Ma'aden has published a $110 billion capital programme covering eight megaprojects over the next decade, chief executive Bob Wilt told the Future Minerals Forum in Riyadh. The company is targeting a tripling of phosphate and gold and a doubling of aluminium over five years.
Ma'aden has set out a capital programme of $110 billion over the next decade, spread across eight megaprojects — by a wide margin the largest spending plan the Saudi miner has published.
Chief executive Bob Wilt outlined the figure on Wednesday at the Future Minerals Forum in Riyadh, saying the company was “deploying capital at an unprecedented pace”. Two of the eight projects are already under way; the other six sit at various stages of planning.
The money is meant to change the shape of the company rather than simply enlarge it. Ma'aden is targeting a tripling of its phosphate and gold businesses and a doubling of aluminium over the next five years. Averaged out, $110 billion implies roughly $11 billion of spending a year, against a company that reported net profit of about $1.51 billion for the first nine months of 2025 — itself a 91 percent increase on the same period a year earlier. A programme of this size cannot be funded from earnings; it implies sustained external financing, asset-level partners, or both.
The clearest example of what that spending buys is already in the ground. Phosphate 3, at the Wa'ad Al Shamal minerals city in the far north of the Kingdom, is an SAR28 billion ($7.4 billion) expansion now under construction. It is designed to add around three million tonnes a year of phosphate capacity, taking the national total toward nine million tonnes, with roughly three million tonnes coming from each of the two earlier phases. Wa'ad Al Shamal has been producing since 2017 and processes rock drawn mainly from the Al Khabra mine.
Phosphate 3 is backed by Shareek, the government programme that pairs state support with large domestic companies willing to raise their capital spending inside the Kingdom. It is a useful reminder of how these projects are financed. Ma'aden is a listed company, but its megaproject pipeline sits close enough to the state to be planned on a different risk basis from an ordinary miner's.
The aluminium half of the plan runs through Ras Al-Khair on the Gulf coast, where Ma'aden's integrated complex comprises an alumina refinery designed for 1.8 million tonnes a year, a smelter of about 740,000 tonnes a year and a rolling mill of about 380,000 tonnes a year. Doubling that business is a heavier lift than it sounds: primary aluminium capacity is added in potlines, each of which requires firm power in the hundreds of megawatts, and the economics turn almost entirely on the delivered cost of electricity.
On gold, the case was made two days earlier, when Ma'aden reported net additions of 7.8 million ounces to its Saudi gold mineral resources following drilling at four separate areas, including a maiden estimate at Wadi Al Jaww. Resource growth of that order is what a tripling ambition has to be built on.
What has not been published is the detail that would let anyone test the number: a project-by-project breakdown, the financing structure, or sanction dates for the six projects still in planning. A decade-long capital envelope is a statement of intent, and it is revised when prices move. Phosphate, aluminium and gold prices were all strong through 2025, which makes a figure of this size considerably easier to announce than to sustain through a downturn.
Execution is the other open question. Eight megaprojects running concurrently in one country draw on the same pool of engineering contractors, skilled construction labour, power connections and port slots as the rest of the Saudi capital programme, which is already unusually large. Sequencing, rather than ambition, is normally what decides whether plans of this type are delivered anywhere near their original cost.
The context is that Saudi Arabia has designated mining the third pillar of its industrial economy, alongside oil and petrochemicals, and Ma'aden is the principal instrument for getting there. The Kingdom values its unexploited mineral resources at about $2.5 trillion. Whether that estimate turns into an industry depends less on the resource than on whether capital of this scale is actually deployed, on schedule, into plants that run.