A spy sheikh controls a fortune of $1.5 trillion. He wants to use it to control artificial intelligence

for a while In the mid-2000s, the refrigerator-sized box in Abu Dhabi was considered the greatest chess player in the world. It was her name HydraIt was a miniature supercomputer, a cabinet full of industrial processors and specially designed chips, held together by fiber-optic cables and connected to the Internet.

At a time when chess was still the main gladiatorial arena for competition between humans and artificial intelligence, Hydra and her exploits were briefly the stuff of legend. The New Yorker published A 5,000-word reflective feature about her emerging creativity; WIRED announced Hydra”scary“; Chess publications covered their victories with the violence of gladiatorial commentary. They wrote that Hydra was a “monstrous machine” that was “slowly strangling” the great human masters.

It is true that the Hydra looked like a monster, and it was also isolated and strange. Other advanced chess engines of the time – competitors to Hydra – ran on regular computers and were available for anyone to download. But the full power of Hydra’s 32-processor array can only be used by one person at a time. By the summer of 2005, even members of the Hydra development team were struggling to get a role in their innovation.

That’s because the team’s sponsor, a then 36-year-old Emirati man who had hired them and paid for the improved Hydra devices, was too busy reaping his reward. In an online chess forum in 2005, Hydra’s Austrian chief engineer, Kreli Doninger, described the donor as the greatest “computer chess geek” alive. “The shepherd loves to play day and night with Hydra,” he wrote.

Under the username zor_champ, the Emirati shepherd logs in to online chess tournaments, playing with Hydra as a team of humans and computers. More often than not, they outperformed the competition. “He loved the power of man as well as machine,” one engineer told me. “He loved to win.”

Eventually, Hydra was overtaken by other chess computers and was discontinued in the late 2000s. But zor_champ has become one of the most powerful and least understood men in the world. His real name is Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

Tahnoun, a bearded, slender figure who can hardly be seen without dark sunglasses, is the national security adviser to the United Arab Emirates — the intelligence chief of one of the world’s richest and most surveillance-happy small nations. He is also the younger brother of autocratic hereditary president Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. But perhaps more importantly and surprisingly for a top spy, Tahnoun has formal control over a significant portion of Abu Dhabi’s vast sovereign wealth. Bloomberg News reported last year that he directly oversees an empire worth $1.5 trillion, more money than anyone on the planet.

In his personal style, Tahnoun comes across as one-third Gulf royalty, one-third fitness-obsessed tech founder, and one-third Bond villain. Among his many business interests, he heads a sprawling technology conglomerate called G42 (a reference to the book the The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, Where “42” is a supercomputer’s answer to the question “life, the universe and everything”). The G42 has a hand in everything from artificial intelligence research to biotechnology, with particular areas of strength in hacking technology and state-sponsored surveillance. Tahnoon is a fan of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and cycling. He wears his sunglasses even to the gym due to his sensitivity to light, and surrounds himself with UFC champions and mixed martial arts fighters.

According to a businessman and security consultant who met Tahnoon, visitors beyond his layers of loyal gatekeepers may not get a chance to speak with him until after taking a bike tour with the sheikh around his private race track. He has been known to spend hours in a flotation chamber, says the consultant, and has flown health expert Peter Attia to the UAE to offer guidance on longevity. According to a businessman who was present at the discussion, Tahnoun inspired Mohammed bin Salman, the powerful Saudi crown prince, to cut down on fast food and join him in his quest to live to the age of 150.