The hike in Aramco’s dividend, which is set to total at least US$124 billion this year, comes days after Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the transfer of an 8% stake in Aramco to the Public Investment Fund.

The PIF now holds a 16% stake in Saudi Aramco, worth about US$333 billion, which translates to an annual payout of at least US$20 billion.

That’s a handy boon for the fund as it prepares to ramp up spending over the next few years on projects like Neom — a more than US$500 billion new city under construction on the kingdom’s west coast.

The PIF is committed to spending US$40 billion a year domestically to help diversify the country’s oil dependent economy, though its ability to fund such huge projects has increasingly been questioned by analysts at a time when the government is forecasting budget deficits until at least 2026.

Its governor, Yasir Al Rumayyan, has said annual deployment is set to rise to US$70 billion from 2025. The fund has already raised US$7 billion from two bond sales so far this year.

Including its stake in Aramco, the PIF controls assets of about US$900 billion. According to a recent prospectus, it had US$15 billion in cash and equivalents as of September — a relatively low number for an entity so large.