Adic to focus on private credit and infrastructure next year

• Adic holds $150bn
• 65% in private markets
• No investment more than 1% of fund

The Abu Dhabi Investment Council (Adic) is increasing allocations to infrastructure and private credit, sharpening its focus on sectors it sees as central to global growth as competition intensifies for capital from the Gulf.

The $150 billion sovereign wealth fund, part of Mubadala Investment Company, runs under an endowment-style model and has built one of the region’s most diversified portfolios.

“If you look at us through that lens, we’re actually one of the largest endowments in the world,” Adic executive director Saoud Al Mulla said. 

“We are three times the size of the largest endowment in the US university space.”

For comparison, Harvard University’s endowment – the largest in the US – stands at just over $50 billion. 

Endowment fund models, widely adopted by top US universities, are structured to preserve and grow capital over generations. They seek to build resilience through diversification and allocation – spreading investments broadly across public and private markets, real assets and alternatives, while limiting the size of any single holding.

While Mubadala takes “a much more direct approach to investing,” Al Mulla described Adic as “the indirect arm of [Mubadala],” drawing on the endowment model’s discipline and diversification.

About 65 percent of Adic’s assets are in private markets. The portfolio is structured so that “not a single investment represents more than 1 percent of the portfolio”.

Adic was founded in 2007 and initially struggled to deploy capital into infrastructure, as the asset class in the region was “not very institutional,” according to Al Mulla. 

But the market has changed dramatically. 

Assets under management in dedicated infrastructure funds have tripled since 2016, reaching more than $1.5 trillion in 2025, a McKinsey report shows, driven by a massive global investment gap and a growing appetite from private investors for stable, long-term returns.

“[Infrastructure] has actually become a very core and central component of any institutional portfolio today,” Al Mulla said. “Our allocation to infrastructure has actually gone up year over year and is expected to go up again in 2026.”

Al Mulla identified digital infrastructure, energy transition and supply chain investments as leading opportunities. 

A recent white paper by ADQ, Abu Dhabi’s $300 billion sovereign wealth fund, citing external data, estimates at least $100 trillion in global infrastructure investment will be needed by 2040.

Average annual returns for infrastructure funds were around 11 percent from 2016 to 2022, with only a slight easing expected in the coming years.

Adic is also expanding into private credit, Al Mulla said: “We have some exposure in our portfolio… and we’re looking to move on this space.”

Unlike larger sovereign fund peers that run international offices, Adic relies on external managers.

Adic was among the first investors in US-based infrastructure private equity firm I Squared Capital, which manages around $50 billion in assets, backing Sadek Wahba when he left Morgan Stanley to launch the business.

The executives spoke at Abu Dhabi Finance Week earlier this month, providing a rare opportunity to hear directly from the fund’s leadership on its strategy.

“We don’t have offices outside of our country, so the managers that we partner with are really our arms and legs in the geographies that they represent our capital,” Al Mulla said. 

“We see them as true extensions of our team.”

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The fund’s approach gives the chance to access stable, long-term capital from Abu Dhabi, “as long as [they] keep delivering on performance”.

“We are always on the hunt for the best and brightest managers out there,” Al Mulla said. “We deploy our capital through funds and full investment, and sometimes through a bespoke view.”

Sadek Wahba, I Squared’s chairman, underscored the standards Adic expects from partners: “Performance is the single most important thing you can deliver. 

“The second element is transparency. Investors like to understand and like to be told what’s going on, both the good news and the bad news.”