The Global Risks Report 2026 offers fresh insights into the evolving landscape of global risks in both the near and long term.
How is the perception of risk shifting over time, as crises become increasingly interconnected and frequent?
At Davos, the panel unpacked the Global Risks Report 2026 and its stark split between near- and long-term threats. In the next two years, “geoeconomic confrontation” tops the list, alongside misinformation and polarization; over ten years, environmental risks dominate. Nigeria’s finance minister Wale Edun argued fragmentation is no longer hypothetical: “It is here. It is real,” warning that reduced trade means lower global output, FX stress, and rising inequality. He noted a shift from multilateral rules to bilateral “transactions,” often tied to raw materials and critical minerals.
Brandon Daniels (Exiger) described supply chains as “diamonds,” with scarce chokepoints, pushing firms to plan “five years out,” localize capabilities, and demand “global transparency” amid large-scale tariff evasion. He also flagged AI-amplified cyber risk via compromised open-source code. Investor Raj Ganguly (B Capital) called AI “foundational” but cautioned today’s valuations assume “100% perfect execution,” while infrastructure and energy constraints could bite; “AI…will consume more energy by 2030” than the US population if unmanaged. Florence Gaub (NATO Defense College) urged sobriety: risk rankings reflect present anxiety; war feels “back” mainly to those who forgot it never left. Despite the warnings, panelists emphasized opportunity: innovation accelerates “when…back to the wall,” and prosperity will depend on investment and adaptive policy.
Good morning everyone here in the room and following us live from around the world. We're here in Davos and excited to kick off a conversation on global risks in numbers. One of the most, anticipated publications every year, published by the World Economic Forum is the Global Risk Report. It came out last week. My name is David Bach. I'm president of IMD, a global business school here in Switzerland. And this is one of those publications that I always have close by, because it is so helpful in framing the conversations that leaders in business and government and civil societies have throughout the year. And the risk report was published a week ago. But this is an opportunity for a group of experts to share some of their thoughts, some of their reflections on what they've seen in the data and, more broadly, how they think about risk in this upcoming year. We have a terrific panel. I'll introduce our panelists briefly, and then I'll share a couple of highlights from the report, and we'll get right into the discussion. Sitting next to me is the Honorable Wale Edun, who is the Arun, who is the Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister for the Economy of Nigeria. Welcome to you, sir. Thank you. Next to him is Florence Gaub. She's research director at the NATO Defense College. Welcome. We have, Brandon. So I'm doing it in the reverse order. Raj Gangulu, who is the co-founder and co-CEO of B capital. Good morning to you. And last but not least, Brandon Daniels, CEO of Exiger, who's here as well. Thank you for joining us. So as I said, this is sort of a must read. And even though we live in a digital work world, I print this one because I then keep it close by. And those of you who've looked at it would have seen that one of the big changes in this year's report is the search of Geoeconomic confrontation to the very top of the leaderboard. Misinformation and disinformation is the second highest ranked risk. Societal polarization. These are the short term risks of the next two years. And then there are a number of other risks, of course, that make the top ten, long term, ten years, all of them focused on nature and the environment, extreme weather events, biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, critical change to Earth's systems. These are the long term risks that the 1800 or so survey respondents are pointing out. And of course, as always, it isn't just about the individual risks. It's about the interaction of those risks, how they link with one another. And so all of this gives us lots of food for thought to dig into. Minister, if I could start with you, the sort of, rise of geo economic tensions is certainly something that we have all felt over the past year. And it's not surprising that that rises to the very top of the list of risks, at least in the short term, over the next two years. How do you think about this current moment? How concerned are you about the fragmentation of the global economy of global trade, and what might be the consequences for economic growth and ultimately for prosperity?
Thank you very much, David. Of course. At this time, the geopolitical fragmentation and I will focus particularly on global trade, which is, really a key factor, at this time is not so much a question of the risk of fragmentation. It is here. It is real. And, of course, for developing countries in particular, but for the world in general, we all know that, the gains of trade, we saw the gains of globalization. Now we have a retreat, from globalization. Globalization. We have, the prospect of reduced trade, reduced global trade, leading to, in fact, reduced global output, according to the figures, that I have seen. And the point there is that global trade is like a tide that lifts all boats. And so for us, as, the developing world, when you roll back trade, it leads to foreign exchange pressures. It leads to, domestic pressures, societal pressures. And, it leaves us, much worse off than we would be if we had a system of a rules based, trading system that was predictable, that was, reliable. So I think that, for us, in the developing world, which, if you forgive me for emphasizing, is that, given this particular, huge risk which is coming to bear and which, is manifesting more and more and as you say, the geopolitics of it is that, we have a move to fragmentation, to bilateral agreements, to uncertainty in terms of, what will happen next in terms of the relationships. And of course, as emerging markets, we are also affected in that we do suffer some of these, import, taxes and some of these tariffs. And of course, it is at a time when the, developing world is looking to, reform and make itself a strong and resilient and able to attract investment. So, it's a huge risk. And, we are looking at, looking inwards as a way of mitigating it.
I'm glad that you reminded us that even though often the news coverage of trade conflicts is, is this country going to win or is that country going to win in the end? Everybody loses when there's less opportunity to trade and to exchange. I think in the past, in many ways, what what drove the global economy was this quest for efficiency, for scale, for opportunity. Are we now in a phase when national security and geopolitical considerations, sort of questions around security and risk are increasingly going to shape trade policy and global economic policy?
Certainly that's what we are seeing. And, it really is a question now of what transaction can you bring to the table? What can you, be important for? So, a country like, my own country, Nigeria, we look to the fact that, despite our push for industrialization, for value added, what is of geopolitical importance is our raw materials, our critical minerals and, that access to the ability to sit down and do a bilateral transaction so that I think, is shaping the world so much more, than previously. And it is forcing us to try to look for a transaction that can be done that will be of interest to the major, countries that are basically, have decided that that is the way to go. As you look to the the reality is the rolling back of multilateralism, the less, willingness really to fund emerging market economies. And that has led has led us, as I said, not just to relying on our own resources, but also to be part of the geopolitical conversation, is what I would say.
Brennan, if I can turn to you, you and your team work with companies supporting them in managing many of these challenges. How are companies dealing with this landscape that the minister described, how the global trading system is, is fragmenting and increasingly politicized.
So, thank you for the question. And it was and just to, piggyback off of what His Excellency said, you know, we build the most advanced artificial intelligence and we apply it to, restoring, designing and securing supply chains. And so for our customers, the single biggest issue and all of the issues that we're in, the global risk report line up with what we're seeing in real time. But the way that we're seeing our customers, which the 150 of the fortune 500 and then the world's largest defense and, global trade agencies and organizations, I mean, we're the largest supply chain risk company by, by by a large margin. The way that we're seeing them deal with it is to recognize that supply chains are not these ever growing, scaling pyramids. They don't scale out for you have one top tier supplier, and that goes into millions. The way that it actually works is instead of a big pyramid, they're diamonds. And at the end of those diamonds, there are critical capabilities that are really extremely scarce. And in many cases, scarcity comes also with, a backdrop of global logistics. So, you know, in the United States, there are only two companies that are as 909 As9100 certified for magnesium castings, in the world for high purity quartz that's capable of actually growing silicon ingots, 90% of our capacity comes out of spruce pine, North Carolina. You know, the we've we've talked a lot about critical minerals requirements. You know, the amount of capacity that the United States needs, for antimony over the next two years for all of our use cases, could fit in the back of a dump truck. And so what we see our customers doing is starting to take supply chain planning out of this, like, sort of last mile logistics analytics, which gets you five days, five weeks out and they're starting to plan five years out. They're starting to skip that fat middle of manufacturers, distributors and sort of that diverse supply chain in the middle. And look for both one, local and domestic sources of critical minerals, of capacities of materials, alternative processes that can take over some of the things that have been traditionally very hard to do, like forgings and castings and moving those over to new digital technologies like Divergent and Hadrian, which are now printing and retooling manufacturing on the, on the fly. And then the second thing is, and this is actually really interesting because you bring it back to national security, about about 35% of our business is defense technology. So Dow Mod right. And what we're seeing them do is actually look more to indigenous capabilities. So in Africa, in Southeast Asia looking for real partnerships where we can start to scale out materials and then bring in some of these innovative printing technologies or organic, industrial based capabilities to actually utilize resources at the site. And that's where I think we can start to see a greater degree of global collaboration is in trying to build locally with the resources that are local for local needs, right. The second thing is, I've, I've been working with the white House for over the summer as the white House twice a week. And I've been working with the white House on, on tariff evasion and tariff policy. And one of the things that we realized is that the volume of transshipment that is occurring, illegal transshipment, illicit transshipment, where things are miscategorized as coming from another country, they're obfuscated, they're dangerous, and illicit goods coming in. The volume of it is at a scale that we didn't previously think possible. We did a report with Goldman Sachs, which I'm hoping gets published, where where we estimated about 70 billion of transshipment from China alone this year. And so one of the things that I think we also need to do in order to get to global collaboration is global transparency. And, you know, David Sacks and many others have been pushing the ability to sell chips globally as an example. Well, as long as there's transparency to the end use, as long as you have visibility to that. We should be utilizing our relative strengths on a global basis to create an open and free trade market. But right now, there's a lot of hurdles and challenges to that.
So I appreciate how you helped us understand that. While the conversation about supply chains is often framed in terms of risks and sort of inefficiency as a result of what's happening, you're saying that that quest for more resilience and a longer time horizon actually does provide opportunities for new types of collaboration, new types of investment. Your company uses technology to help companies identify these risks and plan, but technology itself can be a source of risk. So number six on the risk report is is cyber insecurity. We're seeing this dramatic automation dark factories in China right. Technology plays a much bigger role. What is the role of cyber in this. And sort of the emerging cyber physical nexus in global supply chains?
One of the things that blew my mind on the report is how dramatically the two year to the ten year top risks shifted. Because if if you're working in AI today, like I spent my entire break working on, anti-gravity, which is Google's new platform to help you, use AI to code enterprise applications. If if anyone is worried about anything, you should be worried about cyber threats, because the way that these tools are essentially leveraging open source technology and open source repos, data is they're copying and pasting essentially from things that work. Now, if you look at Shai Hulud, if you look at the NX, attacks, which are massive, I mean, the best cybersecurity companies in the world, CrowdStrike, Mandiant became hosts for those, npm, npm attacks for the actual malware. If you look at these, what they do is they take the your requirement to use these open source libraries. They wait until they go sort of into, into a sustainment mode, and they're no longer committers. And then they inject a committer that is nefarious. And so if you're writing code, I mean, I believe that in a year we might be writing 70% of our code greenfield and having it all driven by AI with senior developers. If you're not securing that on the back end, that is going to create pervasive, unknown risks inside of our technology infrastructure. And we've seen attacks by state sponsored entities in all directions in the last two years. That should shock us and worry us. So I cannot believe that cyber is not up there. And I couldn't believe, honestly, that also economic stability isn't up there because AI creates that same risk like we will need at at my company, we will need different new and not, maybe not as many engineers as we would have ten years ago as we would have five years ago, as we would have a year ago. And it feels like that's accelerating on me every day. So I, I was really surprised by the fact that weather events jumped up again. You know, when looking at the pace of change that we're actually dealing with right now.
Right? And it is something that we should come back to again, the interaction, right, that this globalization potentially going into reverse deprives, you know, many people not just in emerging markets, but there of opportunities. And at the same time, we're getting hit by this wave of automation. Raj, you're an investor. You have a little bit that that lens at B capital. So first of all, the question, one of the questions on the minds of everyone, AI bubble. Yes. No going to burst. And then maybe take it a little bit further about what are some of the risks inherent in the fact that these technology companies have been become so central to the way global markets function?
Thanks for the question. And, you know, I think the report clearly highlights that there is increased concern about an AI bubble. Whether it's an equity bubble or an asset bubble, I think there's there's lots of debate over. I think, you know, just to take a step back, there's three really important things about AI. First is AI is a transformative technology. And I'll come back to kind of, you know, the level of, of impact that we believe it'll have. Second is that for AI to really be rolled out evenly, we need massive investment in infrastructure. And third, is that a lot of the investments that are happening in AI today are based on assuming 100% perfect execution. And we know from having done this for a while that most, most companies aren't going to have 100% execution. But the nice thing about venture capitalists is our memories are like a goldfish. So, while most people in the world always think about the fact that, oh, this has been done before and it can't be, you know, it didn't work. I think one of the things about being a venture capitalist is you have to be optimistic and believe that, that things can be different. And so just to go back to the first one, AI is it's a foundational technology, and it's building on all of the other foundational technologies. So it builds on the internet, it builds on cloud, it builds on mobile. But it's probably it's impact will probably be greater than all of those. And so, you know, do I think that the level of optimism about it is right? Absolutely. Do I think that the optimism is, potentially, a little bit too near-term and that some of this is going to take a bit longer? Probably. And, you know, I think there's things like cloud code that are getting as close to AGI as, as I've seen. I'm not sure I want any of my kids to become a programmer anymore. And to Brandon's point, I think we're all going to need less programmers and programmers who cost 400 $500,000. I think in the next couple of years, you'll see that AI can do some of those tasks at about $25 for for a year. Second is infrastructure. We just need massive investment in infrastructure to really make AI work. You're seeing that investment happen, the investment is uneven, and there's some concerns that the investment that's required will outstrip the capital that that's there and that there's a lot of policy uncertainty also, which makes long term investment more difficult. You know, for us, we've started you know, we're traditionally investors in tech and healthcare. We've started an energy investment team because we think energy is so incredibly important over the next 5 to 10 years to really power AI. You've seen in the US, there's a political backlash happening to the price of energy going up, people believing that it's being driven by data centers. I think the data is unclear about whether it's really driven by data centers. There's a lot of issues on the west coast of the US with fires and transmission lies East coast has its own issues. But AI, you know, if left unmanaged, AI will consume more energy by 2030 than the human population in the US will. And that obviously, you know, we don't have the the grid and the infrastructure to be able to do that. You know, third, our investment in in AI, we're fundamental investors. We're looking at the foundation of the unit economics, the the timeline it's going to take for these companies to be successful. But there is a lot of optimism. I think, you know, if you look at venture capital, venture capital is full of underwriting companies to, you know, I think venture capitalists probably underwrite 50 to 75% of their companies to be unicorns. And we all know that unicorns are much less prevalent. So there's a lot of optimism. I think that optimism needs to be tempered. But AI is fundamentally transformative. So I think, you know, are we in a bubble or not is less important than really understanding the fundamentals of how AI will progress over the next 5 to 10 years?
That's great. Thank you. And you mentioned energy. And of course, this demand for energy that is increasing, you know, everywhere, not just because of AI, as you just reminded us, and of course, planetary boundaries are real. We see that also in the risk report and that environmental issues and concerns are number one, two and three, ten years out. They always seem to be one, two and three, ten years out. And we may have to ask ourselves what sort of happens? Why is it always ten years out? But as you're thinking about investing in the energy space, how much of that is done with an eye to its environmental sustainability? In much of the world, renewables are cost competitive and parts of the world the policy environment around that has has shifted. What's sort of your investment thesis around energy and sustainability in the context of this identification of long term environmental risks?
That's a great question. I you know, fundamentally what was striking about the report, and I think Brennan made this point also, is that in the ten year time horizon, most of the risks are climate related, environmental related. But in the shorter time horizon, it's really dropped. So one interesting thing is, are people basically saying in the long term it's still a very serious issue, but in the short term, let's just focus on AI and making a lot of money, because who cares about the long term. I'm not sure if that's exactly what the report is saying. Our view on this is that our investing in energy is driven by two things cheaper and faster. We need cheaper, faster technology. Now, does that mean that we're investing in coal? We're not because we think that, you know, while it's an interesting technology and it can be cheap, it's just not, long term sustainable. We are, though, investing in things like geothermal because we think that geothermal, the time is now. There's a lot of government support in the US for geothermal. We just let a round in the largest geothermal company, potentially in the world for energy that we're really excited about. So we think that there has to be a balance, that it has to be cheaper and faster. And at the same time, you have to look at the environmental impact of it. But we're avoiding things like nuclear, where we think the time horizon is too long. The cost doesn't make sense. Yet we hope that at some point, nuclear transitions from fission to fusion, and then we do think it will be investable. But for now, we're we're taking a step back from areas like nuclear.
I was in a conversation yesterday with the leader of, India's largest renewables company who said, essentially, at this point, the economics have become so favorable. Sure, we'd like a more favorable policy environment, but essentially renewables, including geothermal, sort of over the the hump. And the business case is so strong. Is that how you think about it as well?
I think we're at the tipping point where renewables, you know, from from wind to solar to geothermal, are starting to actually be very price competitive. And that was the concern we had a decade ago when we had the first green tech revolution. The issue was that it was based on people paying a higher price to lower the climate impact. And what we know is that that doesn't work. And so this time around, it's paying a lower price and having a positive impact on the climate. We think that's way more sustainable.
Florence, I want to bring you into the conversation. So in the survey that underpins the Global risk report, the second most mentioned issue initially that people are concerned about is armed inter-state conflict. And that is also new. The sort of prevalence of that inter-state conflict is not new. But I think the focus of global experts on it is new. You study patterns of inter-state conflict at the NATO Defense College. What do you see in terms of the evolution of inter-state conflict and how it could impact people's livelihoods, livelihoods, economic performance globally in the next several years?
Well, first of all, I have to, disclaimer I took part in the survey that led to the report. So maybe that also can give you a bit of insight on how, these answers come about. I think, also, when you look at past risk reports, they are a snapshot of what experts thinking about right now. And so there's always a distortion because the present is so present. And so we tend to see geoeconomic confrontation tariffs more prominently than a bad weather event because that was just whatever last summer. So I think there is it is imperfect and it can never it's never should never be seen as a prediction. Right. And also I think we are a bit loose with the term risk because risk is not the same as danger. Risk is probability of an event occurring times the potential impact that it has. And when we think of it that way, then we have a problem when it comes to state based armed conflict, because we do not have the numbers to give a clear probability of war. Right. And that's because statistically, we know more or less once a decade you have a war between states. But there are huge outliers, and it doesn't happen frequent enough frequently enough for us to be able to draw conclusions. So that means that in a way, the risk is always there. But of course, it's now gone up because of the war in Ukraine. Because of, you know, general climate of confrontation that also spills over into economics, of course. And then I think the fear is also derived from a feeling of helplessness. Right. So the more helpless you feel about something, the more you feel you influence is pretty reduced, the more prominent the risk is going to be on that scale. So in a very convoluted way, what I'm trying to say is, yes, of course, war is more likely today than maybe three years ago, four years ago. But then I think there is an inevitable, inevitable regional distortion. You know, I'm from Europe, but I have studied conflict. And so I was a bit surprised when people were saying, oh, war is back. Well, you know, you're from from Africa. It was never it never left Africa. It was always in the Middle East. So I think there has to be a bit of a sober approach to this risk. Not overstating the historical, anomaly because unfortunately, war is part of the Anarchical international system that we have. So we have to learn to deal with it to prevent it, of course, to be able to, to deter it. But I'm not going to say be comfortable, but be a bit more level headed with the reality of it.
Right above state based armed conflict is this geoeconomic confrontation. And in some ways, perhaps we're seeing just in the last several weeks the sort of interaction of these things. Right. The economist cover, I think this week was gunboat diplomacy is back. Right. Our states more willing to threaten and in fact use military force, perhaps the way the U.S. did in Venezuela to achieve objectives that seemed to be very much around sort of geoeconomic power and influence. Is that a new driver of conflict that you're worried about, or is this, again, us just focusing on the events of the last couple of weeks?
So I think it was you who mentioned the goldfish. I think we are all a bit guilty of goldfish memory. Yes. What's very soothing is to look into history and look at, you know, Panama. We had a very similar situation as Venezuela. What about Iraq 2003? A huge breach of international law. So I'm not saying, you know what, it already happened before, so relax. But I'm also saying stop pretending that this is all completely new. And we are in a historically, you know, extraordinary situation now, is it uncomfortable? Absolutely. Does it break international law? Yes. But as I said earlier, if you go back, I was I was laughing the other day because I thought never when I studied political science in the 90s, did I think that all of these theories about international relations would actually matter. But today they matter again, because it is about what do states do when they have an interest? What what are the foundations of the so-called rules based international order? You know, states go along with it as long as it suits their interests. And when it doesn't, then they break the law. So does that make the ideal wrong? No, but it also shows that we still have a bit of a way to go to reach that LDL. And I think the issue that we have, especially in Europe, is that, we we came to an ahistorical understanding of the world, meaning we thought from here on, everything's going to be great. You know, the Cold War ended, you know, things were not going so great in other parts of the world, but in Europe, everything was. We lived in Paradise, basically. And suddenly history is back. So I wouldn't say, we are in a in a new situation. I would say if you're feeling stressed by the situation, look into history and figure out how did our ancestors maneuver some of these things. But it is we have historical precedent for almost everything.
It's such an important point. I looked into this the other day. The the average age of the fortune 500 CEO is 58. That means they started their career in 1991. And if they have led in Europe or in North America, that's been a remarkable period of relative stability, globalization and market integration. But of course, an earlier generation was familiar, and people in other parts of the world remained familiar with a much more volatile environment. One of the things that all of you touched on in some ways is the need for investment. And I think, Raj, you said investment needs could outstrip available capital. So, you know, where do I start? Massive infrastructure investments in the continent and elsewhere. Supply chains that need to become more resilient and resilient is sort of a code word for a little bit less efficient, right? Because you you have more suppliers potentially. You were talking about the need to invest massively in energy. Europe has decided to increase defense spending to 5% from an average of, what, 1.5%? Massive change. When we look at all of this, when all of these things come together, is is one of the biggest risks that our investment needs are outstripping our ability to fund things. I don't know if we can start with you.
Thank you very much, David. Exactly. And if you had asked me what the biggest risk overall was, I would have taken, you know, from what Brendan said, you know, the economic instability and from what, Raj said, the need for investment and the fact that, we started off talking about the risk, of fragmentation, the risk of the rolling back of the, global trade and the loss of those benefits, particularly to the developing countries, because at the end of that trajectory of rolling back, trade and fragmenting trade and losing the gains from trade is the society. And, by the time you you go through the lack of access to technology, the lack of access to, investment, you now have inequality. And listening to you, Raj, the inequality that one senses in this huge, funding of AI, which is the new frontier for countries that are struggling to get the gains from trade, that are struggling to, invest in basic infrastructure, not to talk of energy, which is critical, to the new technology, you can see a widening gap. And I think, I must say that one of the things countries like Nigeria are here to do, apart from give a sense of, our own commitment to reform and staying the course, is to attract investment. At the end of the day, it is all about investment, which increases productivity, grows the economy, creates jobs and lifts people out of poverty. So the number one risk or the one number one, result of these risks that we are identifying for me is the lack of investment that will lead to.
And you highlight inequality as the output of that potential lack of investment. One of the most interesting parts of the report for me is always how these risks interact. And if you look at the map of just links, what sits right in the heart of it is inequality, which of course could become worse in the short term. What are your thoughts? The rest of the panel on this issue of investment, lack of available capital to actually see some of the opportunities that are in front of us.
So so there's available capital. I mean, if you look at, risk off offset assets right now, especially in the context of, higher interest rates set across the world in order to combat inflation, you've had cooling inflation, you've had risk offset assets that can create, you know, great yields, and you've had very little, a very low bar for having to return to productive equity and capital. So we've got over $3 trillion sitting on the sidelines in private capital. That's basically insidious right now. It's just consuming dollars back into, you know, M0. Right. We're just not getting out into productive markets. We're not getting it out into infrastructure. There's some of that that's getting pulled away by data centers, by energy, by some long term asset infrastructure. But a lot of that is coming out in private capital lending. And if there's not if there's not effective use, if there's not return on those, those have a chance of going bust. I mean, there's a there's just so much, because of where interest rates are, there's there's so many risk offset assets available to investors that like venture and actually public markets are betting way harder on the future than, the vast majority of private equity and private capital. And so, like, you know, some of our investors, they may have done one deal in 2023, one deal in 2024. They're trying to they're trying to allocate major, slugs of capital against against investments that they think are going to have surety of return because otherwise you might as well be in an index right now. Right. You might as well be in municipal bonds. You may as well be on any of these things that are risk offset inherently. So I think there's capital, but I think we need policy incentives and we need changes in fed rate, protection. We need we need to lower interest rates. Just to be explicit. We need to lower interest rates to get people back into public markets, into productive investing, into things where they can't hide under the shelter of higher yield products.
But is there a risk.
In this more sort of uncertain world that capital may be accumulating in parts of the world where it isn't being deployed and their capital needs elsewhere that aren't being met? Because we do have that sort of lower risk appetite in that retrenchment. Is that something that you worry about? I don't know, Raj, if you have thoughts on this.
First thing is, I completely agree with Brendan's point. I think we're in a risk off mindset with, you know, high interest rates and unclear policy. And those two things need to be fixed to do long term investment of of capital. I do think that the capital is there. The issue is the uneven distribution and investment of that capital when it gets invested. As an example, we are a global investor. We're a global venture capital firm. We've invested in one country in Africa in our history, and that's Nigeria. And so we've been excited to to be an investor there. But we want more certainty. And when you're investing outside of the US, not only do you need certainty from foreign governments, but you need certainty from the US government. So we need to know exactly, you know, because our time horizons are ten plus years to get returns on these investments. And the reality is administrations change in the US and in other countries. And we don't have that certainty of policy that you really need for long term investing. And therefore today we are primarily investing in the US. We still invest globally. We still invest quite a bit in in Asia, but 2,025%. But we become a bigger you know, we've shifted back into investing more in the US because it's at least that way we don't have to worry about cross-border policies. And right now, it seems like cross-border policies are going through a big shift around the world.
Thank you for that. We have a couple of minutes if there are questions in the room. Otherwise we'll continue the conversation on stage. Are there any questions in the room for one of our panelists?
I'll jump in on that.
Please jump in. In the meantime.
People are still thinking, I think, you know, you touched on that. This might sound odd coming from somebody working for nature, but I think as societies, we've become too risk averse when it comes to innovation. And, you know, all the data supports it, that, you know, the wealthier you become, the less risk you take. In order to get innovation, you need to facilitate the lives of people like you. But you also need, you know, in terms of you mentioned, we have too many engineers, so we need to figure out education. So we are at a juncture in history, but I see mostly opportunity. And at the moment a lot of people are just still going backwards and too scared of all these changes. But if you want economic growth, if you want to continue on the journey of making this world a better place, which is the slogan of the World Economic Forum, then you'll have to embrace risk. So risk is not per se negative. It's also where a lot of opportunity lies.
The one other point I would make there is that if you look at the way UAE is investing, that's an example of like generative progressive investing in a in a broad array of sectors, in a broad array of countries. So the Minister of Trade this last year we had AA1 on one session and we joined the next gen FDI, group with a bunch of other companies across the globe, in UAE. And every single step that they're taking is with a forward look, like, if you could do it the current way and, and and it's risk offset and it's easier. They didn't want to do it. They wanted autonomous. They wanted artificial intelligence. They wanted new capabilities. The one thing that I will say that I, I'm struggling with and I've been struggling with it, so I've been in AI and machine learning for 20 years. The one thing I'm struggling with is right now we're at an inflection point where there is a break between how valuable the market.
It can be, and how much that means in productive assets going to individuals. Right. Like you, you have a fundamental shift between how wealthy people can become and how valuable the market is, and that that break is going to grow deeper and wider as AI and autonomous capabilities get better and better, and that there is some danger for the developing markets. Because if I can, if I can create a facility in North Texas, which is cheaper in real estate, which has, you know, limited regulation and is working completely on autonomous capabilities, I can avoid the logistic logistics costs of bringing things over from developing countries and actually be not only risk offset but at cost parity. That's a paradigm that's totally new. So when we're thinking about like global economic security, thinking about global spread, investment in areas of specialization has to be the way that we're thinking. And you see that in the UAE, you see that in those alliances where they realize, like, this has to be a long term global economic market. It's not just bringing things domestically. And I think that's because so much of what they do is bring resources from the outside. But it's a good model to to leverage.
I appreciate you mentioning the UAE because, you know, one of the things that I think is increasingly defining our world is parts of the world where there's optimism and parts of the world where there's pessimism, and they have extraordinary optimism. We only have about two minutes left. So I'd love to close on that theme of optimism. One way of reading a report like this is, good Lord, I'm going to just pull the blanket a little bit higher because there's so many things out there. So, so close us on. After having read the report or more generally, where you sit 30s from each of you, what makes you optimistic about this year in the future?
Thank you. Well, first of all, that there are pools of money out there that we can attract if we put in place the right reforms and we put in place the right policies for to attract investors with the UAE, whether it's Raj, but also the optimism that I really feel is that the same policies that attract foreign investors also attract domestic investors. And we do have the access to the diaspora investors as well as Nigerians that currently maybe are under an inflationary environment, would spend, would now look to invest. And so I think our ultimate, optimism is to convince Nigerians that under the current environment, it is profitable, it is worthwhile investing in the Nigerian economy.
Fantastic. Florence.
I think it's fairly easy. I wrote an article for the web on this. You know, for the last 100 years, we've gone through five cycles of doom and gloom where every time we hit a low, we're like, oh my God, we can't go forward. And that's when innovation happens, when we with the back to the wall. So we've done it before. We can do it again.
Tastic. Raj.
I think just to build on that point, every industrial revolution, every technical, technological transformation has led to a period of uncertainty and disruption. But ultimately, human beings lives improved. And I think the same will happen with AI.
Brandon.
I couldn't have said it better. I mean, my optimism is in the long term spark of human individualism and the ability for one person to change the world. It's happened several times in energy. It happened in, moving from, whale blubber to kerosene to electricity, like, I mean, and this this happened in, like, a 20 year span, right? This wasn't hundreds of years. We we have a opportunity to innovate. And that's going to create job opportunities and new areas of education that we couldn't have envisioned and we couldn't have imagined. And that I think, honestly, another area of optimism for me is space. I think it creates, you know, not to be cliche, but it creates a new frontier.
Fantastic. Look, you know, one way of looking at a global risk report is, to, you know, get concerned, get all worried. But what is so powerful about this is in order to make good decisions, better decisions, we need to be clear eyed about some of those risks. So my optimism comes from us being more clear eyed about where the risks are and therefore being able to see the opportunities. Please join me in thanking a terrific panel. Thank you so much for your contributions to this conversation.
Thank.