Adani made his billions from ports. His new bet is far from the shore

**Snigdha Sharma** (0:00)
In October last year, in the sea between Sicily and Malta, a ship called Energy Savannah slowed down to less than one knot. That is slower than my walking pace. And then, something even more curious happened. The ship stayed there for more than seven days. It was not a dock or a port, it was just a narrow strait of the Mediterranean, directly above the seabed cables and electricity links that connect Malta to Italy. It only docked three times that month, very briefly at the Maltese port of Marsax Lock. And then, it went straight back out into the sea again. What is even more interesting is who owns it. Energy Savannah, which is soon to be renamed as Astro Atlas, actually belongs to Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone, or APSEZ, which is India's largest private port operator.
For nearly three decades, Adani's port business began at the exact moment the ship docked and the cargo started moving. But now, one of its newest vessels seems to be in no hurry to reach a port at all.
Now, if you follow its roots long enough, like my colleague, The Ken reporter Sakshi Siddashiv did, a pattern emerges. The ship loops around the North Sea, the world's busiest offshore energy basin. And it lingers in the waters between Turkey and the Eastern Mediterranean. These happen to be among the most geopolitically contested subsea corridors on the planet. And here is the reason why.
The world's energy systems are slowly sliding off land and into the sea.
Think LNG terminals, wind farms that are sprawled across the European waters, and gas fields that sit even further from the shore. Even the cables carrying electricity and internet between countries run along the ocean floor.
India, like many, depends on this deep sea world more and more. But it owns almost none of it. Adani wants to change that.
Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from The Ken. I'm your host Snigdha Sharma and I don't chase the news cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleague Rachel Varghese and I will come to you with one business story that's worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Tuesday, the 14th of July.
To understand what Energy Savannah is really up to, my colleague Sakshi began keeping a tab on its movements. And instead of focusing on where it sails, she focused more on where it stops. And that is because this ship is a part of what is called Marine Services, where the job site is the water itself. Basically, offshore, things constantly need to be installed, repaired, inspected, surveyed, connected and maintained. Somebody has to bring the equipment and the engineers to that exact spot on the ocean and stay until the work is done.
Energy Savannah is built for this. It is a 100-meter-long vessel that can operate at depths beyond 3,000 meters, which means 3 kilometers of water between the hull of the ship and the seabed. So, a ship holding position for a week is basically a ship at work. And it chose one of the busiest energy worksites on the planet. You see, after Russia invaded Ukraine, Europe scrambled for new energy sources. And this trait sits at the crossroads of that effort. Gas from North America passes through it. Around it lie offshore gas fields, power interconnectors, submarine cables and terminals for LNG.
The ship's wider route tells the same story. It spends most of its time in the North Sea, the world's busiest offshore energy basin, and around Turkey and the Eastern Mediterranean, among the most contested undersea corridors anywhere. Adani assembled this capability piece by piece. It entered the business in 2022 by acquiring Ocean Sparkle. And today, it runs 136 vessels across 12 countries. In 2024, it also bought UAE-based Astro Offshore, adding more than 20 vehicles and a footprint across Asia and Africa. Energy Savanna is its ground vessel. In the last few months, APSEZ entered Europe's deep water market through a partnership with Oceaneering International, which is an American underwater engineering specialist. And it won a 10-year contract serving Argentina's first project to export LNG.
The business is still small, just over 8% of APSEZ's revenue, but it grew 134% in a single year, more than doubling. And the income is genuinely external, earned entirely from third-party customers rather than Adani's own ports. On the April earnings call, Chief Executive Ashwani Gupta explained the appeal.
These vessels sit on mid- to long-term contracts in a business not as cyclic to trade as compared to the shipping business. Which also raises a question. Adani already has a monopoly over India's port infrastructure. Why does it need to do this at all?
To find out, stay tuned.