Prof. Winston Ma, CFA & Esq., is an investor, attorney, author, and adjunct professor in the global AI-digital economy. He is a partner of Dragon Global, an AI-focused family office, and he is also the Executive Director of Global Public Investment Funds Forum (GPIFF) and an Adjunct Professor (on Sovereign Investors) at New York University (NYU) School of Law.
Thought Leadership on Sovereign Capital and AI Governance, 
Substack: SWF Sovereign AI Amazon Author page
SWFs’ AI and AI’s Own Sovereign Wealth Fund
Sovereign capital and artificial intelligence intersect in two directions, not one.
SWFs’ AI — how sovereign wealth funds engage with artificial intelligence — spans three distinct aspects:
• investment (capital deployed into AI infrastructure, compute, semiconductors, and foundational models — the Gulf funds anchoring today’s largest AI deals);
• governance (how sovereign shareholders exercise the influence that capital buys — board seats, voting behavior, stewardship once the stake is in); and
• implementation (how funds use AI internally to upgrade their own investment process — underwriting, portfolio analytics, risk modeling).
AI’s own SWF — the emerging idea that AI-generated wealth warrants a public claim, structured as a fund in its own right — raises a parallel, still-unsettled set of three questions:
• funding source (mandatory equity transfer, voluntary contribution, taxation, or a state simply redirecting an existing account — Korea’s own pivot shows this isn’t limited to the Senator Sanders-versus- OpenAI Sam Altman binary);
• governance model (direct state control versus arm’s-length institutional design); and
• distribution discipline (one-off populist payouts versus reinvestment that compounds across generations — where national legislatures and multinational rulemaking may both come into play).
See Winston Ma’s Op-Ed series at Davos, World Economic Forum (WEF) and NYU Development Research Series
Most recently for 10 years, he was Managing Director and Head of North America Office for China Investment Corporation (CIC), China’s sovereign wealth fund. Prior to that, Mr. Ma served as the deputy head of equity capital markets at Barclays Capital, a vice president at J.P. Morgan investment banking, and a corporate lawyer at Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP. He is one of a small number of native Chinese who have worked as investment professionals and practicing capital markets attorneys in both the United States and China.
Mr. Ma has served on the boards of multinational listed and private companies in tech, finance, and natural resources industries. Most recently in 2021-2024, he was the board Chairman of Nasdaq-listed MCAA, a European tech SPAC (which entered into a merger with the digital media unit of Football Club Barcelona) and, in 2022-2024, an advisory board member of Capgemini, the global IT consulting giant. In 2020-2022 he was the chairman of advisory board at Open Mineral, the first Fintech B2B metal marketplace. In 2017-2018 he was a board member of Singapore-listed Noble Group (SGX: CGP).
Formerly a nationally certified Software Programmer, Mr. Ma is the author of more than 10 books on SWF funds, digital economy, and global geopolitics, including The Hunt for Unicorns: How Sovereign Funds are Reshaping Investment in the Digital Economy and most recently “Blockchain and Web3” (among 2024 “six must-read blockchain books” by TechTarget). He has been frequently interviewed by CNBC and Bloomberg TV and quoted by major financial media including WSJ, Reuters, and Financial Times. He was selected a 2013 Young Global Leader at the World Economic Forum (WEF), and in 2014 he received the NYU Distinguished Alumni Award.