The sovereign fund boom: when were today's funds founded?

Most of today's sovereign wealth funds are young. Of the 78 core national funds on our list, 77 have a founding year in their profiles, and 63 of those were founded in 2000 or later. That is 82%. Across all 206 entities with a known year, 144 date from this century, and the 2010s were the busiest decade on record.

What we counted

Our list holds 231 state investment entities. For 206 of them, our data gives a founding year, taken from the profile. We grouped those by decade. We also looked separately at the 78 core national funds, the group most people mean when they say "sovereign wealth fund". 77 of them have a known year.

Founding year here means the legal creation year as stated in each profile: the law, decree or incorporation that created the entity. It is not the year of the first investment, and it is not the year an older body was renamed, unless the profile treats the renamed body as new.

Finding 1: two waves, and the second is still going

Source: our dataset. Basis: founding year as stated in each profile. 25 entities have no founding year in our data.

The first wave runs from the 1950s to the 1990s, slowly. The second wave starts in the 2000s and takes off. The 2010s alone produced 68 entities with a known year, more than every decade before 2000 put together (62, our arithmetic).

The 2020s count already stands at 34, including 13 core national funds. Our list also holds 25 funds that are proposed or not yet operating, so more founding dates are on the way.

Finding 2: the busiest years

Looking at single years, 2012 stands out with 14 entities founded, followed by 2006 with 13 and then 2011 and 2018 with 11 each (source: our dataset). Every year from 2014 to 2024 saw at least three new entities on our list.

Finding 3: the oldest are American

The oldest entities on our list are US state trusts, created long before anyone used the term sovereign wealth fund. Our profiles date the Texas Permanent School Fund to the Texas Constitution of 1845, the Wisconsin Board of Commissioners of Public Lands to 1848, the Oregon Common School Fund to 1859, the Nebraska Permanent School Fund to 1867 and the Texas Permanent University Fund to 1876 (source: each fund's profile).

The oldest core national fund on our list is the Kuwait Investment Authority, which traces its start to February 1953, when the Kuwait Investment Board was formed in London. KIA itself was created by Law No. 47 in 1982. Our data uses the 1953 date. Only six core national funds on our list date from before 1980: Kuwait (1953), Kiribati's Revenue Equalization Reserve Fund (1956), Monaco's Constitutional Reserve Fund (1962), the Nauru Phosphate Royalties Trust (1968), Saudi Arabia's PIF (1971) and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (1976).

Finding 4: the new funds are everywhere except North America

Here is the share of entities with a known year that were founded in 2000 or later, by region.

Source: our dataset.

Africa is the clearest case: 29 of its 30 dated entities were founded this century. North America is the opposite: only 11 of 34 dated entities are this century, because so many US state funds go back to the 1800s and 1900s.

Recent core national funds on our list include Oman Investment Authority (2020), the Indonesia Investment Authority (2021), the Hong Kong Investment Corporation (2022), the Future Ireland Fund (2024), MGX in Abu Dhabi (2024) and Danantara (2025). Among funds created by law but not yet investing are the Botswana Sovereign Wealth Fund (2025) and Kenya's Sovereign Wealth Fund (2026).

A caution on "new"

Some funds that look new are older bodies under a new name or a new law. Oman is a good example. The Oman Investment Authority was created by Royal Decree 61/2020 on 4 June 2020, and our profile lists its predecessors as the State General Reserve Fund (1980) and the Oman Investment Fund (2006). Our data counts it under 2020, because that is the legal creation year. Danantara in Indonesia brings together existing state company holdings under a 2025 law. Kuwait runs the other way: we date it from 1953, not from the 1982 law. So the boom is partly new money and partly old money in new structures.

What this means

Many of the funds in today's rankings have short track records. A fund founded in 2015 cannot publish a 20-year return. That links to one of our other findings: 52.4% of operating funds publish no long-term return at all (see the ten disclosure walls). Part of that gap is age.

For the money behind these funds, see where does the money come from?. For funds not yet up and running, see the new sovereign wealth funds tracker.

Caveats

1. 25 entities have no founding year in our data. They are proposed or not yet operating funds (16), sub-national funds (7), one core national fund and one holding company. The decade counts cover the 206 with a year.
2. Founding means legal creation. Renamed or merged bodies may be counted from their newest legal form.
3. The 2020s are incomplete. The decade count runs to October 2026.
4. Our list, our scope. A different definition of sovereign wealth fund would give different counts.

Methods note

Founding year: the founding year recorded in each profile, which is normally the law, decree or incorporation date; profiles that say a fund is not yet founded count as no year. Decades group years by their first three digits. Core national funds are the core national tier. "Founded 2000 or later" includes the year 2000. Full method: methodology.