Saudi Arabia‘s trillion-dollar futuristic mega city is fast becoming a major embarrassment for the country, and is increasingly being seen as a symbol of the challenges its leadership is facing as tensions rage across the Middle East.
The plan, first announced in 2017, envisaged investing around a trillion dollars in building a city more than 100 miles long and just 200 meters wide. The Line would be a thin line of glass higher than The Shard cutting right through the Saudi desert, providing housing for millions of people and transforming the nation.
But issues have built up over the last few years, and earlier this week it was announced that the contract for critical tunneling work on the project had been cancelled.
“The Line was always a fantastical, magical project which was right on the actual limits or beyond the outer limits of imagination and reality,” Neil Quilliam, an associate fellow at Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa Programme, told The i Paper.
The Line was supposed to be a dramatic centrepiece of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, and part of the much larger Neom scheme that included an octagonal city, a floating hotel and a folding village. It rested on a strategy of attracting foreign direct investment (FDI), alongside stabilising regional tensions with Iran and the other gulf states.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler known by his initials MBS, now face a tough choice, with the Iran war, growing fiscal deficits, waning investor confidence and pushback from within the country itself, putting at risk the project as well as relations with the US, China and others.
“I think this is a dawning reality that that was way too ambitious and that they can have ambition but have to focus on more modest projects that are going to have a positive impact on the population,” Quilliam said.
The design plan for the 500-metre tall parallel structures known collectively as The Line, in the heart of the Red Sea megacity NEOM (Photo: NEOM/AFP via Getty Images)Plans for the project have been scaled back in recent years, with the initial proposal for The Line to extend to 170km reduced to just 2.4km in 2024. But the news this week that a tunnel construction contract worth an estimated $1 billion, awarded to a consortium led by South Korea’s Hyundai Engineering & Construction, had been cancelled points to further problems.
The tunnel was to be the foundation of the city, with space for a subway line as well as a freight railway track. The i Paper understands that the news had been expected for some time by people close to the project.
Grand and cutting-edge architecture has long been part of the way emerging powers demonstrate their ambition and wealth, said Tom Ravenscroft, the editor of Dezeen, an architecture and design magazine.
“The Line is a kind of marketing tool,” he said. “It’s showing that Saudi Arabia can do the biggest and the best, like in the 1920s when people in Europe heard that they were building the Empire State building in New York and thought ‘they’re crazy, it can’t be done’.
“But the massive difference is that the Empire State building was built,” he added.
For foreign investors and businesses, there are concerns around the growing risks from the war with Iran, as well as wider regional instability.
“The conflict comes at a really bad time, because we are seeing the entire FDI strategy shift, and NEOM and The Line has been emblematic of that,” said Torbjorn Soltvedt, an associate director and Middle East analyst at risk consultancy firm Maplecroft.
He said the goal for The Line was to get almost $200 billion (£150 billion) from foreign investors and another $200 billion from Saudi Arabia’s largest companies.
The futuristic city in Saudi Arabia was set to feature two massive, mirror-encased skyscrapers that extend over 170 kilometres of desert and mountain terrain (Photo: Neom/AFP/Getty)Soltveldt said that Saudi Arabia had been trying to regain momentum by reassuring investors on the geopolitical side, with a more diplomatic approach to winding down tensions with Yemen, reaching out to Iran and “being more of a regional diplomatic broker, but despite very actively trying to stay neutral, they’ve now found themselves right in the firing line of Iran”.
The inability to bring in the scale of private investment needed likely means Saudi Arabia’s rulers need to rely on the country’s sovereign wealth fund to fund their infrastructure ambitions. But this comes at a time when other spending is likely to increase dramatically.
“There’s going to be massive investment in defence, so there’s going to be a reallocation of funding, they’re going to have to start bringing their money home from Asia, probably from the US,” Soltveldt added, pointing to the $600bn Saudi Arabia pledged to Donald Trump shortly after his inauguration in 2025, although there was little detail on what that money was to be used for.
It could also be damaging to the global reputation that MBS has tried to establish for himself, hanging out with the likes of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
“MBS reputation will take a hit because he loves his KPIs [key performance indicators], and he really did make FDI one of those critical indicators,” Quilliam said.
“Vision 2030 is very closely associated with MBS himself,” Soltvedt added. “It’s not just kind of an economic project but it was also intended to be a vehicle for change by transforming the economy.”
That vision may now have to be scaled back as the region comes to terms with another round of conflict and instability, and as Saudi Arabia looks at a future without a gleaming line in the sand.
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