membership-based and democratic,” said Mr Kessen. “It is precisely these members who must be involved in such groundbreaking decisions.”

Melissa Eddy contributed reporting.

German football fans had thrown everything they could at the problem, often in a quite literal sense: at various times in recent weeks they protested the specter of a private equity giant taking a stake in the country's domestic league by to rain tennis balls. chocolate coins and even marbles in fields across the country.

The demonstrations forced the postponement of the games, embarrassed authorities and may have helped convince one of the world's largest financial companies not to strike a deal. But it was thanks to an escalation of technology that the final victory was secured: Remote-controlled cars were once usedbelching smoke and disrupting yet another game, the league relented.

The end came in an emergency board meeting, where the league's clubs voted to halt talks with CVC Capital Partners, a Luxembourg-registered private equity firm, over a deal that would have given teams a $1 billion cash injection in exchange for a portion of the league's broadcast revenue over the next twenty years.

“Given current developments, a successful continuation of the process no longer seems possible,” Hans-Joachim Watzke, chairman of the league's supervisory board, said on Wednesday.

The vote was a comprehensive – if increasingly rare – victory for fans' interests at a time when the sport has proven unable to resist the overtures of deep-pocketed investors. That the supporters of several dozen German football clubs seemed to have won the battle through a mixture of anger and humor somehow made their victory even more remarkable.

CVC Partners has signed agreements similar to the German proposal with a number of teams and leagues in recent years. The company already has interests in it La Ligathe elite football league in Spain, and League 1its equivalent in France, as well the WTA tour and the prestigious Six Nations Rugby League.

The DFL, the body that oversees German football's two top divisions, had originally voted in December to follow suit, narrowly backing a motion that would allow the league to explore a “strategic partnership” with CVC or Blackstone, one of the largest players in the world. largest private equity funds. Black stone withdrew from the trial earlier this month, leaving CVC as the only contender.

The turning point for the proposed German investment, most agreed, came on Sunday, when two remote-controlled cars were unleashed during a second division match between Hansa Rostock and Hamburg. They each had a smoke bomb on their back that spewed blue and white fumes into the air. The race was stopped for several minutes while stewards attempted to chase the cars.

By then, the protests and subsequent furor were calling into question “the matchday operations, the matches themselves and the integrity of the competition,” Mr Watzke said.

The prospect of even indirect private investment in a league where clubs must, by law, be majority controlled by fans has proven to be a toxic prospect.

The protests broke out almost immediately after news of the league's intention to make a deal became public in December, and as fans made it clear they did not want to follow the path set by the English Premier League, where clubs are bought and sold by oil companies. magnates, venture capitalists and nation states.

Some games started against a backdrop of eerie silence as fans held back their cheers. Others saw banners outlining the fans' position, often in explicit terms, unfurled in the stands. Various objects were thrown onto the fields to interrupt the game.

Thomas Kessen, spokesman for Unsere Kurve, an umbrella group that advocates for fans, described the protests as “comprehensive, creative and peaceful.”

Ultimately, the protests proved so frequent and so intense that the DFL had little choice but to back down.

“For all active football fans and all members of the clubs, this is a great success, which shows that German football is membership-based and democratic,” said Mr Kessen. “It is precisely these members who must be involved in such groundbreaking decisions.”

Melissa Eddy contributed reporting.