Ekimov was awarded the 1975 USSR State Prize in Science and Engineering for work on electron spin orientation in semiconductors. He is co-recipient of the 2006 R. W. Wood Prize of the Optical Society of America for "discovery of nanocrystal quantum dots and pioneering studies of their electronic and optical properties" shared with Alexander Efros and Louis E. Brus.
Ekimov, Brus and Moungi Bawendi were the recipients of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots".