Foster + Partners, the London firm responsible for the Gherkin and Berlin's Reichstag dome, were appointed in May 2004. The design went public in October 2005, planning consent followed in 2006, and ground was finally broken in February 2011 with construction by Lend Lease. By November 2011 the roof began to take shape; by April 2013 it was complete; by May the signature translucent outer cushions were installed along with the seating. Capacity settled at 14,300 - 12,300 seated plus 2,000 standing. The whole thing came together in roughly two years. The neighbour to the south is the SEC Centre, and the immediate neighbour to the west is the SEC Armadillo, another Foster building that has dominated Clydeside since 1997. Together they form the Scottish Event Campus, a deliberate cluster of venues that turned a stretch of post-industrial waterfront into a destination.

On Sunday 8 June 2013, at about 3:20 in the afternoon, flames appeared on the partially completed dome. Forty firefighters from the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service arrived to contain the blaze. The cause turned out to be ongoing welding work on the roof - sparks finding something flammable in the wrong moment. On 18 June the venue's operator announced that despite the setback, work was still on track for the September opening. The roof was repaired, the cushions installed, and Rod Stewart took the stage as planned. The fire became one of those near-miss stories that construction projects rarely talk about afterwards.

The Hydro became Glasgow's all-purpose arena. The 2014 Commonwealth Games used it for netball and gymnastics. The BBC Sports Personality of the Year ceremony was held here in December 2014. The UFC brought its first Scottish event - UFC Fight Night: Bisping vs. Leites - in July 2015. The Artistic Gymnastics World Championships ran here in late 2015. Boxer Josh Taylor headlined four nights of light welterweight fights. Insane Championship Wrestling drew 6,193 fans to Fear and Loathing IX in November 2016, billed as the most-attended independent UK wrestling event in 35 years. WWE returned to Scotland with Clash at the Castle in June 2024, the company's first major televised pay-per-view ever held in Scotland and its first event in the country since 2002. All Elite Wrestling debuted in Scotland with a Dynamite and Collision taping in August 2025.

On 11 September 2014, days before the Scottish independence referendum, the Hydro hosted Scotland Decides: The Big, Big Debate - the largest televised debate in Scotland's history, with around 7,500 first-time voters in attendance and live broadcast on BBC One. The arena has appeared in fiction too: it stood in for the Eurovision Song Contest venue in the 2020 film Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, and the exterior plays the home of the fictional Los Angeles Waves basketball team in the Netflix series Running Point. The numbers tell the rest of the story. In 2016 the Hydro handled 751,487 ticket sales, ranking eighth-busiest music arena in the world. In 2019 it was second only to Madison Square Garden. It pulls more than a million visitors a year - the size of Glasgow's entire metropolitan population, give or take, passing through one building.