Azerbaijan’s second International Investment Forum closed in Baku this week with $10.8 billion in signed contracts across 26 agreements, a figure that nearly matches the inaugural event’s total and signals the country’s continued push to turn sovereign wealth connections into diversified capital deployment. The deals span artificial intelligence, energy, manufacturing and production, according to Economy Minister Mikayil Jabbarov, who confirmed the tally to Euronews on the forum’s final day.
The numbers and the names
The attendee list carried more weight than the aggregate dollar amount. BlackRock, Global Infrastructure Partners and Brookfield Asset Management were among the firms represented at the forum and the parallel Azerbaijan Infrastructure Investment Dialogue, collectively managing roughly $30 trillion in assets according to SOFAZ, the state oil fund. BlackRock alone reported $15.3 trillion under management as of July, with GIP, folded into BlackRock since 2024, accounting for another $170 billion. That concentration of institutional firepower in a single room is the real story; the contract value is merely the receipt.
The diversification pitch
President Ilham Aliyev used the forum to reiterate a now-familiar narrative: the non-oil sector reached 72% of GDP in 2025, with real non-oil growth averaging 5% annually since 2020. He listed manufacturing, transport, logistics, renewables, digital technologies, agriculture, tourism and infrastructure as target sectors. In the same breath, he acknowledged that energy investments still dominate, noting that the production-sharing agreements signed three decades ago remain “absolutely untouched - not a single word was changed,” which he framed as proof of Azerbaijan’s reliability as a partner. The consistency is the selling point; the diversification remains the aspiration.
The infrastructure dialogue
The closed-door Infrastructure Investment Dialogue, co-hosted by SOFAZ and BlackRock, moved the conversation from headline totals to project pipelines. Central Bank data shows foreign direct investment topped $3 billion in the first half of 2026, up 13.8% year on year. The leading source countries were not disclosed in the available data, but the trajectory suggests the forum’s memoranda are beginning to translate into recorded flows. Whether the $10.8 billion in new agreements follows the same conversion rate as the 2025 cohort, where more than $7 billion of the $10 billion-plus total targeted non-oil sectors, will be the metric that separates momentum from theater.