Saudi Arabia’s ambitious Neom megacity project, centered on the 170-kilometer mirrored skyscraper known as The Line, has been dramatically scaled back after years of engineering challenges, ballooning costs, and dwindling investor confidence. Conceived by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as a futuristic, car-free city for nine million residents, The Line was to feature a “hidden marina,” suspended buildings, and even a stadium 350 meters in the air. But as designs advanced, experts warned that much of it defied physics and practicality. Costs soared to an estimated $4.5 trillion, foreign investment lagged, and construction slowed despite more than $50 billion already spent, reports the Financial Times. Once hailed as a symbol of Saudi Arabia’s transformation beyond oil, The Line is now reduced to just three modules of its planned 20, with work largely halted and skepticism growing over whether the project will ever be completed. They write:
The centrepiece of The Line, a vast, glass-clad linear city in Saudi Arabia, was to be the “hidden marina”. The world’s largest cruise ships would glide through a gate as tall as London’s Shard over a deepwater harbour carved from the desert. Suspended above it, like a chandelier, a 30-storey glass-and-steel building would hang from the arch, a sci-fi vision dreamed up by a Hollywood art director. Even its designers warned that physics might not cooperate.
Beneath the marina, engineers planned a high-speed rail station. Above the chandelier, another flourish: a 45,000-seat football stadium perched 350 metres above sea level, ready for Saudi Arabia’s 2034 World Cup. “This stadium will be like nothing you have ever seen,” Denis Hickey, The Line’s chief development officer, told an audience in Davos earlier this year. “Everyone says: ‘Can you build it?’” […]
When construction began three years ago, The Line was meant to be a symbol of unstoppable momentum: transformative urban living without traditional streets or cars, powered by renewables, running uninterrupted from the Gulf of Aqaba to the Hejaz mountains. It would be the centrepiece of Neom, the futuristic metropolis through which Prince Mohammed intended to prove the scale of his ambition as Saudi Arabia aims to transition from oil to a digital economy. […]
With the goal now to build just three of the 20 modules originally planned, the ambition for The Line’s first phase is a faint echo of what it once was. One person familiar with the project said work had effectively stopped, with efforts now focused on completing a few small buildings around the marina. Some of the earlier piling work has been covered with sand.
“I think as a thought experiment, great,” said one urban planning expert who works in Saudi Arabia. “But don’t build thought experiments.”
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