Reports began surfacing suggesting that Saudi Arabia is recalibrating its ambitious goals for the under-construction “megacity” Neom, most prominently walking back its promise of housing 1.5 million people in one massive skyscraper dubbed “The Line.”
Neom debuted in 2017 as the personal pet project of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the crowning jewel of “Vision 2030,” bin Salman’s overarching plan to move the Saudi economy away from dependence on oil and expand Saudi Arabia’s cultural and political influence. Bin Salman has said in interviews that he hopes Neom will one day compete with cities such as Miami, Florida, to host global music festivals, attract elite technology companies and scientific talent, and reimagine the concept of a “walkable city.”
The Neom project’s largest individual development is The Line, a skyscraper that, once completed, is expected to be 106 miles long and house the needs of entire communities, including agricultural developments, shops, and other businesses, and a train system that would render cars and other personal modes of transportation obsolete. The developers of The Line had initially claimed they expected to house 1.5 million people in the building, leaving open-ended what sort of legal system would function in the building and how people would freely come and go from it, given the presumed government-controlled transport.
The Line has attracted the most attention of Neom’s projects but is far from alone. Some other neighborhoods in the imagined city are planned to consist of more traditional attractions, such as Oxagon, a community of offices for tech startups, the future ski resort and music festival venue Trojena, and the luxury retreat island Sindalah. However, these present significant challenges, such as the inherent difficulty of constructing a ski luxury in the desert and the fact that Oxagon is expected to be constructed on water.
Bloomberg reported on Friday, citing anonymous sources “familiar with the matter,” that construction of The Line is moving at a much slower pace than the heads of the project had predicted, leading them to predict that the building will be home to 300,000 people by 2030 — not 1.5 million. Bloomberg also claimed that the slow pace and growing concerns over funding the gigantic project have resulted in some laborers at the site losing their jobs.
“Officials have long said The Line would be built in stages and they expect it to ultimately cover a 170-kilometer stretch of desert along the coast. With the latest pullback, though, officials expect to have just 2.4 kilometers of the project completed by 2030,” Bloomberg claimed.
The outlet noted that the Saudi government “has yet to approve Neom’s budget for 2024,” citing anonymous sources, potentially endangering the future of the project. It noted, however, that Neom is not without its successes, including “the development of a more than $8 billion project to build solar and wind farms that will be used to create so-called green hydrogen.”
The completion of Sindalah is also reportedly on pace to arrive on time, expecting its first tourists in 2024.
The Bloomberg report belied concerns entirely absent in the public face of the Neom project. It noted that the Saudi government had not announced any setbacks for The Line publicly, and it has not weighed in on the report since. Rather than indicating a slowdown of development, Neom has consistently announced new projects. Its latest, debuting on March 20, is a lagoon resort named “Treyam” that will allegedly offer “an elevated haven in which to unwind, re-energize and enjoy majestic natural surroundings.”
Neom has also expanded its international presence in the first half of 2024, announcing the opening of an office to promote the city-to-be in New York in February.
The entire cost of building Neom is expected to be around $1 trillion, the New Civil Engineer reported on Monday — a prodigious sum in large part backed by Saudi Arabia’s oil profits. Aramco reported $121 billion in profits in 2023, a sizable amount, but only the second-highest on record.
New Civil Engineer noted in its reporting that the leadership of the Neom project announced in a video published in February that the “first phase” of the Line would be completed by 2030, not the entire project. It also noted that it could not get comment on the Bloomberg story from engineers associated with the Line.
“I think the plan that is laid out in the 2030 vision statement by His Royal Highness, is really clear and I think it’s galvanised everybody within the Kingdom,” Denis Hickey, the chief development officer of the Line project, said in the video.
If the Bloomberg report is accurate, it would not be the publication’s first to question the aggressive confidence that the crown prince and those associated with Neom have projected. In 2022, Bloomberg claimed, citing “more than 25 current and former employees,” that those involved were struggling to achieve what the crown prince was demanding of them.
“According to more than 25 current and former employees interviewed for this story, as well as 2,700 pages of internal documents, the project has been plagued by setbacks,” Bloomberg reported at the time, “many stemming from the difficulty of implementing MBS’s grandiose, ever-changing ideas—and of telling a prince who’s overseen the imprisonment of many of his own family members that his desires can’t be met.”
Mohammed bin Salman has repeatedly denied that Neom is “too ambitious.” In an interview for a special produced by the Discovery Channel in June, the crown prince insisted that Neom was “very do-able.”
“Neom will compete with Miami in terms of entertainment, culture, sports, and retail,” he promised, stating that the land used for the project is “empty [and] has a mix of topography, from mountains to islands, beaches, dunes, to oases, corals, skiing to diving.”
“Since we have empty place and we want to have a place for 10 million people, then let’s think from scratch,” he offered.
In reality, the northwestern part of Saudi Arabia is home to an indigenous tribe known as the Huwaitat, who have complained that the Saudi government is exterminating them off the land.
“For the Huwaitat tribe, Neom is being built on our blood, on our bones,” Huwaitat activist Alia Hayel Aboutiyah al-Huwaiti told the Guardian in 2020. “It’s definitely not for the people already living there! It’s for tourists, people with money. But not for the original people living there.”
Multiple reports that year indicated that prominent Huwaitat activists attempting to protest Riyadh’s invasion of their territory were in danger. The Saudi government killed at least one of them, Abdul Rahim al-Huwaiti, in his home after posting videos to YouTube denouncing that the government was “removing people and deporting them from their land.”
Human rights experts at the United Nations condemned the Neom project after reports surfaced that indigenous activists were charged with “terrorism” and facing execution.
“Despite being charged with terrorism, they were reportedly arrested for resisting forced evictions in the name of the NEOM project and the construction of a 170km linear city called The Line,” a letter by the U.N. experts published in May read. “Under international law, States that have not yet abolished the death penalty may only impose it for the ‘most serious crimes’, involving intentional killing. We do not believe the actions in question meet this threshold.”
