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King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) has opened a coral restoration facility on the Red Sea coast under the KAUST Coral Restoration Initiative (KCRI). The university announced the opening on 11 November 2026, alongside COP31 in Antalya. The facility is the world's largest for coral cultivation and restoration. It combines a land-based coral nursery and a research campus, with capacity to produce up to 360,000 corals a year. The initiative aims to outplant more than two million corals across 100 hectares of reef at Shushah Island by 2030, and to establish a resilient reef ecosystem by 2040. KCRI brings together a land-based nursery, sea-based nurseries, more than 50 research programmes in heat-resilient corals, coral probiotics, robotics and AI-driven modelling, and eCoral, an AI-driven digital twin of the reefscape. What it means for engineers: a land-based aquarium facility working with a digital twin that models the reef, selects planting sites and monitors growth, a project that brings engineering, technology and marine science into one system. What is the hardest engineering challenge in running a facility that produces hundreds of thousands of corals a year?
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