By John — Desalination News
ACWA Power, the Saudi utility developer behind dozens of desalination and power plants across the Gulf and beyond, has grown into one of Saudi Arabia’s biggest privately-controlled enterprises, with a market value Bloomberg now puts at $34.9 billion, according to reporting this week. The milestone reflects a company that has spent the past several years pushing well past its original Gulf desalination-and-power base into clean energy, green hydrogen, and markets as far afield as China and the United States.
The Public Investment Fund, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, remains ACWA Power’s largest shareholder with a 44.2% stake. The Abunayyan and Al Muhaidib families — two of the company’s founding private backers — together hold at least 26.3%, a stake whose value has risen in step with the company’s since its 2021 initial public offering, at the time the largest Saudi listing since Saudi Aramco’s.
The growth has come from diversification as much as scale. ACWA Power now operates more than 100 assets across multiple countries, and has expanded beyond its traditional Gulf strongholds into Morocco, Uzbekistan, Egypt, and Turkey. The company has also secured Saudi government approval for exclusive rights to export the Kingdom’s green hydrogen, began building a presence in China in 2024, and is now exploring entry into the US market — all while desalination, clean energy, and renewables remain, by the company’s own framing, central to Saudi Arabia’s long-term Vision 2030 economic plans.
That growth hasn’t come without risk exposure of a kind unique to a company whose core infrastructure sits in one of the world’s more contested regions. ACWA Power’s June 2026 investor report acknowledged that some of its regional desalination facilities had come under attack, a reference to the wave of strikes on Gulf desalination infrastructure — including incidents in Kuwait and Bahrain — that this blog has covered as part of the broader pattern of water infrastructure emerging as a target during Middle East conflict. Jefferies analyst Prateek Bhatnagar argued the company is nonetheless partly insulated: long-term water purchase agreements smooth out short-term volatility, he said, and geographic diversification means no single attack on one facility threatens the broader business.
ACWA Power is the sole sponsor behind several desalination projects this blog has covered recently, including the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank-backed Caspian Sea plant in Azerbaijan — a reminder that the same company now valued at nearly $35 billion is also, in practice, one of the most prolific single sponsors of new desalination capacity anywhere in the world right now. Whether that valuation holds up will depend in large part on whether the company’s bet on diversification — geographic and technological alike — continues to outpace the security and procurement risks concentrated in its home region.
(Source: Enterprise, Bloomberg)