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# Saudi Public Investment Fund Is Scooping Up Talent
- URL: https://dispatches.goodallresearch.com/pif-lucid-ceer-knowledge-transfer/
- Published: 2026-08-17T06:30:59.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-16T18:05:24.000Z
- Description: Lucid cut about 10% of its workforce while still staffing its Saudi factory. Ceer grew 20% on hires from Stellantis, Gestamp and Hyundai. From Formula E classrooms to the Lucid board, PIF is importing an automotive industry through people, and it says so itself.
- Author: Amanda Goodall
- Tags: Business, Electric Vehicles, Finance, Saudi Arabia, Investing, Soverign Wealth Funds, Saudi PIF, Public Investment Fund, Newsletter, #Migrated-1790710853882, #Import 2026-09-29 12:48

Last week I posted a note saying PIF was building human capital underneath an industry before the industry even reached scale. It’s all very wild and exciting to dig into.

I’ve been mapping this for weeks and much to my surprise, the map got bigger than I expected. So let’s start with the announcement that kicked all of this off.

Formula E and PIF expanded Driving Force, an education program built around STEM, sustainability, and electric motorsport. The latest version is actually pretty neat… it uses Formula E’s new GEN4 car to teach kids not just how the technology works, but what the careers attached to it look like.

And sure, this is easy to file away under it’s a kids program, it’s not Formula One, etc.

But I kept lingering on one question:

**Why is one of the largest sovereign wealth funds on earth interested in teaching children about careers in electric mobility?**

So down the rabbit hole I went. When you put Driving Force next to what PIF is doing across automotive manufacturing, EVs, autonomous mobility, gaming, esports and motorsport, it stops looking random. Then I got into my favorite… the workforce data. That’s where this got really good.

Everything I can see says PIF is building the human capital underneath an industry before that industry is anywhere near scale. That was my thesis going in, but I did not expected there would be such a big mechanism sitting underneath it:

**PIF is using portfolio companies to import industrial knowledge into Saudi Arabia.**

Not capital alone - Not knowledge alone. All of it, together, within a very unique sequence. These companies are telling us in all their press releases. It just seems like nobody is really paying attention.

Because I love digging, I read PIF’s 2026–2030 strategy that came out a few days ago and it’s quite useful… unusually plain-spoken for a document of its kind as well.

The fund calls the next phase Value Realization. After years of rapid expansion and capital deployment, it’s pivoting toward integrated economic ecosystems, even more strategic-asset optimization, and considerably more mature domestic value chains. PIF describes itself as an architect and steward of platforms that let others scale.

But the line that really stood out to me is that its strategic ecosystems are meant to ***accelerate capability transfer across industries.*** That is remarkably close to what the workforce data is showing me independently.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/73/d5/73d5a312-f20a-4227-b705-ab5739021bdc/content/images/2026/09/dab50043-faa1-45c8-a22f-064c59b2522f_3300x2220.png)

To catch you up on what is happening:

PIF invested in Lucid.

PIF created Ceer with Foxconn.

PIF put $3.5 billion into Uber back in 2016.

PIF built Savvy Games Group.

PIF got deep into electric motorsport.

And PIF just led the consortium taking Electronic Arts private in a $55 billion deal alongside Silver Lake and Affinity Partners.

Every one of those can be analyzed on its own. Most people stop right there without realizing what is *moving* between these assets.

Capital, of course… but also technology, customers, suppliers and manufacturing processes… oh and don’t forget people. It really comes down to people. It isn’t just a case of hired roles… it’s the pedigree, and talent caliber that comes into place.

We’ve all seen the news. Lucid is in the middle of a big changeup…. cutting costs, trimming inventory, moderating production, chasing $1.4 billion in cash-flow improvements. And look, there's been a lot of noise around this company lately… including chatter about bankruptcy that has no business being in the conversation. A company sliding does not commission a stamping line...it doesn't add senior quality engineers and it doesn't keep the delayed-draw facility mostly untouched. Lucid is running a hard reset, and a hard reset is what a company does when it intends to still be here.

The workforce shows it plainly and makes me even more excited at what is in the works. In the dataset I reviewed, Lucid’s observed headcount fell roughly 10% between December 2025 and August 2026, and engineering took the worst hit.

April was a bit more brutal. Engineering exits directionally looked to outnumber starts, with simultaneous double-digit declines across operations, business management, sales support, marketing, HR and IT. Hiring then nearly stopped. By midsummer, engineering starts were running at a small fraction of exits.

All in all, headline headcount isn’t what caught my attention. While the broader organization gets cut back, Lucid keeps putting resources behind its Saudi operation.

AMP-2 has moved from construction into industrialization…. stamping, body, paint and final assembly systems all being installed and commissioned ahead of production trials. Lucid has also been expanding AMP-2 toward completely built-up vehicle production and substantial additional capacity. Midsize production is still planned to start there first.

So I stopped asking where Lucid is cutting and started asking something different:

**What is Lucid refusing to cut?** And then I dug into the people.

**The Workforce Underneath AMP-2**

Saudi-linked Lucid profiles run to about 4% of the observed workforce in my dataset, and this is not a sales organization for imported luxury EVs.

The roles include advanced manufacturing engineering, manufacturing controls, production control and material planning, stamping, electric-powertrain maintenance, quality engineering, facility integration and maintenance, capital-project engineering, general assembly, operational excellence, logistics, purchasing, trade compliance, electrical engineering, and technical training. I take the time to list all of those out because that’s factory stuff…. not just fancy showroom stuff. This is important- keep reading.

But the previous employers are where it gets better. General Motors. Ford. Honda. Siemens. Porsche Saudi Arabia. Saudi Electricity Company. Local industrial firms. Regional automotive distributors. Wow. And did I mention that the progressions are visible in the data. T**hey’re taking people out of the big manufacturers, bringing them in at engineering level, then moving them up into senior advanced manufacturing roles.** Someone comes over from Ford in business-process transformation and lands in Lucid logistics. Another moves from Saudi Electricity into advanced manufacturing engineering. Another holds a senior electrical-engineering role with **AMP-2, KSA** stamped right on it.

Think about what those people actually carry around in their heads.

How to launch a production line. How to run lean. How to commission equipment. How to manage quality. How to control material flow. How to develop a supplier. How to keep an automotive plant running when something inevitably goes sideways at two in the morning.

Saudi Arabia is not trying to spend several decades learning every one of those lessons the hard way. It’s hiring people who already learned them somewhere else.

Now of course you could just argue back, well yeah, all companies try to hire the top talent. Or ofc ourse they learned from other companies. That is the norm right? Actually not really. Not all companies stay focused on hiring top talent or specifically picking the right people from the right places to help them move forward. Lucid has done an epic job of this. The only other companies in this industry I have seen have such a great hiring methodology are Tesla and Nio. But back to Saudi Arabia…..

The timing is impeccable. A cluster of these Saudi roles for advanced manufacturing, manufacturing controls, the AMP-2 electrical engineer, stamping and BIW launch, powertrain maintenance, senior quality… were added or stepped up across late 2025 into mid-2026\. This is precisely the window in which AMP-2 crossed from construction into industrialization. The hires precede and coincide with the physical transition. That’s a factory being staffed to run. There’s also a Lucid technical trainer in there… and a trainee whose previous job was operating heavy equipment.

Hold that thought. It matters later, and I’ll come back to it.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/73/d5/73d5a312-f20a-4227-b705-ab5739021bdc/content/images/2026/09/7de6cc20-ddcb-4669-9572-cef2075a3e87_3000x2200.png)

## When I Looked at Ceer… That Changed the Whole Piece

Lucid alone can be explained away, and I want to be honest about that. PIF has billions in the company. Of course it wants AMP-2 to work. Protecting your own investment is expected.

Ceer is a totally different animal.

Ceer is Saudi Arabia’s own EV company, a joint venture between PIF and Foxconn, built from nothing. Its workforce is being assembled piece by piece out of the global automotive industry.

In my dataset, observed Ceer headcount grew roughly 20% between August 2025 and mid-2026, with very little attrition pushing the other way. Ceer is really compounding. But… that isn’t the interesting part.

The talent Ceer has been hiring is a notch up. Tool-room specialists and tool-room leadership, press-shop specialists, supplier-development leadership, body-shop technical support, vehicle-test engineers, electrical-engineering technicians, quality and warranty expertise, cost engineering, and manufacturing support.

Stellantis is the single largest source in the flow data, with Gestamp and Hyundai close behind. Then Tata Motors, VinFast, Ford, Škoda/Volkswagen, Jaguar Land Rover, Aston Martin.

- **A group leader who came through Tata and Škoda Volkswagen.**
- **A supplier-development lead with years of JLR behind him.**
- **An electrical-engineering technician out of Hyundai.**
- **And a tool-room capability arriving from Gestamp, one of the largest metal-forming and body-structure suppliers on the planet.**

You are talking major OEM knowledge, supplier knowledge, and consulting knowledge… all of it landing in the same place at the same time. So this isn’t headcount growth. I know most people stop at the headline number because it’s easy and it plugs into a model. You have to look further in.

And here’s the part that moves this from my interpretation to something considerably harder to argue with.

**Ceer says knowledge transfer is the point.**

When PIF launched the company, it framed the objective as building a sustainable automotive industrial base that would promote the transfer of knowledge into the Kingdom and create jobs. Not sell EVs. *Transfer knowledge.*

Remember that phrase. Transfer knowledge.

I would be remiss to not mention that PIF hired James DeLuca to run Ceer.

Before Ceer, DeLuca was VinFast’s first CEO… he stood up a car company in Vietnam from a standing start. Before that he ran GM’s global manufacturing. 220K+ employees, 171 plants, 31 countries. If your actual objective is to learn how to build an automotive industry from scratch, that is a very specific person to go get.

So now I have three things pointing the same direction, and they were assembled independently:

1. **The stated corporate purpose says knowledge transfer.**
2. **The CEO hire is a global manufacturing operator with a from-zero build already on his resume.**
3. **The workforce data… which knows nothing about either of those…. shows exactly the flow you’d expect if both were true.**

That is about as close to corroboration as this kind of research gets.

## And YES, the Factory Matches the People… Because a hiring pattern with no concrete behind it is just a spreadsheet. You have to dive in.

Ceer’s manufacturing complex in King Abdullah Economic City runs press shop, body shop, paint shop, general assembly, logistics, warehousing and vehicle testing. Ceer partnered with Schuler for what it calls the first fully automatic press shop of its kind in the region, with Dürr for the advanced paint shop and with Rimac Technology for integrated electric drive systems

In February it announced 16 further commercial agreements worth SAR 3.7 billion, on top of SAR 5.5 billion the year before. And the stated localization target is 45% of vehicle materials and components sourced from Saudi companies by 2034.

Now go back to the hiring list. Press-shop people, Tool-room people, Supplier development, Body shop, Electrical engineering, Vehicle testing, Quality…. **The people map matches the physical build, line for line.**

Press shop goes in, press-shop specialists get hired. Localization target gets set, supplier-development leadership arrives. And I know the reaction to that is going to be, well, obviously those would look the same.

Let me again say… very rarely do companies do what they say they’re doing behind the scenes. You don’t normally see the right kind of hiring, let alone the right caliber of person in those specific roles, at the right moment.

So this is actually major. This hiring is operational.

**Sovereign capital gets analyzed through money.**

**How much did PIF put in?**

**What’s the ownership percentage?**

**the valuation?**

**What’s the eventual return?**

**All fair questions for sure. But a portfolio company can transfer something that isn’t financial return too.**

**It can transfer institutional knowledge.**

**It can *build* institutional knowledge.**

Put Lucid and Ceer side by side. Across the two organizations, Saudi Arabia is accumulating expertise in tooling, assembly, manufacturing controls, quality, supplier development, powertrain, maintenance, logistics and procurement. Yes, that’s an entire automotive operating system… and virtually all of it originated inside companies that spent decades and a great deal of money figuring it out. Say what you want about their recent difficulties… they already went through these processes and worked it out. If it isn’t broken, why would you rebuild it? Capital buys the factory and the RIGHT people bring the operating system.

And once that knowledge is inside the country, it can move again. A Saudi manufacturing engineer trained at Lucid doesn’t have to stay at Lucid forever. She can go to Ceer. Or to a supplier. Or to another PIF company. Or to an industrial business that doesn’t exist yet. At which point some portion of the return on PIF’s investment lives entirely outside any individual company’s financial statements. Are you seeing the incredible investment happening here.

Saudi Arabia has acquired capability. That right there is the asset.

And this isn’t only about cars, which is how I know it’s a method and not a one-off.

Through PIF-owned Alat, Saudi Arabia entered a strategic relationship with Lenovo that included a large Riyadh manufacturing facility capable of producing two million-plus devices a year under a “Made in Saudi Arabia” label. Alat’s stated purpose is turning the Kingdom into a global manufacturing hub for electronics and industrials powered by clean energy. Look at the engineers.

Saudi graduate engineers were sent up to Lenovo’s existing global manufacturing sites for training. Then they came home. Earlier this year Alat welcomed back a cohort of 28 who had completed that training abroad. That’s the whole mechanism in miniature: **Capital goes out. Knowledge comes back.** Alat isn’t being coy about it at all either. It describes the program in terms of strengthening industrial capability, accelerating knowledge transfer, and building a skilled Saudi workforce… the same language you’ll find in the 2026–2030 strategy.

So the pattern at Lucid and Ceer isn’t some exotic reading of tea leaves on my part. It’s a localization mechanism PIF companies are already running elsewhere, in a completely different industry, and describing out loud while they do it. This isn’t entirely new, either. But it has solidified enormously workforce wise in the last 2-3 years.

**But Can You Import a Workforce Forever?**

You really can’t.

Importing expertise solves the first problem. It does nothing for the 2035 problem. Eventually Saudi Arabia has to make more of these people itself. And this is where yet another layer shows up.

PIF seeded the National Automotive and Vehicles Academy (NAVA) specifically to build the technical workforce this industry needs. NAVA has since signed workforce-development agreements with Ceer, Lucid and the Hyundai JV, including employment-based training and specialized technical courses. In November 2025, Ceer and NAVA created an automotive manufacturing technology diploma. Ceer’s stated approach is explicitly two-track: attract global talent, develop local expertise. Import and grow, at the same time.

Now remember that Lucid technical trainer? And the trainee who used to run heavy equipment? That’s the same machine, one layer down, and it’s already making moves. Now go further upstream. Much further. That’s where Formula E comes back into the story.

Driving Force targets kids aged eight to eighteen. It isn’t training tomorrow’s press-shop manager. It’s doing something much earlier and much cheaper… making a 13 year old interested in the technology in the first place, and showing her there’s a job on the other side of it. PIF describes the initiative in terms of creating future motorsport talent and innovators in sustainable mobility.

So the pipeline ends up looking like this

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/73/d5/73d5a312-f20a-4227-b705-ab5739021bdc/content/images/2026/09/09c713a6-78dc-4d28-a83c-3fabef6b8fdb_2640x1520.png)

That is an absurdly long-duration investment. Nobody running quarterly capital makes it. ***Which is precisely the kind of thing a sovereign wealth fund exists to do.***

Before I go any further into the network, I want to stop and say why I do research this way at all. Because for my money it’s the whole point. Financial analysis is going to see all of this late. Not through incompetence… just through the details.

- **A factory hits revenue after production starts.**
- **Supplier localization shows up after contracts are awarded.**
- **Human capital becomes measurable after people are trained.**
- **An industrial ecosystem becomes obvious once it already exists, which is exactly the moment it stops being a trade.**
- **Hiring shows up earlier.**

Ceer bringing on tool-room and press-shop specialists tells you its operational stage before any volume number does. Lucid protecting and adding Saudi advanced-manufacturing capability while cutting nearly everything else tells you where management refuses to even blink. Workers walking out of established OEMs into Saudi companies show you where industrial knowledge is accumulating. Training agreements tell you what skills a company expects to need. Education programs tell you where policymakers think demand will be a decade out.

And there’s a broader point in the Lucid case I want to keep hold of: **a falling workforce is not automatically a strategic retreat.** When a company is cutting hundreds of people and starving discretionary projects, what it *continues* funding becomes far more informative than what it cuts. AMP-2 is one of only four must-win priorities. And the workforce underneath it looks like a factory being prepared to operate. Ordinary workforce analysis sees the layoffs. The signal is in what survived them. Which is why total headcount is usually the least interesting number on the page. Where people come from, what they know, what they were hired to do, and where those skills cluster… that’s the data.

So that’s the mechanism… but proving the mechanism only gets you halfway. The moment you accept that PIF is importing capability rather than just buying assets, the portfolio stops being the thing worth watching. The connections *between* the portfolio companies become the thing worth watching.

Formula E looks difference in this lens…. Saudi investment in sport usually gets discussed through tourism, entertainment, and visibility. Those readings aren’t wrong, but electric motorsport sits unusually close to an industry PIF is simultaneously spending billions trying to build.

PIF bundles Formula E, Extreme H and E1 electric powerboats under its E360 partnership, and says outright that the purpose is using motorsport to advance technology, sustainable mobility and race-to-road technology transfer. Mind you… that’s their phrase, not mine.

So look at what’s stacked up.

**Formula E brings the racing.**

**GEN4 brings the technology… 600 kilowatts, 815-plus horsepower, active all-wheel drive, built to stay relevant to road-car engineering rather than diverge from it.**

**Driving Force brings the education.**

**Lucid and Ceer bring the vehicles and the factories.**

**EVIQ brings charging.**

**The Pirelli JV brings tires.**

**TASARU brings mobility investment.**

**And Saudi Arabia brings the industrial capacity.**

None of that requires a secret master plan to reinforce itself.

\*One important caveat, and I’m not going to fudge it. PIF does not control Formula E. Liberty Global does, with a 65% controlling interest. PIF is a strategic partner. That puts Formula E in a very specific box on my map: partner, not controlled…which is exactly where I’d look for future optionality. The relationship keeps progressing thru sponsorship, then E360, then Saudi races, then STEM, then technology positioning, then workforce development, then what? Well it is simple… the asset itself is appreciating around them. Three days before the Driving Force announcement, Formula E signed a multi-year deal making Disney+ and ESPN+ its global streaming home across 144 territories, starting with the 2026/27 GEN4 season.

Liberty, for its part, has substantially reshaped its corporate operating model and is rotating capital toward assets with structural tailwinds. So you’ve got a controlled sports and media asset picking up global distribution and a new technology platform at the exact moment a sovereign fund is embedding itself deeper into its education, technology and event layers.

When a sovereign investor moves from *sponsoring* motorsport to *integrating motorsport into industrial policy*, the ownership layer becomes worth a watch… and crucially… you need to know who’s suddenly hiring motorsport and automotive executives.

Gaming needs care, so let me flag the thinner evidence up front. PIF spent years building gaming and esports exposure through Savvy. Then it went much bigger. PIF, Silver Lake and Affinity Partners agreed to take Electronic Arts private at roughly $55 billion enterprise value… around $36 billion of equity and roughly $20 billion of committed debt… with PIF rolling its existing 9.9% stake and emerging as majority owner. EA is not a random publisher. It’s global sports IP, hundreds of millions of users, simulation and game technology, AI development capability, and an enormous distribution layer: EA Sports FC - Madden- F1- WRC.

The consortium described the opportunity in terms of combining networks across gaming, entertainment and sports, and potentially blending physical and digital experiences. That is unusually on-theme language. The hard line I’m drawing here is that there is no current evidence that PIF acquired EA in order to connect EA’s F1 or simulation IP to Formula E, Lucid or Ceer. I’m not making that claim. Gaming is an adjacent capability on this map. What makes it worth monitoring is that PIF’s own strategy now explicitly prioritizes portfolio synergy. If those connections start appearing operationally… through people, technology, partnerships or products, then the signal totally changes. For now: watch it, don’t assume it. I’ll be keeping an eye on it.

**Then there is Uber…** The autonomous side needs much less interpretation, because the connections are documented rather than inferred. PIF invested $3.5 billion in Uber in 2016… one of its largest international transactions at the time, and its first major move after Vision 2030 was announced. And the investment came with a board seat, which is pretty great. 10 years later, Uber is trying to become the global commercialization layer for autonomous vehicles. It’s talking about roughly $10 billion of AV investment over multiple years and something like 120,000 vehicle commitments, with milestone-structured investments in AV partners designed to give it roadmap visibility and a place near the front of the line.

Dara Khosrowshahi compares the coming AV landscape to AI… multiple competing providers, with Uber as the commercialization layer on top. And Uber says it’s already working with third-party financial sponsors to *financialize the ecosystem.* Their word, ecosystem. An open acknowledgment that scaling this needs outside patient capital.

Guess who’s been an Uber shareholder for a decade. Guess who backs one of its vehicle suppliers. In April, three things happened close together. Uber raised its Lucid investment to $500 million. PIF affiliate Ayar committed another $550 million through Series C preferred. And Uber expanded its purchase commitment to at least 35,000 Lucid vehicles for its global robotaxi service, with midsize production expected to begin late 2028\. PIF didn’t stop at the preferred either. Lucid’s PIF-provided delayed-draw term loan was increased by another $500 million, $500 million was drawn in April, and roughly $2 billion of undrawn capacity remained after that.

The architecture is not complicated.

**Lucid** builds the vehicle. **Nuro** provides the autonomy. **Uber** brings customers, network and commercialization. **PIF** wraps long-duration capital around all of it.

And then there’s governance.

I’d argue the leadership layer is the single most underrated part of this story, because it’s the piece that converts “these companies are adjacent” into “these companies are connected.”

**Mohammed bin Salman** sits at the strategic level. Chairman of PIF. He’s also chairman of Savvy Games Group, whose own governance materials describe its mission, under his vision, as making Saudi Arabia a global games and esports hub. National industrial strategy on one side, national gaming champion on the other, same person at the top.

**Yasir Al-Rumayyan** is PIF’s governor and runs overall capital strategy. He was originally PIF’s representative on Uber’s board… SEC filings identify him as such explicitly.

**Turqi Alnowaiser** is the connective node, and honestly he’s been far more central to this than I realized when I started.

He’s PIF’s Deputy Governor and Head of International Investments. He joined Lucid’s board in 2019 and became its chairman in 2023\. He joined Uber’s board in November 2023, taking over the PIF governance link from Al-Rumayyan. And when the $55 billion EA transaction was announced, he was PIF’s quoted executive explaining it, talking about investing heavily in EA’s growth including AI in game development.

So one man sits across:

**Uber** mobility platform… board director **Lucid** EV technology and Saudi manufacturing… chairman **EA** gaming, sports IP, simulation… deal leadership

That is not a coincidence you can wave off. It’s an org chart.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/73/d5/73d5a312-f20a-4227-b705-ab5739021bdc/content/images/2026/09/91a437cc-ffbc-460a-a5e7-2c3dd8d5702e_3300x1971.png)

Saudi PIF company and org chart

And Khosrowshahi made it explicit on Uber’s August 5 earnings call. Discussing Lucid’s ability to execute on the robotaxi order, he pointed to Lucid’s new management, its integration work with Nuro, and continued PIF backing… then voluntarily reminded investors that PIF is a long-term Uber investor with board representation. We didn’t have to infer that connection at all. Uber’s own CEO drew it for us, unprompted, on the record.

One boundary I do want to keep plain: **Silver Lake doesn’t belong inside the industrial ecosystem.** They’re a financial and execution partner on EA… technology investing and LBO expertise alongside PIF’s patient capital and existing stake. Different box.

Then, we have the dates… This is the bit I nearly missed, and it might be the most practically useful thing in here.

The April Series C wasn’t generic preferred capital. Ayar and PIF put $550 million in for 55,000 Series C preferred shares at an initial conversion price of $10.816, representing roughly 50.85 million common shares at the time…. about 15% of Lucid’s then-outstanding common, with customary anti-dilution protection. The August registration puts that potential common-share equivalent at 51.65 million as of June 30, so it’s already drifted.

But more interesting than the size is the calendar buried in the documents.

**April 28, 2026**: financing closes. PIF agrees not to transfer the Series C, or the common received from it, for twelve months without Lucid’s consent.

**April 2027**: that restriction expires. I’d characterize this as PIF’s liquidity and transfer optionality date, not an exit date. Nothing here says PIF plans to sell. But one constraint on what it can do with that block disappears.

**Around October 2027**: because conversion or redemption could bump into Nasdaq issuance limits, Lucid and Ayar agreed to cooperate on obtaining any necessary shareholder approval, with Ayar consenting, no later than eighteen months after closing.

**October 2027**: separately, Uber’s 24.04 million shares become transferable under the lockup described in the new prospectus.

**Late 2028**: midsize robotaxi production expected to begin. At AMP-2\. In Saudi Arabia.

That’s a cluster worth putting on a wall. Two large strategic holders see transfer restrictions fall away within roughly six months of each other. An issuance-mechanics approval window closes in the same stretch. And the manufacturing program they’re all pointed at starts producing about a year later. I’m not predicting anything from that, I’m saying it gives us a specific set of dates against which to monitor capital, ownership and workforce behavior.

Put the major pieces on a rough timeline and the shape gets much easier to see.

**2016**: PIF invests $3.5bn in Uber and takes a board seat. First major international move after Vision 2030.

**2018–2023**: PIF builds its Lucid position. Alnowaiser joins the Lucid board in 2019, becomes chairman in 2023, and joins Uber’s board the same year.

**2022**: PIF and Foxconn launch Ceer. The stated ambition isn’t selling EVs. It’s building a Saudi automotive industry, transferring knowledge, creating jobs.

**2023–2024**: Saudi automotive manufacturing takes physical shape. Ceer starts its complex, Lucid develops AMP-2, Ceer signs Schuler for the press shop and Rimac for electric drive systems. Liberty Global moves to a 65% controlling interest in Formula E.

**2025**: The human-capital layer arrives in force. NAVA signs workforce agreements across Ceer, Lucid and the Hyundai JV. Ceer and NAVA create the automotive manufacturing technology diploma. PIF and Formula E launch Driving Force. Uber, Lucid and Nuro deepen the robotaxi partnership. PIF, Silver Lake and Affinity announce the $55bn EA transaction.

**2026**: Ceer adds another SAR 3.7bn of supplier agreements and targets 45% localization by 2034\. Lucid begins a major corporate reset while continuing to advance AMP-2\. Uber expands to at least 35,000 vehicles and raises its investment; PIF adds $550m plus loan capacity. Lenovo’s Riyadh manufacturing advances while Saudi engineers return from training abroad. Driving Force expands again. Formula E signs Disney+ and ESPN+ across 144 territories. And PIF formally enters its Value Realization phase.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/73/d5/73d5a312-f20a-4227-b705-ab5739021bdc/content/images/2026/09/49a983c2-5ad2-4195-9692-7f920614387b_3359x1754.png)

Any single event on that list has an ordinary explanation. The sequence is what interests me: capital first, then assets, then physical capacity, then supply chain, then academies…. all to create the future.

The greatest part of this… it is not about accumulating a portfolio… it is straight up how you build an industry. One thing worth keeping in mind about the capital itself. PIF can underwrite a factory whose workforce won't exist for a decade. The cost of capital isn't the constraint here…. the capability is. That changes what "return" even means on these positions.

The discipline that keeps this from becoming fan fiction is separating what PIF owns from what it merely touches.

Layer Status Notes Lucid Backed / chaired PIF capital, loan facility, board chairmanship. Not outright control.

Ceer Owned (JV) PIF + Foxconn. Explicit knowledge-transfer mandate.

Alat / Lenovo Owned / strategic PIF company; Lenovo is a partner, not a holding. Savvy Owned PIF company. MBS chairs.

EA Controlled (consortium) PIF majority with Silver Lake and Affinity. Uber Minority + board seat Long-duration holding, real governance link.

Formula E Partner — not controlled - Liberty Global holds 65%. Relationship deepening.

NAVA / Driving Force Seeded / sponsored Human-capital infrastructure.

The crazy thing… I haven’t even dug into batteries, power electronics, automotive semis, sensors, industrial robotics, simulation, autonomy stack, vehicle software, specialized materials, testing and validation, manufacturing equipment, charging at scale, fleet financing, motorsport technology suppliers, or media rights yet.

The question is no longer whether PIF wants Saudi Arabia to have a mobility and advanced-manufacturing ecosystem. The better question for anyone with money at stake: **what is that ecosystem still short of?**

Go back to the bottom row of that table. Every gap is a requirement.. .and those will eventually turn into capital, partnerships, suppliers, acquisitions… or people.

Usually people first. You have to know what you’re buying before you buy it, and knowing generally means hiring somebody who already knows.

I'll keep pulling on this one. If the workforce data starts showing something that breaks the thesis, you'll read it here first.

Amanda