Book Launch: Who Owns AI? Where Sovereign Capital Meets National AI Ambitions
- Friday, November 13, 2026
- 2:30–3:30 p.m.
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Room 206, Vanderbilt Hall
- 40 Washington Square South New York, NY ,10012 (View Map)
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Room 206, Vanderbilt Hall
This event is not open to the public.
Please note: event open to NYU Law students and NYU Law ID holders only.
Special event for the Sovereign Finance, Capital Markets, and Global Regulatory Challenges Seminar [Credit Course for NYU Law School and Stern MBA Degrees]
Friday, November 13, 2026
In October 2026, the question of who owns AI moved from theory to the boardroom. Anthropic pledged 5% of its equity to a new Public Benefit Fund, while OpenAI has discussed a stake of similar size for the US government. Winston Ma’s new book, published the same month, explains how we got here and where this leads.
His previous SWF book, The Hunt for Unicorns (2020), tracked sovereign investors (the “trillion-dollar club”) as they became the most powerful venture capitalists. That trend is now fully in place for AI – SWFs’ AI: sovereign funds hold seats at the top labs, own data centers and finance semiconductor chips.
The new story runs the other way: AI is creating wealth so large that it may need its own sovereign wealth fund. Who Owns AI? connects the two stories, SWFs’ AI and AI’s own SWF. In this special session, Winston Ma is joined by guest speakers from La Caisse (Canada) and KfW (Germany) to discuss where sovereign capital meets national AI ambitions.
Speakers:
Bertrand Villon, Managing Director, Private Equity, La Caisse Bela R. Onken, CFA, Director, Mining and Industries, KfW IPEX-Bank GmbH Representative Office North America Winston Ma, CFA Esq. Executive Director and Adjunct Professor, Global Public Investment Funds Forum, NYU School of Law (former MD of CIC) |
Co-Conveners:
Law and Business Association (LBA), NYU School of Law
Time:
2:30–3:30 p.m. Friday, November 13, 2026
Venue:
Vanderbilt Hall, Smart Classroom 206, NYU School of Law
40 Washington Square South, New York, NY, 10012
Related Readings:
Book: Who Owns AI? Sovereign Wealth Funds, State Ownership, and the Race for Sovereign AI (One Button Publishing, October 2026)
FT Op-Ed: AI Needs its Own Sovereign Wealth Fund (Winston Ma, FT FDIntelligence, July 2026) FT Op-Ed: Trump is Taking a Page out of China’s Sovereign AI Playbook (June 2026) Bloomberg TV Interview: US Pursuing Unconventional Sovereign Wealth Fund (August 2025)