Hussain Sajwani

Hussain Sajwani is an Emirati billionaire businessman, the founder of the property developer DAMAC Properties, which he established in 2002, and of his private investment company DAMAC Group. Forbes put his net worth at US$15.3 billion in 2026. A business associate of US President Donald Trump, he announced alongside Trump in January 2025 a US$20 billion investment in data centres across the United States. ^{1 2}

Sajwani was born in 1953 in Dubai, the eldest of five children; his father was a trader in the city's souk who sold watches, shirts and goods imported from China. ^{1 2} He won a government scholarship and briefly attended medical college in Baghdad before studying industrial engineering at the University of Washington, from which he graduated in 1981. ^{1 2} He is married with four children and resides in Dubai; three of his children, Ali, Amira and Abbas, work in the family business. ¹

Sajwani began his career in 1981 at Abu Dhabi Gas Industries (GASCO), and in 1983 started a catering venture that grew into Global Logistics Services, supplying the US military and companies such as Bechtel; it still operates today. ¹ In 2002 he founded DAMAC Properties, which became one of the largest luxury developers in the Middle East; he stepped back from its chairmanship in 2018, returned two years later, and took the company private in 2022. ¹ In Egypt, a court sentenced him in absentia in 2011 to five years in prison in a land case; the dispute was settled in May 2013, when DAMAC returned the land, withdrew its arbitration case and the sentence was suspended. ¹ Through DAMAC Group he acquired the Italian fashion house Roberto Cavalli in 2019 and the Swiss jeweller De Grisogono in 2022, and his data-centre arm, founded in 2021 and renamed DAMAC Digital in 2025, is the vehicle for the US$20 billion American data-centre programme announced with President-elect Trump on 7 January 2025. ¹ His charitable foundation, the Hussain Sajwani–DAMAC Foundation, sponsored the One Million Arab Coders initiative in 2017 and donated three million dirhams to the Magdi Yacoub heart hospital project in 2020 and one million dirhams to the 100 Million Meals campaign the same year. ²

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