Abu Dhabi Sovereign Fund Buys $200m Stake in Irish-British Power Link, Its Third UK Energy Bet This Year

Mubadala bought the stake from Equitix, which continues to operate the asset in partnership with Baltic Cable. The transaction is one of the more significant pieces of foreign infrastructure investment to touch Irish energy assets so far in 2026, and it's a clear vote of confidence in the long-term value of the physical infrastructure connecting Ireland's power grid to the wider European market.

The Deal: What Mubadala Actually Bought

Abu Dhabi sovereign investor Mubadala Investment Company has acquired $200 million of Equitix's stake in Greenlink, the subsea electricity interconnector linking Ireland and Great Britain, in a deal announced this week. Mubadala bought the stake from Equitix, which continues to operate the asset in partnership with Baltic Cable.

What Greenlink Actually Is, and Why It Matters

Greenlink is a 504-megawatt high-voltage direct current subsea cable running roughly 190 kilometres beneath the Irish Sea, connecting EirGrid's Great Island substation in County Wexford to National Grid's Pembroke substation in Pembrokeshire, Wales. It entered commercial operation in early 2025 and has the capacity to power around 380,000 homes.

Crucially, it allows electricity to flow in both directions between the two markets, which means it does more than just import or export power — it actively helps balance supply and demand on both sides of the Irish Sea. That two-way flexibility is exactly what becomes more valuable as Ireland adds more wind and solar generation to its grid, since renewables produce variable amounts of power and interconnectors like Greenlink give the system somewhere to send a surplus, or somewhere to draw from when Irish generation dips.

The European Union has formally designated Greenlink a Project of Common Interest, a recognition reserved for infrastructure judged critical to regional energy security and a more integrated European power market.

Why a Gulf Sovereign Fund Wants a Piece of Irish Grid Infrastructure

Karim El Jazzar, Mubadala's head of Europe and MENA infrastructure, described Greenlink as "a strong example of infrastructure that combines strategic relevance with a clear and sustainable economic value." That's not just marketing language. Interconnectors like Greenlink operate under a regulated framework, overseen jointly by Ofgem in the UK and Ireland's Commission for Regulation of Utilities, which gives investors long-term visibility on revenues — a rare and valuable feature for institutional capital looking for stable, inflation-resilient returns over decades rather than years.

For Mubadala specifically, this is the third notable UK and Ireland-linked energy infrastructure bet this year, following a $325 million investment in the Hornsea 3 offshore wind project and backing for battery storage company Zenobē. Taken together, those three deals point to a deliberate strategy: rather than betting on any single power generation technology, Mubadala is building a diversified position across the infrastructure that makes the whole energy transition function — generation, storage, and the cables that move power to where it's actually needed.

What This Signals for Ireland's Energy Sector

For Ireland, this deal is a useful data point in a much bigger story: international capital continues to see Irish energy infrastructure as a genuinely attractive, de-risked place to deploy long-term money, even amid a more cautious global investment environment generally.

Equitix and Baltic Cable originally acquired Greenlink from Partners Group in a deal worth over €1 billion just last year, and the fact that a sovereign wealth fund of Mubadala's scale and selectivity is now buying into that same asset within twelve months suggests the original valuation has held up well, and that demand for exposure to Irish-linked grid infrastructure is, if anything, increasing.

Achal Bhuwania, Equitix's chief investment officer, framed the partnership as combining two investors with deep infrastructure expertise to better support "the evolving needs of interconnected power markets," language that points toward further joint investment in similar assets down the line rather than a one-off transaction.

The Bigger Picture for Energy Investment in Ireland

This deal lands at a moment when Ireland's own grid operators and policymakers are under real pressure to expand capacity to match growing electricity demand — not least from data centres and the broader electrification of transport and heating. Interconnector capacity is one of the more efficient ways to add flexibility to that system without building new generation from scratch, since it lets Ireland tap into surplus power generated elsewhere in Europe and the UK during periods of high demand, and export Irish-generated renewable power when conditions favour it.

A deal like this also tends to have a signalling effect well beyond the asset itself: when a sovereign fund with Mubadala's global reach and selectivity puts fresh capital into Irish-linked grid infrastructure, it tends to put that infrastructure — and the broader Irish energy market — more firmly on the radar of other large institutional investors evaluating where to place long-term European energy bets next.

The Bottom Line

A $200 million stake sale might sound like a story confined to financial pages, but for Ireland it's a concrete signal that the infrastructure underpinning the country's energy transition — not just the wind farms and solar panels, but the cables and grid links connecting Ireland to the rest of Europe — is attracting serious, patient international capital. With Mubadala now three deals deep into UK and Ireland energy infrastructure in a single year, expect more sovereign and institutional money to follow.