Sajwani Says Anthropic Stake Earned More Than 30 Years of Business

Hussain Sajwani, founder and chairman of DAMAC Group, says his investment in Anthropic has made him more money in under two years than 30 years of running businesses.

The comparison rests on a timeline he knows first-hand. Sajwani started out in catering in 1983. He took his company public on the London Stock Exchange in December 2013, and he counts the stretch between those two moments as 30 years in business. The Anthropic position, on his account, outearned the whole of it in a fraction of the time. He set a single private holding against an entire career built on construction and sales, and the holding won.

Anthropic is preparing to list on Nasdaq on Thursday, November 19, 2026, at an estimated valuation of between US$1.26 trillion and US$1.41 trillion. Sajwani bought in at a US$18 billion valuation. He said the company carried a US$2 trillion valuation just a few weeks before the IPO, and that the offering is pricing at about US$1.4 trillion. That is a level he says he is happy with. The distance between his entry point and the listing range is the return he is describing. The listing will also be the first public price on a position that has so far been marked privately.

DAMAC Group is a privately owned conglomerate founded in 1982, and it has diversified well past the property development it is best known for. It employs more than 10,000 people drawn from over 100 nationalities. DAMAC Capital, its investment arm, puts money into technology, finance and life sciences. The group's spread means the Anthropic stake sits alongside, not instead of, a balance sheet built on physical assets.

Sajwani's record in technology investing runs back further than the current cycle, and it began badly. He kept a Silicon Valley office in 1998 and 1999, lost money on it and shut it down. He returned to the sector about 12 years ago, this time with a portfolio rather than an office.

The portfolio today holds Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI and more than 30 other companies. Sajwani names Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX as the holdings throwing off huge returns.

The equity bets sit alongside a shift in what the group builds. Sajwani has moved from property development into data centers in the Gulf, which places DAMAC in the physical layer of the AI economy rather than the software layer. DAMAC Digital, launched in 2021, operates facilities in 13 countries. Five global hyperscalers have signed partnership agreements with the unit, handing it a customer base among the largest cloud operators.

He concentrates on large sites of 100 MW and above. Most are liquid-cooled and designed around the AI chips they are built to host. That threshold puts the group's work at the heavy end of the data center market; smaller halls are a different business with different tenants. The next projects are earmarked for large-population regions: the US, the EU and Asia.

Costs have moved against builders. Sajwani said data center construction has grown about 30% more expensive over the last couple of years and could add another 20% to 30%. Europe and the US are the most expensive markets. Asia is cheaper, because labor costs less and some Chinese equipment, generators included, can be used. Europe and the US are restricted to European or American equipment, and that restriction lifts the bill.

Regulation is the second drag in Europe. Environmental and zoning rules stretch projects out by years, and Sajwani called some European regulations nonsense. Europe, in his reading, is a hard place to invest for either speed or return. The US is the best market when land with power attached can be found, because the rates are better.

In January 2025 he announced a US$20 billion US data center investment with then President-elect Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Florida. The money is to be deployed over four to five years through DAMAC Digital and is aimed at eight states. The pledge put a single figure on the group's American ambitions weeks before the new administration took office.

He expects the US midterm elections to bring stricter rules on data centers and on the environment, and he expects American data center supply to shrink as a consequence. Stricter permitting would slow new builds at a moment when demand from AI operators is still climbing.

Outside the US, DAMAC Digital is in serious negotiations to buy land in the UK and Australia. The industry, he said, is still working out where data centers are most efficiently built, and that search runs through markets with very different power, labor and equipment costs.

Rising costs trouble him less than supply chain constraints. Higher construction bills can be passed to the hyperscalers that take the capacity. Delay is harder to hand on, which is why he ranks supply chain disruption above cost as the bigger problem. Costs arrive as an invoice and can be renegotiated. Late equipment arrives as a missed deadline.

The two halves of the story feed each other. A gain on Anthropic shares gives the group room to fund a construction programme whose costs keep climbing, and the same appetite for AI compute that lifted the valuation is what fills those 100 MW halls once they come online. The equity stake buys time and optionality. The data centers demand land, power and patience in markets where permitting is slow and equipment is priced by geography. The return belongs to the first. The constraints belong to the second.