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Record investment drives Jordan’s utilities market

9 June 2026

 

In April, Jordan signed the final technical and legal agreement for its landmark National Water Carrier Project, paving the way for the financial close of the kingdom’s largest planned water infrastructure project to date.

The agreement represents a significant step forward for the scheme, which is now projected to reach $5.6bn in total costs, including financing, up from earlier estimates of $3.5bn.

Paris-based investment and utility firms Meridiam and Suez were awarded the contract last year to develop the project in partnership with Jordan’s Water & Irrigation Ministry.

Since then, multiple large-scale financing agreements have been put in place for the project, which is expected to supply about 40% of Jordan’s drinking water needs.

While new contract awards have been limited in 2026, the successful execution of the Aqaba-Amman Water Desalination and Conveyance scheme will help reassure the market that large-scale infrastructure projects of this nature can move forward.

The project is set to reduce the benchmark water cost from about $3 a cubic metre in 2024 to approximately $2.7 and is crucial to addressing Jordan’s severe water scarcity.

Prime Minister Jafar Hassan recently said that the scheme, along with the Aqaba Port railway project, represented “the largest level of foreign investment in the kingdom’s history”.

For its part, the government has said it will contribute $722m to the Aqaba-Amman project, representing the largest single capital expenditure in the state budget.

Upcoming projects

Looking forward, there is a healthier pipeline of new water projects, led by a two-phased wastewater treatment project at Wadi Zarqa.

The first phase will have an initial capacity to treat 150,000 cubic metres a day (cm/d) of wastewater by 2030.

The $150m second phase covers an independent sewage treatment plant with a capacity of 200,000 cm/d. Both tenders are expected to be released in the coming months.

Two larger projects, valued at $300m each, are currently in the planning stages. Both are managed by Yarmouk Water Company and involve major transmission pipeline works in Ajloun and Irbid as part of the Jordan Water Sector Efficiency Project.

The Jordan Water Sector Efficiency Project is a World Bank-backed programme aimed at reducing water losses, improving utility performance and enhancing the efficiency of water services across the kingdom.

Power contracts

Jordan’s power sector is set for a record-breaking year following the announcement that a $900m combined-cycle gas turbine (CCGT) plant will be developed in partnership with Etihad Development Company, a subsidiary of the UAE’s Etihad Water & Electricity (EtihadWE).

The project will be developed under a build-own-operate model with Jordan’s National Electric Power Company (Nepco) purchasing electricity under a 25-year power-purchase agreement.

For context, Jordan’s power sector saw just $33m in total contract awards in 2025, according to MEED Projects.

The full-year total last exceeded $100m in 2022, when there were $111m of contract awards. The plant is expected to meet about 10% of Jordan’s electricity demand once operational.

The kingdom has also been looking at other forms of power generation, such as Jordan’s first 450MW pumped hydroelectric energy storage project near Al-Mujib Dam.

Earlier this year, US-headquartered K&M Advisors and France’s Artelia were appointed as transaction advisers to carry out the final feasibility study for the project, which is expected to be tendered in the third quarter of 2026.

The Ministry of Energy & Mineral Resources (MEMR) is also planning to undertake the construction of a 1,000MW wind power plant and battery energy storage system near the Port of Aqaba in Jordan.

The renewable energy scheme could potentially support the kingdom’s emerging green hydrogen industry, including a separate planned $1bn green ammonia and hydrogen project in Aqaba.

In May, the project became the first publicly announced green ammonia project in Jordan to receive development approval from the Council of Ministers.

The project would be developed by Jordan Green Ammonia, a special-purpose vehicle funded by the UAE-based 7Fidelity Group and Poland’s Hynfra.

The project in Aqaba is expected to produce 100,000 tonnes a year of green ammonia from 2030

Of approximately $6bn-worth of power projects in the pre-execution phase, it is worth noting that about $4.4bn are still in the early study or feed stages.

Near-term awards are likely to come from several smaller substation and power generation schemes.

Jordan-Syria power link

Among the wider pipeline of regional opportunities, Jordan’s power sector could also benefit from efforts to restore electricity connectivity with neighbouring Syria.

Syria’s Public Establishment for Transmission & Distribution of Electricity recently tendered a contract to repair the 400kV high-voltage interconnector transmission lines between the two countries.

The works form part of Syria’s $146m Electricity Emergency Project, which is being financed through a World Bank grant and aims to restore critical electricity infrastructure across the country.

The rehabilitation of the Syria-Jordan interconnector is expected to enable the import of up to 600MW of electricity and represents one of several initiatives under way to rebuild Syria’s power network following years of conflict and underinvestment.

More broadly, Syria is emerging as an active power market in its own right. In April, Germany’s Siemens Energy signed manufacturing agreements for major power plant projects being developed by a consortium led by Qatar’s UCC Holding.

The contracts cover combined-cycle power packages for the Zayzoun and Deir Azzour power plant projects, announced last year as part of a $7bn memorandum of understanding between the consortium and Syria’s Ministry of Energy.

The May 2025 agreements include four combined-cycle gas turbine power plants in Traifawi, Homs and Zayzoun, Deir-Azzour and Mehardeh in Hama with an installed capacity of 4GW.

Additionally, a 1GW solar power plant will be developed in Wedian Al-Rabee in Syria’s southern region.

Most of these projects, awarded under concession agreements following a strategic memorandum of understanding framework, are due to come online in 2029.

After years of inactivity, this is considerable progress. The next step is attracting sufficient interest in new and upcoming tenders. This will signal whether international contractors are ready to re-engage with the country’s power sector.

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Mark Dowdall

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    Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) has published its audited consolidated financial statements for the year ended 31 December 2025, the first full set of annual results to follow the board’s approval of the fund’s 2026-30 strategy.

    The results show a sharp improvement in profitability last year even as leverage rose and volatility in its listed equity holdings widened. The performance helps explain the strategic shift towards capital discipline and focus on private sector partnerships set out in April.

    In April, PIF’s board, chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman Al-Saud, approved a new five-year strategy structured around three portfolios, the Vision Portfolio, the Strategic Portfolio and the Financial Portfolio, and organised around six domestic ecosystems: tourism, travel and entertainment; urban development and liveability; advanced manufacturing and innovation; industrials and logistics; clean energy, water and renewables infrastructure; and Neom as a standalone ecosystem.

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    The strategy followed a period of reprioritisation across PIF’s gigaproject portfolio and set out a renewed emphasis on private capital, with PIF stating it would “further enable the role of the private sector as an effective partner for sustainable economic development”.

    PIF’s consolidated profit for 2025 rose to SR65.2bn ($17.4bn) in 2025, up 152% from SR25.8bn in 2024. The increase was driven by operating profit more than doubling, to SR78bn from SR34.7bn, as revenue growth outpaced cost of revenue and general and administrative expenses moderated relative to the prior year. Profit attributable to the owner of the fund rose to SR46.4bn, up from just SR1bn in 2024, a swing that accounts for most of the year-on-year improvement.

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    Segment mix                                                     

    The segment breakdown shows where that growth came from, and it lines up closely with the six ecosystems named in the 2026-30 strategy. Banking and financial services remained the largest single revenue line at SR85.3bn, followed by telecommunications at SR76.8bn ($20.5bn), which was down slightly on 2024. Mining revenue rose 19.3% to SR38.8bn, consistent with the strategy’s focus on industrials and logistics, while revenue from electronic gaming and related services held broadly flat at SR15.6bn, an area PIF governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan specifically cited as a sector for strategic investment alongside artificial intelligence and renewable energy. Agricultural and livestock revenue nearly tripled, to SR7.6bn from SR2.5bn, and revenue from events operations rose to SR7.6bn from SR6bn, both pointing to the diversification into domestic ecosystems the strategy describes. Real estate operations revenue and revenue from advanced electronics and aerospace both declined slightly year-on-year.

    Total assets grew 5.1% to SR4.54tn from SR4.32tn, continuing the expansion PIF has reported since 2015, when the strategy document put assets under management at $150bn, against more than $900bn today. The two figures are not directly comparable, since the IFRS consolidated balance sheet captures the full assets of consolidated subsidiaries such as the fund’s banking, telecommunications and mining operations, while PIF’s publicly cited assets-under-management figure uses a different valuation methodology, but both point to the same order of scale.

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    The scale of PIF’s investment activity in the run-up to 2025 is set out in the April strategy announcement rather than the financial statements themselves. Between 2021 and 2025, PIF says it invested more than $199bn in new projects in Saudi Arabia, contributed $243bn to real non-oil GDP and spent more than $157bn with the local private sector, alongside growing assets under management six-fold and delivering an annualised total shareholder return of more than 7% since 2017. Read against the 2025 results, the rise in mining, gaming, agricultural and events revenue is an early indication that this domestic ecosystem investment is beginning to show up in operating performance, even as the wider balance sheet shows the cost of that expansion in higher borrowing and greater sensitivity to listed equity markets.

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  • UAE to add Ajman to its Etihad Rail passenger network

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    In response to MEED’s request for comment on the Ajman section, Etihad Rail said:

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    “As previously announced, Etihad Rail’s passenger services are being introduced in phases, with further expansion planned over time. We do not comment on market speculation, commercial discussions, procurement activity, or projects that have not been formally announced.

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  • Local contractor wins DIFC tower contract

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    Dubai-based contractor Al-Basti & Muktha has been awarded a contract to build the DIFC Heights Tower mixed-use development.

    The state-backed Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) awarded the contract.

    The project comprises a 43-storey building with 366 residential units, office space, and retail and food-and-beverage outlets. Construction is expected to commence shortly, with completion slated for 2029.

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    READ THE JULY 2026 MEED BUSINESS REVIEW – click here to view PDF

    Stress test for Gulf aviation; Mixed performance as country outlooks diverge in the Levant; GCC tourism sector pivots from crisis to recovery mode.

    Distributed to senior decision-makers in the region and around the world, the July 2026 edition of MEED Business Review includes:
    To see previous issues of MEED Business Review, please click here
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    Yasir Iqbal