Nicolai Tangen: 'Even if AI is a bad bubble, it's directing capital toward change'

The CEO of Norges says markets are 'very hot' and this time it is different from the dotcom crisis, AI will be transformative, he says, but will create inequalities between developed and poorer nations

- Jeevan Vasagar and James Harding

Nicolai Tangen, the man in charge of the world's largest sovereign wealth fund, heads to a Norwegian mountain lodge each year with a bunch of old friends. Sitting in front of the fire, they make predictions on the year to come. It sounds like a version of Mountainhead, Jesse Armstrong's film about cocksure tech bros boasting about their billions and the dystopian Al future. But this snowy get-together was more Scandinavian - and self-deprecating.

"We were just completely wrong," he says. "So this was a few weeks before the US election - we got that one wrong. Nobody predicted the tariffs, or the situation between the US and Europe... anything that was going on in China, India... It's just futile trying to predict anything."

The irony is that financial markets, technology companies and governments look to Tangen to get a sense of where the world is going.

He is chief executive of Norges Bank Investment Management, referred to outside the country as Norges. In Norway, they call it Oljefondet - the oil fund. In 1969, Norway found oil in the North Sea. Lots of oil. In order to avoid corruption and share the wealth, the Norwegian government put the first 2bn Norwegian kroner (equivalent to $310m at the time in 1996) of oil and gas revenues into a sovereign wealth fund. Today, it's worth $2.1tn and owns shares in nearly 9,000 companies.

Norges is also generally seen as capital with a conscience. As other fund managers have turned against supposed "wokery", Norges has continued to champion investments in renewables, opposed gargantuan pay deals and relentlessly topped the transparency rankings; it updates its website 13 times a second with a ticker that tells the world the fund's market value. It is the most looked-at number in Norway.