The world's largest private seawater desalination company, Saudi Arabia's ACWA Power, is accelerating its expansion into the Chinese market with unprecedented efforts. Recently, senior executives of the company revealed in Shandong that they plan to invest 30 billion US dollars (approximately 200 billion RMB) in China over the next five years, marking that China has become their second largest strategic market in the world after Saudi Arabia. This huge investment is not only a commercial layout, but also a reflection of the deep integration of Saudi Arabia's "2030 Vision" and China's "dual carbon" goals, aiming to jointly explore a new blue ocean for global energy transformation.

As the first strategic pivot of this grand investment plan, Shandong will receive at least 3 billion US dollars in key investments. ACWA Power has confirmed the construction of a 30000 ton daily seawater desalination project in Weifang and is in talks with cities such as Yantai to introduce its globally leading seawater desalination technology and maximum processing capacity. This series of actions shows that this Saudi giant is not just trying it lightly, but intends to build Shandong into its water and clean energy hub in northern China, deeply participating in and empowering regional green development.

ACWA Power brings not just a single water plant, but its decades long successful implementation of an integrated system solution of "water source water plant water network" in Saudi Arabia. It has built a 450 kilometer long ultra long water pipeline, and if this "Saudi experience" is successfully implemented in Shandong, it is expected to give rise to a new regional water resource security model: establishing large-scale green desalination bases along the coast and providing stable water supply to inland urban agglomerations through intelligent pipelines. This will fundamentally optimize the water resource pattern in Shandong and set a benchmark for the systematic upgrading of China's water market towards capital and technology intensive development.

This large-scale investment is an inevitable result of the deep integration of China Saudi Arabia capital and industry. As an energy giant under the Saudi sovereign fund PIF, ACWA Power's cooperation with Chinese companies has reached $50 billion in recent years, covering nearly half of its global projects. From the establishment of the Beijing representative office in 2009, to the establishment of the Shanghai Investment Company in 2023, and to the opening of the Pudong Innovation Center in 2025, ACWA Power's localization process in China has been accelerating, laying a solid foundation for cooperation in this huge investment.Editor/Bian Wenjun