Samer Choucair: BRICS Is Evolving From a Political Bloc Into a New Channel for Allocating Risk and Capital
Investment leader Samer Choucair said the BRICS summit in New Delhi came at a sensitive intersection between the recalibration of China-India relations and escalating energy disruptions in the Middle East.
Choucair said Chinese President Xi Jinping’s return to India for the first time since 2019, alongside the participation of Russia, Iran, the UAE, Egypt, and Indonesia, turned the summit into a test of the cohesion of the Global South rather than simply another diplomatic gathering.
According to Samer Choucair, the summit’s investment significance extends well beyond its final communiqué. The more consequential developments involve the repricing of supply chains, the expansion of local-currency trade, changing energy-market dynamics, alternative financing through the New Development Bank, and emerging cooperation around artificial intelligence.
BRICS Is Redrawing the Risk Map
Samer Choucair said the expansion of BRICS to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, and the UAE alongside Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa has brought energy producers, industrial importers, and Global South economies seeking reform of the international financial system onto a single platform.
Choucair said the bloc’s share of global GDP measured at purchasing-power parity has surpassed that of the G7 under widely cited estimates, reinforcing the argument that BRICS should increasingly be viewed as a potential source of global growth rather than merely a political grouping.
At the same time, conflict in the Middle East and tensions surrounding the Strait of Hormuz have increased shipping and insurance costs and placed additional pressure on the balance of payments of economies such as India, Indonesia, and Egypt.
Energy exporters, meanwhile, can benefit from stronger terms of trade as long as disruption does not evolve into a prolonged supply shock severe enough to damage global demand.
China and India: Reducing the Risk Premium
Samer Choucair said Xi’s return to India has renewed investor attention on the commercial relationship between Asia’s two largest powers, particularly against a backdrop of record bilateral trade and India’s substantial trade deficit driven by imports of machinery, electronics, and industrial components.
Choucair argued that managing border disputes without allowing political tensions to disrupt trade could reduce the risk premium attached to sectors including logistics, electronics, pharmaceuticals, and automobiles.
“Funds do not buy the rhetoric of partnership,” Choucair said. “They buy predictability in customs, aviation, and cross-border investment.”
For institutional investors, the distinction is critical. Diplomatic engagement becomes economically meaningful when it lowers transaction costs, improves supply-chain visibility, and makes future capital flows more predictable.
The Gulf at the Center of Capital Reallocation
Samer Choucair said the UAE’s position within BRICS and Saudi participation in the summit’s proceedings have placed the Gulf at the intersection of energy security and financing the industrial transformation of the Global South.
Disruption to major maritime corridors strengthens the investment case for ports, alternative trade routes, energy infrastructure, and digital networks.
At the same time, energy surpluses can increasingly be converted into productive long-term assets, including data centers, industrial supply chains, logistics platforms, and co-investment structures involving BRICS partners across Asia and Africa.
For Gulf investors, this represents more than geographic diversification. It creates an opportunity to deploy energy-generated capital into infrastructure and technology assets positioned to benefit from the gradual restructuring of global trade.
Artificial Intelligence Opens a New Investment Channel
Choucair said China’s initiative to develop an open-source artificial-intelligence community within BRICS, including cooperation around language models and joint training, could contribute to the emergence of technological standards that develop in parallel with Western ecosystems.
Such competition could fragment parts of the global software and semiconductor supply chain. But according to Samer Choucair, fragmentation also creates investment opportunities.
Data centers, cloud infrastructure, digital connectivity, and AI computing capacity across the Gulf, India, and Southeast Asia could attract greater capital as demand for digital sovereignty converges with access to reliable and competitively priced energy.
This intersection between computing infrastructure and energy availability could become particularly significant for Gulf economies seeking to transform their existing energy advantage into a broader competitive advantage in the digital economy.
Reweighting, Not Decoupling
Samer Choucair cautioned investors against confusing the economic size of BRICS with the investability of its individual markets.
“Economic size does not equal market depth,” Choucair said.
Corporate governance, liquidity, capital-market depth, regulatory predictability, and the ability of foreign investors to repatriate profits remain decisive considerations when institutional capital evaluates opportunities across BRICS economies.
The investment thesis, therefore, is not necessarily about replacing one financial system with another. It is about creating additional channels through which capital, trade, financing, and geopolitical risk can be distributed.
Choucair concluded that BRICS is unlikely to replace the U.S. dollar overnight. Its more immediate significance is that it has become an increasingly important platform for reallocating risk and structuring transactions across emerging economies.
For Samer Choucair, that distinction will define how institutional investors approach the bloc in 2026.
Capital will reward economies capable of converting a multipolar world into financing, infrastructure, trade, and investable cash flows rather than those relying primarily on political rhetoric.