HVACR Saudi Arabia at Big 5 Construct Saudi turned on four questions: under what conditions a performance figure was measured, which refrigerant a plant is built around, where insulation is made, and who holds stock in the Kingdom. A 2027 local content deadline for split air conditioners sits behind all of them.
HVACR Saudi Arabia is the co-located section of Big 5 Construct Saudi that has quietly become the most strategically important part of the show, because Saudi Arabia is now building three things at once that all resolve into the same requirement: cool air, moved reliably, at the lowest achievable energy cost.
Residential and commercial real estate, industrial facilities and computing capacity are being commissioned in parallel, and each carries a cooling load that has to be designed, installed, certified and then operated for decades. Cooling already accounts for the largest share of Saudi electricity consumption through the summer, and researchers at IMARC put the Saudi air conditioning market at roughly $2.7bn in 2025 heading towards $5.2bn by 2034. The data centre cooling segment is far smaller in absolute terms but growing faster: Research and Markets sizes it at about $153m in 2025 rising to $836m by 2035.
What that means on an exhibition floor is that the conversations have moved down the specification. Four things dominated.
The first was certification, and specifically the conditions under which a performance figure was obtained. Eurovent Certita Certification exhibited with Eurovent Middle East promoting a Desert Certification option covering the six GCC markets, which tests equipment at 35C and 46C, requires demonstrated operability at 52C, and publishes a Desert Seasonal Energy Efficiency Ratio describing part-load performance across a year. The argument is straightforward: a rating obtained at European ambient conditions describes a climate that does not exist in the Kingdom.
The second was refrigerant selection, which has become a compliance decision as much as a thermodynamic one. Prime Middle East Trading Company won the Big 5 Impact Trail sustainability innovation award for its work with Honeywell's Solstice low-global-warming-potential range; its parent Prime Middle East FZE has distributed refrigerant and industrial gases across the region since 1993. For a mechanical contractor, the choice determines how long a plant remains serviceable under tightening rules and what a retrofit will cost.
The third was insulation, which is where the Gulf's supply chain has actually localised. Kimmco-Isover, jointly held by Alghanim Industries and Saint-Gobain Isover, runs a stone wool plant at Yanbu in the Kingdom's west and supplies glass wool from its Kuwait factory, giving the region a domestic source for thermal and acoustic insulation and for duct insulation systems. Insulation is heavy, bulky and freight-sensitive, which makes it one of the categories where local production wins on economics before policy is considered.
The fourth was the equipment channel itself. Haier's Saudi presence runs through Haier and Aljabr Saudi Electronics Company, formed with the Al Jabr group and a sponsor of the show, while technical distributors such as Alyamitech in Dammam supply HVAC equipment, valves, pumps, gauges and heat exchangers into industrial buyers. Most international cooling products reach a Saudi site through one of these intermediaries, and their stock levels and service coverage are what an owner is really buying.
Sitting behind all of it is a policy change with a date. The Local Content and Government Procurement Authority has confirmed that split air conditioners will be among the products requiring a minimum local content percentage from 1 August 2027 in order to benefit from the mandatory list of national products, alongside water pumps, water valves and copper wires. That gives every air conditioning manufacturer selling into Saudi public procurement a two-year window in which to decide whether it assembles here.
The conference programme carried a theme the equipment stands did not: coordination. Sessions addressed the relationship between HVACR design, installation and facilities management, which is where most Saudi cooling energy is actually lost. A correctly selected chiller commissioned badly, or handed over to an FM team without the control strategy that was designed for it, will underperform a cheaper machine that someone operates properly.
The scale of the operating asset is easy to underestimate. The Information Technology and Communications Complex in Riyadh, built across more than 800,000 square metres with four twenty-storey towers, runs its own district cooling plant rated at more than 35,000 tons of refrigeration. Assets of that size are not building services projects. They are utilities, and the Kingdom is commissioning more of them every year.