Eagle Hills inks USD 12 bn Maldives waterfront agreement, its largest Indian Ocean investment

Abu Dhabi-based developer Eagle Hills signed an agreement with the Maldives government to build the Maldives Waterfront and Marina, a mixed-use district in Ras Malé — the government’s flagship land-reclamation city at Fushi Dhiggaru Lagoon, about 17 minutes from Malé by speedboat, according to a press release. Eagle Hills says the project is envisioned to draw as much as USD 12 bn in investment across its phases, though the construction timeline has yet to be disclosed.

What Eagle Hills is actually proposing: The project comprises an integrated district of hotels, branded residences, a marina, and retail and leisure space, along with schools and clinics — the same mix as most of its other projects. Eagle Hills says it won’t dredge further, since the land is already reclaimed under the Maldives’ own Ras Malé program, and will bring in independent marine monitoring during construction.

Why it matters: This would be one of the largest foreign investment commitments the Maldives has landed — the Maldives’ entire FDI stock, accumulated over decades, is estimated at around USD 9.1 bn. Eagle Hills’ investment is still envisioned capital, not committed capital — but even directionally, this is a different order of magnitude for Maldivian FDI. It also comes at a moment when Abu Dhabi and Dubai developers — flush with cash from a multi-year property boom — are looking outside a home market where demand has cooled since the Iran war began.

Eagle Hills’ Georgian, Syrian, and now Maldivian pushes are variations on the same theme. Gulf capital and construction expertise, deployed into markets that need both. Chairman Mohamed Alabbar has said Dubai-listed Emaar Properties, which he also chairs, could join the project.

BACKGROUND- Eagle Hills’ overseas pipeline has grown fast. Since founding Eagle Hills in 2014, Alabbar has taken the Emaar playbook — master-planned, mixed-use, marina-anchored developments — into Georgia (a USD 6 bn commitment), Iraq (a USD 1.5 bn Baghdad golf course), Italy (restoring Venice’s Grand Hôtel des Bains with Coima), and most recently Syria, where he is planning a USD 18 bn reconstruction-linked fund. Not every push has landed cleanly: the Belgrade project with Jared Kushner has drawn scrutiny, Montenegro needed a parliamentary ratification fight to survive local controversy, and Budapest killed Eagle Hills’ “mini-Dubai” project outright after community pushback.

The Maldives — a market the UAE already knows well — is a comparatively lower-risk wager by that standard. UAE investors have been active in the country’s tourism sector for years. Dubai-based MBS Global Investments agreed with the Maldives government in May 2025 to build a USD 8.8 bn financial center in Malé; the Abu Dhabi Fund for Development backed the expansion of Velana International Airport, which reopened last year; and Dubai developer Dar partnered with a Trump-linked developer to build and tokenize a Maldives hotel just months ago.