For a while In the mid-2000s, a box the size of a refrigerator in Abu Dhabi was considered the largest chess player in the world. The name was Hydra, and it was a small supercomputer: a box full of industrial processors and specially designed chips, strung together with fiber optic cables and connected to the Internet.
At a time when chess was still the premier gladiator arena for competition between humans and AI, Hydra and his exploits were briefly legendary. The New Yorker published a 5,000-word contemplative article on the emerging creativity; WIRED declared Hydra “terrifying”; and chess publications reported the victories with the violence of wrestling commentary. Hydra, they wrote, was a “monster machine” that “slowly strangled” human grandmasters.
True to its form as a monster, Hydra was also isolated and strange. Other advanced chess engines of the time – Hydra's rivals – ran on regular PCs and could be downloaded by anyone. But the full power of Hydra's 32-processor cluster could only be used by one person at a time. And by the summer of 2005, even members of Hydra's development team were having trouble getting their creation to work.
That's because the team's patron – the then 36-year-old Emirati man who had hired them and raised the money for Hydra's upgraded hardware – was too busy reaping his reward. In an online chess forum in 2005, Hydra's Austrian chief architect, Chrilly Donninger, described this benefactor as the world's greatest “computer chess geek.” “The sponsor,” he wrote, “likes to play with Hydra day and night.”
Under the username zor_champ, the Emirati sponsor logged into online chess tournaments and played with Hydra as a human-computer team. More often than not, they would beat the competition. “He loved the power of man and machine,” one engineer told me. “He loved to win.”
Hydra was eventually overtaken by other chess computers and discontinued in the late 2000s. But zor_champ became one of the most powerful, least understood men in the world. His real name is Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed al Nahyan.
Tahnoun, a bearded, wiry figure who is almost never seen without dark sunglasses, is the national security adviser of the United Arab Emirates – the head of intelligence for one of the richest and most surveilled small countries in the world. He is also the younger brother of the country's hereditary, autocratic president, Mohamed bin Zayed al Nahyan. But perhaps most importantly, and most bizarrely for a spy master, Tahnoun exercises official control over much of Abu Dhabi's vast sovereign wealth. Bloomberg News reported last year that he directly oversees a $1.5 trillion empire – more money than anyone on the planet.
In his personal style, Tahnoun comes across as one-third Gulf Royal, one-third fitness-obsessed tech founder and one-third Bond villain. Among his many, many business interests, he runs a sprawling technology conglomerate called G42 (a reference to the book The Hitchhiker's guide to the Milky Way, where “42” is a supercomputer's answer to the question “life, the universe and everything”). The G42 has a hand in everything from AI research to biotechnology – with special areas of strength in state-sponsored hacking and surveillance technology. Tahnoun is fanatical about Brazilian jiu-jitsu and cycling. He even wears his sunglasses at the gym due to his sensitivity to light, and he surrounds himself with UFC champions and mixed martial arts fighters.
According to a businessman and a security consultant who met Tahnoun, visitors who get past his layers of loyal gatekeepers may only get a chance to talk to him after cycling with the sheikh around his private velodrome. He is known to have spent hours in a flotation chamber, the consultant says, and has flown health guru Peter Attia to the UAE to give advice on longevity. According to a businessman present at the discussion, Tahnoun even inspired Mohammed bin Salman, the powerful Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, to cut back on fast food and live to be 150 with him.
