Al Falih calls for more private cash and hints at PIF pullback
- 28 de out. de 2025
- 3 min de leitura
The private sector must take a larger role in the development of Saudi Arabia, investment minister Khalid Al Falih said on Tuesday – and the Public Investment Fund should consider scaling back its spending.
Investment minister’s speech to FII summit
Riyadh seeking international investors
‘Ease of doing business keeps us awake’
Speaking on the opening day of the Future Investment Initiative summit in Riyadh, Al Falih acknowledged that the “giga-projects have been taking a lot of resources from the government” and urged domestic and foreign investors to increase their footprint in the kingdom.
“It’s time for us to maybe scale back on this government or PIF spend to prove and to cede some of these value chains and clusters and let the private sector come in and start investing,” he told the FII audience.
Al Falih said last week that the private sector’s contribution to Saudi GDP had doubled in a decade, rising from SAR1.1 trillion ($293 billion) in 2016 to about SAR2.3 trillion.
Riyadh wants this figure to pass SAR2.4 trillion in the next five years.
The Saudi government is courting private-sector investors to support its development ambitions, but has met resistance from companies citing financial risks, a senior official said last November.
“We in Saudi Arabia realise strongly that businesses have choices,” Al Falih said on Tuesday.
“We try to reduce the risk to the maximum extent possible. Risks that the government can neutralise or own, we own it. We are committed to reducing barriers to doing business – ease of doing business keeps us awake at night.”
He went on: “We have skin in the game. If you want a country that can co-execute, co-plan, co-develop, co-innovate with you … we are happy to partner.”
Previous FII conferences – this is its ninth edition – have been dominated by the multibillion-dollar infrastructure projects central to the Vision 2030 strategy. This year, the focus appears to be more on emerging economic sectors in Saudi Arabia.
“The most obvious one is AI,” Al Falih said, describing the technology as an “addition rather than subtraction” in terms of giga-projects’ spending priorities.
Tariq Amin, CEO of PIF-owned AI company Humain, said state funding for AI ventures was readily available.
“Everything we ask for, we get,” he said at a press conference to launch Humain One, an AI operating system – an alternative to Windows or macOS – that enables users to speak to a computer to tell it to perform tasks.
On the sidelines of the conference, Mohsen Moazami, international president of US artificial intelligence company Groq, said the ambition of Saudi Arabia’s nascent AI industry was “huge – and obviously it ties to the Vision 2030”.
For outside investors, he said, it presents a “very large opportunity, but it requires patience and navigation”.
Foreign investment has become a higher priority as oil prices have declined – from an average of $81 a barrel last year to just under $65 on Tuesday.
Since 2015, the PIF has been the driving force behind Vision 2030, increasing its domestic focus from 20 percent to 80 percent.
The programme “has unlocked a generational opportunity”, PIF governor Yasir Al Rumayyan told delegates in his opening presentation at FII.
“Nine years since the launch of Vision 2030, you can see results everywhere: new cities, new industries, new ecosystems and supply chains.”
At a board meeting in December 2024, the PIF approved spending cuts to projects, some by as much as 60 percent. No projects have been scrapped, however.
In August, the immediate future of one high-profile development, Neom’s Trojena, was thrown into doubt when it was reported that the futuristic mountain ski resort might not be completed in time to host the 2029 Asian Winter Games.
A spokesperson for the Olympic Council of Asia told AGBI that it was “pleased with the strong progress being made” at Trojena, but stopped short of confirming its role as the main venue.
“We’ve taken Saudi to the world and now the world is coming to Saudi Arabia to FII every year,” said Al Rumayyan on Tuesday, “to the Expo in 2030 and to the Fifa World Cup in 2034”.
This year’s FII gathering has set “a record in our history”, according to FII Institute CEO Richard Attias, with 9,000 delegates including 6,000 members. Børge Brende, the president of the World Economic Forum, and Donald Trump Jr were among those in attendance on the first day in Riyadh.
By Megha Merani, Edmund Bower
October 28, 2025, 5:05 PM
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