- 27 minutes ago
Kuwait is often mentioned less frequently than its Gulf neighbors, yet this quiet profile should not be mistaken for lack of value.
In fact, Kuwait offers a distinctive combination of cultural depth, economic strength, and urban comfort that many travelers and observers overlook.
In fact, Kuwait offers a distinctive combination of cultural depth, economic strength, and urban comfort that many travelers and observers overlook.
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00:00Kuwait rarely gets the same attention as Dubai, Qatar, or Saudi Arabia.
00:04In fact, some people think the country has fallen behind.
00:14But beneath that reputation is one of the Gulf's richest and most influential countries,
00:20with enormous oil wealth and billions invested around the world.
00:23So why does Kuwait still get overlooked?
00:25Let's get into it.
00:26Everything Kuwait did first
00:28Start in 1938, drillers struck oil in the Bergen field, and production began in 1946.
00:34Bergen is the world's second-largest conventional oil field and has produced over 70 billion barrels since.
00:39In 1953, Kuwait set up a board to invest the revenue.
00:43It became the Kuwait Investment Authority, the world's oldest sovereign wealth fund.
00:47Kuwait was investing oil money eight years before it was a country.
00:50Britain recognized independence on 19 June 1961.
00:53In 1962, a 31-member Constituent Assembly drafted a constitution.
00:59It created a constitutional monarchy with a 50-member elected National Assembly holding budget approval,
01:04treaty ratification, interpolation of ministers, and no confidence motions.
01:08No other state in the region had that.
01:10Women gained the vote in 2005.
01:12The reserves, approximately 101.5 billion barrels of proven oil, among the top six or seven countries on earth.
01:18Inside 17,820 square kilometers, capacity is targeted at 4 million barrels per day by 2035.
01:26The savings, $1.07 trillion by May 2026, 5th globally.
01:31Sovereign net foreign assets ran at roughly 652% of GDP in 2025.
01:36Public debt sat at 14.7%.
01:38Fitch rates the country awe.
01:40The build record runs to the present.
01:41The airport's third runway, 4.58 kilometers, opened on 30 October 2025.
01:47In December 2025, Kuwait signed the first phase contract from Mubarak Al-Kabir port.
01:5224 berths, over 8 million containers a year.
01:55Then there is the one with no oil in it at all.
01:57When we started that negotiation or discussion around the partnership, AI was just coming through.
02:05What came out of it was not a regional first.
02:07With the first AI-powered Azure, Microsoft started from the bottom up.
02:12The scope of that claim is the part to hold on to.
02:15Globally, the one announced in Kuwait.
02:18Now set that record against what Kuwait does not have.
02:21No signature tower, no World Cup, no Formula One weekend, no airline campaign.
02:26The Gulf states that get attention bought it, and Kuwait never entered that market.
02:30The reason it never did starts with a fort on the coast and ends with 700 oil wells on fire.
02:35Why nobody looks.
02:37Kuwait did not fall out of the conversation by accident, it was pushed out.
02:41The origin is entirely commercial.
02:43Families of the Banu Udub fled drought in the Najd, and around 1716, they settled on the northeastern coast beside
02:49a small fort.
02:50For a century and a half, the town lived on purling, fishing, and trade under the Al-Sabah family.
02:55In 1899, its rulers signed the Anglo-Kuwaiti Agreement, handing foreign affairs to British protection while keeping internal authority at
03:04home.
03:04Which is how Kuwait reached the 20th century, without ever being colonized.
03:08Oil rewrote everything.
03:09Revenues funded the first city plan in 1952, and the population climbed from roughly 200,000 to over 750,000
03:17by 1970.
03:18Independence came in 1961.
03:20Iraq issued a claim within days, and a British military presence held the line until Baghdad recognized the borders in
03:261963.
03:27That claim never died.
03:28On 2 August 1990, Iraq invaded, and the occupation lasted seven months.
03:33Iraqi forces killed approximately 1,000 civilians and displaced hundreds of thousands.
03:37On the retreat, they set fire to roughly 600 to 755 onshore oil wells out of the 914 operating, turning
03:44the country's revenue base into a burning field that blacked out the sky at midday.
03:48Firefighting crews worked until 6 November 1991, at a cost of around $1.5 billion.
03:54GDP took roughly seven years to climb back, assisted by the United Nations Compensation Commission, which processed 2.7 million
04:01claims and paid out about $52.4 billion.
04:04Some of it never closed at all.
04:06In 2021, the Tripartite Commission resolved 30 cases of missing persons through DNA identification, three decades after the war ended.
04:15Here is the consequence nobody accounts for.
04:17While Dubai spent the 1990s building a skyline and a brand, Kuwait spent them rebuilding refineries and power stations out
04:24of ash.
04:24The empty lots are not stagnation, they are sequencing.
04:27Number two, of course, Kuwait may be lagged for some time.
04:31And the lag being described there is a specific one, not a verdict on the country.
04:36Especially from an infrastructure perspective, and here I'm not talking about the normal infrastructure.
04:42Because while the skyline sat still, something underneath it had been compounding since 1953.
04:47The quietest fortune in the Gulf.
04:50Long before Abu Dhabi built ADIA or Riyadh turned the PIF into a headline machine, Kuwait had invented the category.
04:56What separates it is not the size of the fund but the age of the habit.
05:0070 years of compounding, begun by a government that had not yet written a constitution.
05:04The current account surplus moderated to 23.6% of GDP in 2025 on an average crude price of $70
05:11.4 a barrel.
05:12Hydrocarbons still generate over 70% of government revenue.
05:16Yet sovereign assets convert what would be deficits anywhere else into surpluses here.
05:19This does not behave like an oil state improvising through a boom.
05:23It behaves like an endowment, and the discipline runs deeper than the fund.
05:26$112 billion fund, you delivered $7.3 billion in the three months to June.
05:32That return came out of a three and a half year rebuild, and the framework behind it is deceptively simple.
05:37We worked very hard on what I call the three P's.
05:40People, process, and portfolio.
05:42The hiring came first, and it was aggressive.
05:45We hired more than 80 professionals within 18 months starting in early 2017.
05:53Then came the uncomfortable part.
05:55And then we basically moved on to the portfolio, started cleaning up.
05:59We got rid of roughly $20 billion.
06:02The most striking figure was the cash sitting idle inside a pension fund.
06:07The cash we inherited there was humongous, 41%.
06:11For context, that is a position almost no institution on earth would defend.
06:15It's completely unheard of.
06:18Any institution or investor, let alone a pension fund portfolio.
06:23Within a few years, it had been cut by roughly three quarters.
06:27Today, cash is at 11.5%.
06:29Obviously, to make returns, you need to be invested to start with.
06:34That is Kuwaiti capital management, in one sentence.
06:37Patient, unglamorous, and pointed at a horizon most governments never look toward.
06:41Yeah, we're responsible for the savings of more than 600,000 people basically in Kuwait.
06:46And it is the same instinct that hardened the country's security posture after 1991.
06:52We are very serious when it comes to protection and risk management.
06:56Money, though, was never the only thing Kuwait built first.
06:59And the second one has been far more contested.
07:02The Parliament that refused to disappear.
07:04The money is the underrated asset.
07:06The politics is the underrated identity.
07:08Ministers in Kuwait can be dragged in front of elected representatives and interrogated in public.
07:13The National Assembly has functioned as one of the most influential elected legislatures in the Gulf.
07:18Reinforced by the Duwaniya, the open debating sessions held in private homes where Kuwaiti political opinion has been forged for
07:24generations.
07:25What followed was six decades of friction.
07:27The Assembly has never been abolished, but it has been dissolved and reconstituted over and over, 13 times between 2006
07:33and 2024 alone.
07:35Each cycle produced deadlock.
07:36Each deadlock stalled legislation, and each stall pushed Kuwait further behind neighbors who could simply decree a project into existence.
07:43The very thing that makes the country exceptional is also what slowed it down.
07:47That tension broke in May 2024.
07:49The Emir dissolved the Assembly elected the month before and suspended select constitutional articles for up to four years pending
07:56review.
07:56It remains suspended, with no elections held as of August 2026.
08:01Here is where the expected story fails to happen.
08:03The suspension did not produce paralysis.
08:05It produced a legislative sprint.
08:07Kuwait completed 284 legislative reforms by July 2026.
08:1227 new laws, 67 amended, 10 repealed.
08:15Judicial Kuwaitization lifted Kuwaiti representation in the judiciary to 87%.
08:20And an Amiri decree expanded the cabinet to 21 ministers in February 2026,
08:25installing seven new faces across economic and reform portfolios.
08:30Underneath it sat the financial unlock.
08:31The March 2025 debt law raised the ceiling to KD 30 billion and permitted 50-year maturities, restoring access to
08:38international capital markets after an eight-year absence.
08:41Kuwait could finally borrow against its future, instead of raiding its reserves.
08:46That is the whole country in miniature.
08:48And for anyone entering that market, the sequencing is not what most foreigners expect.
08:52It's all about trust, relationship.
08:55After that, we need to find the legal structure.
08:58All of that machinery now points at the one problem Kuwait has never been able to solve on paper, its
09:03own geography.
09:04The build-out nobody is watching.
09:07Everything Kuwait sells by sea threads through the Strait of Hormuz, a channel narrowing to 22 nautical miles that carries
09:13between 20 and 25% of global seaborne oil trade.
09:17One closure in Kuwait's exports collapse back onto domestic refining, a country sitting on 100 billion barrels with a single
09:23exit door it does not control.
09:25Kuwait Vision 2035 is the answer to that.
09:28Built on five pillars and tracked against 20 indicators aimed at a top 30 world ranking by 2035.
09:33The 2025-2026 plan carries 141 strategic projects engineered to pull an up to KD 10 billion in private and
09:41foreign investment.
09:42Silk City spans 250 square kilometers in Sabia.
09:46Shatadia, the largest industrial zone at roughly 6 million square meters, was handed over in July 2025.
09:52The GCC Railway's Kuwait segment belongs to a 2,177-kilometer network targeted for 2030.
09:59But the shift is not only concrete, and the leadership understood that early.
10:03Kuwait government and the Kuwait leadership understand very well the impact of technology on the future of the country.
10:11Which is how a cloud agreement turned into a global first.
10:14And that really helped shape this partnership to be the first of many, many things.
10:21Dealmakers on the ground describe an opportunity set far wider than energy.
10:26But we have a lot of projects.
10:27We have the mega projects, water, electric, and the infrastructure, construction.
10:33And demand is shifting toward the same sector Microsoft just planted a flag in.
10:38All those sectors, they have a very good opportunity, but you know what's the trend today?
10:44It's the AI and the tech.
10:45Foreign capital is already moving to buy its way in.
10:48So I think a lot of, you can see a lot of interest now from a lot of foreign companies
10:54also to acquire local companies.
10:57And the advice given to anyone entering says a great deal about how the market works.
11:01Find the right partner, find the right advisor, because the advisor gonna design the deal.
11:07The oldest sovereign wealth fund on earth, the Gulf's first elected parliament, the world's second-largest oil field, and the
11:13first ground-up, AI-powered Azure region announced anywhere, in a country almost nobody outside the region is watching.
11:19That is what makes Kuwait the most underrated country in the Gulf.
11:24If you enjoyed watching this video, click on one of the boxes playing on your screen to watch more similar
11:28content.
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