Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund is a massive sovereign wealth fund, which invests in a wide range of assets.
There is a particular kind of theater that unfolds in Riyadh these days, and on the twenty-fourth of July it reached something like a crescendo. In a single day—not a week, not a fiscal quarter, but a single revolution of the earth—Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) put its signature to nearly twenty-five billion dollars in financing frameworks, spreading its considerable arms across Washington, the World Bank, and the murky, magnificent architecture of global capital. It was, one imagines, a very good day to be a lawyer in the Kingdom.
The centerpiece was a courtship with the Export-Import Bank of the United States, that most American of institutions, which agreed to a framework worth up to fifteen billion dollars to help PIF’s portfolio companies buy American-made goods. EXIM, never a body to let a slogan wilt, dressed the arrangement in the language of the moment: “Buy American, Build the Future.” And the numbers offered were the kind that make trade ministers weep with gratitude—sixty-five billion dollars in procurement since 2017, a contribution of thirty-five billion to American GDP, the United States crowned as PIF’s favorite foreign shopping destination. Aerospace, advanced technology, future mobility, water security, the minerals that make the modern world hum—all of it now folded into a single memorandum, that peculiarly modern document that promises everything and commits to nothing. The Export-Import Bank of the United States is also in chats with Morocco over financing for the proposed $26 billion Africa-Atlantic gas pipeline.
But the U.S. government was not the only suitor. On the very same day, PIF turned to the World Bank Group and emerged with two more agreements totaling nine and a half billion: six billion with the International Finance Corporation (IFC), aimed at co-financing everything from hospitals to hotels while coaxing private money off the sidelines, and three and a half billion with the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), which will explore the arcane art of credit enhancement to grease PIF’s ambitions across the Middle East and North Africa. Decarbonization, “innovative industries,” high-value jobs—the vocabulary of virtue deployed with practiced ease.
What binds these three documents together, of course, is Vision 2030, the sprawling national reinvention that has become the organizing principle of Saudi ambition. The Kingdom that once sold the world its oil now proposes to buy its way into everything else, partnering with the institutions of the old economic order even as it builds the scaffolding of a new one. Whether the future being financed is quite so bright as the memoranda insist remains, as ever, the delicious open question. For now, the signatures are dry, the frameworks are erected, and the money—that magnificent, restless money—waits to be spent.
On a separate note, the PIF and a cadre of investors got EU approval for their $55 billion acquisition of video game developer Electronic Arts. The deal is now expected to close on August 4, 2026. PIF maintains its desire to diversify from oil and seeks to become a global hub for games and sports
