Foreign direct investment into the United Arab Emirates reached AED 177.3bn in 2025, and the country ranked second worldwide for new greenfield projects for a third year. For an industrial reader the second figure carries more information than the first.
AIM Congress opens in Dubai this week against an investment backdrop that its organisers have been quoting for months. According to the World Investment Report 2026 from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, foreign direct investment inflows into the United Arab Emirates reached AED 177.3bn in 2025, and the country retained second place worldwide for new greenfield projects for a third consecutive year, attracting 1,562 of them.
Two numbers, and they measure different things. The distinction is worth drawing carefully, because the smaller one is the more useful.
Inflow value counts money crossing a border into a resident enterprise. It includes acquisitions of existing companies, reinvested earnings and intra-company lending, none of which necessarily results in anything being built. A large acquisition can move the headline substantially while changing the physical economy not at all: the factory that existed on Monday has a different owner on Friday.
A greenfield project is by definition new. It is a facility that did not exist, which means land is acquired, a building is constructed, equipment is procured and people are hired. Counted by project rather than by value, it is a reasonable proxy for how much physical activity an investment climate generates. Fifteen hundred and sixty-two of them is a substantial pipeline of construction distributed across a small country.
What the count does not reveal is composition, and that is where the industrial reading gets harder. The Emirates attract greenfield investment across financial services, technology, logistics, tourism, professional services, retail and industry, and a regional headquarters occupying a floor of an office tower counts as one project alongside a warehouse or a process plant. The construction content of those two is not comparable.
The sectors that do produce heavy construction content are visible in the country's own priorities: logistics and warehousing around the ports and free zones, food processing, pharmaceuticals, advanced manufacturing, and increasingly data centres. Each of those puts up buildings with substantial mechanical and electrical content, and each generates a supply chain order after the construction is finished.
The congress programme is arranged so that the composition question gets answered late. Day two runs vertical tracks across foreign direct investment, portfolio investment, small and medium enterprises, startups, family offices, future cities and the digital economy. Day three carries the bilateral and multilateral signings and the country-pavilion announcements, which is where individual projects acquire names, sectors and sometimes values.
For contractors and equipment suppliers the useful exercise at an event like this is to ignore the aggregate and count the announcements that name a facility. A memorandum to explore cooperation is not a building. A joint venture with a site is.
AIM Congress runs from 7 to 9 September at Dubai World Trade Centre, with more than 20,000 participants and over 400 institutions expected.