Our next guest has seen markets from every angle — as an economist, financial TV anchor, CEO of a brokerage, and as the leader behind one of the region’s biggest platforms. He led Careem in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Junaid, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me.
Oil is more than 50% higher than a year ago and rate expectations keep shifting. What global trajectory do you see over the next 12 months?
There are so many competing factors. Crude is at $114. US pump prices are exceptionally high. Inflation is at 3.7%. The ten-year Treasury is above 5%. And despite that, growth is also strong — revised upward twice. The question is whether consumer discretionary will slow now that prices are up, versus whether AI and new technologies will rapidly increase productivity. Europe is not seeing the same level of growth. Asia and large net importers of oil like India are seeing pressure on current accounts. In the midst of high rates, technology stocks continue to grow rapidly. The world is grappling with whether higher inflation leads to lower consumption and eventual recession — or whether AI productivity gains help industries leapfrog.
How is technology helping businesses and investors manage this volatility?
OpenAI’s annualised revenue is already around $50 billion. Anthropic’s is expected around $65 billion. Microsoft is a $350 billion revenue company, Google $470 billion, Meta $230 billion — and it took them decades to get there. Anthropic and OpenAI together are already looking at around $120 billion in annualised revenue. The hyperscalers have spent $1 trillion in the last three years and the entire industry is expected to invest $6 trillion in AI over the next three to four years. If in two to three years the combined revenue of AI and AI-related services starts hitting $1 trillion a year — the productivity gains are going to be very, very strong.
You led Careem in Pakistan and Saudi. What did that teach you about how platforms transform how money moves?
When Careem launched a closed-loop wallet — because in markets like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Egypt, credit card penetration was very low — we started learning that once people put money in their wallets, usage went up two and a half to three times. As you added more services — ride hailing to food to groceries to peer-to-peer exchange — the reliance on that wallet as a real source of funds increased and your velocity of use multiplied. A lot of people try to create a single-feature standalone app. It never scales. But if you can embed money movement within a regular use case across multiple use cases, having a central payment rail really increases stickiness and doubles or triples usage.
Abu Dhabi is building a five gigawatt AI campus. What does that ambition tell you?
Two themes are common across the world. First — localisation of infrastructure. Two massive supply chain disruptions, during Covid and now again. More and more sovereigns want their data locally or regionally centred. This region is becoming more and more digital and its data uses are growing. Second — whoever has access to cheap energy will win in compute and storage. This region has multiple energy sources — natural gas, sunlight 365 days a year. If the current conflict resolves, Gulf states should be able to invest in cheap energy infrastructure — renewables, solar, battery systems, and nuclear — to provide cheap compute at scale.
What should frontier markets and emerging markets be doing to grab a share of the $800 billion global data centre investment?
Not all markets will be able to build their own and get the right utilisation. Almost all sovereigns are mandating that banking data, transaction data, and citizen data be locally housed — which creates innate local demand. But not all markets have the same cost of energy and some do not have the fiscal space. The private sector has to roll that out in many countries. We are not going to see a uniform rollout. Countries that cannot do an aggressive build-out will rely on countries like those in the Gulf — which can service the region around them.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
Thank you for having me.
