The pattern is visible only in retrospect, and only if you are willing to look at the entire portfolio at once rather than one headline at a time. Every Vision 2030 giga-project that survived into 2026 shares a single characteristic: it generates economic returns independent of the megacity thesis. Every project that was cancelled, suspended, or quietly killed shared a different characteristic: it required the integrated megacity to function. The green hydrogen plant produces a commodity that global markets will buy regardless of whether NEOM becomes a city. The ski resort in the desert required a city of 9 million people to justify its existence. One survived. One did not. The pattern holds across the entire portfolio without exception.
What follows is the forensic record of what the Kingdom built, what it abandoned, what it spent, and what it has left to show for the most expensive construction programme in modern history.
The Line: $50 Billion for 1.4 Per Cent
The Line was announced in January 2021 as a 170-kilometre mirrored linear city stretching from the Red Sea coast to the mountains of Tabuk. It would house 9 million people. It would have no cars, no streets, and no carbon emissions. It would be completed by 2030. The original cost estimate was $500 billion, though internal projections placed the figure at $1.5 trillion.
By April 2024, Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal reported that the first phase had been scaled back to 2.4 kilometres — approximately 1.4 per cent of the planned length. The 2030 population target was revised from 1.5 million to fewer than 300,000. Saudi officials initially denied the scale-back. The construction site confirmed it.
On 16 September 2025, the Public Investment Fund formally suspended all construction on The Line until further notice. The on-site workforce was relocated to Riyadh. As of April 2026, work has not resumed.
A 100-page internal audit, presented to the NEOM board in the spring of 2024 and reported by the Wall Street Journal in March 2025, delivered the mathematical verdict: completing The Line to its original specification would cost an estimated $8.8 trillion and would not be finished until 2080. The figure exceeds 25 times Saudi Arabia’s annual government budget. It is more than four times the Kingdom’s GDP. McKinsey and Company assisted with the audit’s preparation. The audit found “evidence of deliberate manipulation” by “certain members of management” who had based the business plan on “unrealistically positive assumptions” to justify cost overruns. Revenue estimates were inflated to cover cost increases, with examples including a boutique hiking hotel room repriced from $489 to $1,866 per night and an “inventive glamping” site raised from $216 to $794 per night — adjustments designed to artificially inflate the internal rate of return.
What $50 billion produced: an operational airport, road networks, worker housing for tens of thousands of labourers, port facilities on the Red Sea, and 2.4 kilometres of foundation work with 16,000 deep piles laid. No above-ground superstructure exists. NEOM’s deputy CEO, Rayan Fayez, confirmed the spending figure at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2025 with the characterisation that NEOM was “an economy building exercise” rather than a “giga-project or real estate development project.” The distinction is more revealing than intended.
On 12 March 2026, NEOM terminated a $1 billion tunnelling contract held by a consortium of Hyundai Engineering and Construction, Samsung C&T, and Greece-based Archirodon. The contract, awarded in June 2022, covered a 12.5-kilometre underground tunnel for highways, metro, and freight rail beneath The Line. Hyundai’s share was approximately 723.1 billion won — roughly $500 million. The consortium finalised settlements for completed works and reported no financial loss. The tunnel that was supposed to serve 9 million residents now serves no one.
NEOM had claimed to be consuming 20 per cent of the world’s available steel. Its chief investment officer, Manar Al Moneef, stated that the city would be “the world’s largest customer for construction materials for several decades.” Those materials are no longer being ordered.
Trojena: The $6 Billion Month
Trojena was designed as a 1,400-square-kilometre mountain tourism destination within NEOM, featuring a ski resort, a freshwater lake, luxury hotels, and year-round outdoor recreation in the mountains of Tabuk Province. In 2022, Saudi Arabia won the right to host the 2029 Asian Winter Games at Trojena — a decision that required competition-grade ski infrastructure in a desert environment where summer temperatures exceed 30 degrees Celsius.
The Winter Games proved to be the immovable deadline that exposed every moveable assumption. Industry observers estimated that Trojena needed $3-4 billion in construction awards within six months to have any realistic chance of hosting on time. Instead, it received $6 billion in cancellations.
On 24 January 2026, the Olympic Council of Asia and the Saudi Olympic Committee jointly announced a “postponement.” The Saudi statement framed the withdrawal as strategic: “We have made the difficult decision to withdraw as hosts of the 2029 Asian Winter Games to ensure we can deliver the transformational destination that Trojena is designed to be.” On 5 February, Almaty, Kazakhstan was named the replacement host, selected for a quality that Trojena definitionally lacked: existing winter sports venues.
The contract terminations followed in sequence. Webuild, Italy’s largest engineering group, saw its $4.7 billion contract for three dams and a 2.8-kilometre freshwater lake terminated effective 29 March 2026. The project had reached 30 per cent completion. The remaining backlog was approximately EUR 2.8 billion. Webuild stated it would be “unharmed,” with NEOM reimbursing all costs including demobilisation. The diplomatic framing obscured the reality: nearly $5 billion of work was stopped because the client decided the project should not exist.
Eversendai Corporation of Malaysia, working in collaboration with Saudi Arabia’s Al Bawani Company, had its structural steel contract for Trojena’s Ski Village terminated on 26 March. The contract had been awarded barely a year earlier, in March 2024. The company cited the “escalating Middle East conflict/geopolitical situation” as the stated reason and was preparing claims for compensation.
The environmental case against Trojena was never seriously addressed because the prestige case rendered it irrelevant. The freshwater lake required damming a desert wadi system. The ski infrastructure demanded continuous artificial snow production at temperatures incompatible with winter sports. The entire concept tested the outer boundaries of climate engineering in a region experiencing accelerating water stress. When the prestige case became unaffordable, the environmental case became academic. The desert won on economics before ecology could enter the argument.
The Mukaab: $50 Billion on Paper, $100 Million in Practice
New Murabba was announced as a $50 billion redevelopment of downtown Riyadh, centred on the Mukaab — a 400-metre cube that would be the world’s largest single-built structure, containing approximately 2 million square metres of interior floor space. The interior would feature a dome with an AI-powered display — the largest on the planet — observed from a ziggurat rising over 300 metres. The structure would be “large enough to fit 20 Empire State Buildings.” Completion was targeted for 2030.
On 27 January 2026, Reuters reported that construction beyond soil excavation and pilings had been suspended. The surrounding real estate development continued, but the cube itself — the $50 billion project’s reason for being — was paused. Projects commissioned to date were valued at approximately $100 million. The completion date was pushed from 2030 to 2040.
The ratio tells the story: $100 million contracted against a $50 billion plan. The gap between ambition and commitment was not a phasing decision. It was a project that existed primarily as a rendering. Knight Frank estimated the total project value at roughly equivalent to Jordan’s GDP. That comparison was offered admiringly when the project was announced. It reads differently now.
Oxagon: The City That Never Floated
Oxagon was NEOM’s floating industrial platform — the world’s largest, positioned in the Red Sea as an innovation and manufacturing hub. The octagonal structure was designed to house advanced manufacturing, logistics operations, and a research campus, all on a massive floating platform.
As of the first quarter of 2026, no procurement activity has been recorded for the floating platform. The concept has been pushed to the early 2030s with no confirmed construction start date. The port — the terrestrial component — is 68 per cent complete, with BESIX having delivered more than four kilometres of quay wall and seven berths. Full container operations are scheduled for 2026, with a terminal capacity of 1.5 million TEU per year. The green hydrogen plant, situated within the Oxagon zone, is 80 to 90 per cent complete.
The irony of Oxagon is that its useful components — the port, the hydrogen plant, the power grid — were always terrestrial. The floating platform was the architectural spectacle, the element that required the megacity thesis to justify its existence. It was quietly deleted from near-term plans without a cancellation announcement. The port works. The platform was never ordered.
In February 2026, NEOM announced a $5 billion partnership with DataVolt for an AI data centre campus at Oxagon — a 1.5 GW facility anticipated to be operational by 2028, using Red Sea seawater for cooling with net-zero operations. Hexagon, the Swedish-American geospatial company, secured a $2.7 billion contract for smart-city data infrastructure. The floating industrial city is becoming a data centre campus. The pivot is unstated but visible in the contract values.
Sindalah: Three Years Late and Counting
Sindalah, the luxury island resort in the Red Sea, was positioned as NEOM’s first deliverable — the component that would demonstrate the project’s ability to execute. The original opening date passed without comment. A “grand opening” party was held in October 2024, three years after the originally scheduled opening. As of August 2025, the resort remained closed to the public. No confirmed public opening date existed as of March 2026.
The island has consumed an estimated $4 billion — roughly triple the initial projected cost. No published room rates, booking portals, or guest arrival dates exist for the Four Seasons property. A realistic estimate for a soft opening is late 2027 at the earliest. Red Sea Global, a PIF subsidiary, is set to take over management.
Sindalah was supposed to prove that NEOM could deliver. Instead, it demonstrated that even the simplest component — a single luxury island resort — could not be completed on budget or on schedule.
Jeddah Tower: The Seven-Year Freeze, Thawed
Jeddah Tower presents a counter-narrative that complicates the graveyard thesis, which is precisely why it merits inclusion. Planned as the world’s first kilometre-tall building — at least 180 metres taller than the Burj Khalifa — the tower was halted in 2018 when its principal backer, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, was detained during the Ritz-Carlton purge.
Construction restarted in January 2025. As of 27 March 2026, the tower had surpassed the 95th floor, adding a new floor every three to four days. CEO Talal Almaiman targets completion in 2028. The tower is not a giga-project in the Vision 2030 sense — it predates the programme and serves a conventional commercial purpose. But its restart after a seven-year freeze, and its steady vertical progress while every NEOM component stalls, illustrates the principle: projects with standalone economic logic can survive political disruption. Projects that depend on a megacity thesis cannot survive fiscal disruption.
The Kill List
Beyond the headline projects, a cascade of smaller cancellations and “re-scoping” decisions has quietly reduced the active portfolio:
PIF reduced budget allocations to giga-projects in December 2024, beginning the formal process of triage. A reported 60 per cent cut in PIF construction contracts followed. Multiple NEOM contracts worth billions in aggregate were cancelled on 26 March 2026.
Approximately 1,000 NEOM employees — 20 per cent of the 5,000 direct staff — were laid off. The remaining employees were relocated from the remote construction site to Riyadh, losing on-site benefits including housing and meals, a de facto pay cut delivered as a logistics decision.
Meanwhile, a 16-building palace for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has taken shape within the NEOM zone — complete with private beaches, extensive gardens, a golf course, ten helipads, and four swimming pools. It is visible from satellite imagery. The palace requires no residents, no ski resort, and no floating industrial platform. It required only a decision.
The Survivors
The projects that survived share a structural characteristic so consistent it could serve as an investment screen.
Qiddiya opened Six Flags Qiddiya City on 31 December 2025 — the first operational entertainment asset, with 28 rides and attractions including Falcons Flight, the world’s longest, tallest, and fastest roller coaster. Aquarabia, the largest water park in the Middle East at 25 hectares, was opening after Eid al-Fitr in March 2026. The Prince Mohammed bin Salman Stadium broke ground in 2026 for a 2029 opening. The Speed Park F1 circuit, valued at $1.9 billion, targets completion around 2027. Qiddiya’s long-term plan anticipates 600,000 residents and 48 million annual visitors. The theme park works because theme parks have customers on day one.
Red Sea Global had nine resorts open as of 2026, out of 27 underway. The first — Six Senses Southern Dunes — opened in November 2023. Plans target 16 properties operating in 2026 across Four Seasons, Ritz-Carlton, Rosewood, and Six Senses brands. AMAALA was on track to welcome first guests in 2026. The full 2030 target: 50 hotels, 8,000 rooms, and over 1,000 residential properties across 22 islands and six inland sites. Luxury tourism has demand curves that do not depend on a linear city.
Diriyah Gate, the seven-square-kilometre heritage and lifestyle development near Riyadh, had awarded more than $27 billion in contracts since 2024 within a total project value of $63 billion. Heritage hotels were open and operating. The Bujairi Terrace had established itself as Riyadh’s most popular gathering place. Museums were welcoming visitors. The UNESCO-listed At-Turaif district had been meticulously restored. A $1.5 billion contract for a 20,000-seat arena and a $1.4 billion contract for the Royal Diriyah Opera House were underway. Hotels from The Langham, The Chedi, and Six Senses were opening in 2026. The overall completion date shifted from 2027 to 2030 — a delay, but not a cancellation. Diriyah works because it is a real place with real heritage serving a real city of 8 million people.
King Abdullah Financial District hosted 140 tenants and 75 multinational regional headquarters across 95 buildings covering 1.6 million square metres. The KAFD metro station — a Zaha Hadid design — became operational in December 2024. A 3.6-kilometre driverless monorail was under development for 2027. Climate-controlled skywalks connected the buildings. KAFD works because Riyadh needs office space and the companies occupying it need it now.
The NEOM Green Hydrogen plant — the $8.4 billion joint venture between ACWA Power, Air Products, and NEOM, financed with $6.1 billion in non-recourse financing from 23 international banks — was 80 to 90 per cent complete. It will generate four gigawatts of solar and wind power and produce up to 600 tonnes of green hydrogen daily. Green ammonia exports are expected in 2027. The hydrogen plant works because there is a global buyer for green ammonia and the sun shines reliably in Tabuk.
The test is simple. Does the project have a customer who exists today? If yes, it survived. If it required a population of 9 million people in a mirrored corridor in the desert, it did not.
PIF’s $8 Billion Writedown
In August 2025, PIF disclosed an $8 billion writedown on its giga-project portfolio, reflecting end-of-2024 valuations. Gigaproject investments declined 12.4 per cent to 211 billion Saudi riyals — approximately $56.2 billion. The giga-project share of PIF’s total assets fell from 8 per cent in 2023 to 6 per cent in 2024.
The writedown was driven by budget overruns at NEOM, where geological challenges in the Tabuk desert exceeded engineering projections; operational complications at Red Sea Global, where environmental restrictions constrained development timelines; and lower crude oil prices in 2024, which reduced Aramco dividend income below the levels required to fund Vision 2030 comfortably.
PIF’s total assets under management stood at approximately $925 billion. The fund targets $2.67 trillion by 2030. The $8 billion writedown represented less than 1 per cent of the total portfolio — a rounding error in sovereign wealth fund terms. But it was the first public acknowledgement that the giga-project thesis had a price, and that the price was being paid.
The McKinsey Question
McKinsey and Company has earned more than $130 million annually from NEOM, according to reporting by DeSmog in October 2024. The firm assisted with the preparation of the internal audit that revealed the $8.8 trillion projected cost. It helped design the original scope — the 170-kilometre linear city, the mountain ski resort, the floating industrial platform — and then helped audit the scope it had designed. The audit found that executives, aided by McKinsey, had relied on “unrealistically rosy assumptions” to justify cost overruns. McKinsey’s spokesman stated that the firm “abides by international business rules” and was not involved in “manipulation of financial reporting.”
Boston Consulting Group was involved in designing the Vision 2030 economic blueprint. Leaked consulting documents revealed that BCG had suggested partnering with NASA to create an artificial moon — “the biggest in the world.” Consulting heads from BCG were summoned before the US Congress in 2024 to disclose details of their Saudi engagements. Specific fee amounts from BCG have not been publicly disclosed.
The consulting industry’s relationship with Vision 2030 raises a structural question: when the firms that design the plans are also paid to validate them, and the fees scale with the ambition of the plans, who is the client — the government that pays, or the rendering that grows? McKinsey earned over $130 million per year while advising on a project whose internal audit found evidence of deliberate financial manipulation. The question is not whether McKinsey knew. The question is whether the incentive structure made it possible not to.
The Contractor Damage
DSV, one of the world’s largest logistics groups, holds a 49 per cent stake in a $10 billion joint venture with NEOM for exclusive logistics and transport services until 2055. The total shareholder funding commitment through the end of 2031 was $5 billion, of which DSV had committed up to $2.45 billion. As of February 2026, the joint venture was “not operational, and no capital has been allocated to it.” DSV capped spending at $100 million in 2025 as project timelines slipped. The joint venture was announced in October 2023 with the promise of 20,000 jobs. None have been created.
Bechtel, Fluor, and AECOM had collectively won or were in final-stage negotiations for an estimated $4-6 billion in NEOM construction packages. Several packages were suspended, reduced, or rebid at significantly lower values. None of these firms derives the majority of revenue from Saudi Arabia, but the loss of anticipated NEOM contract volume represents a material negative revision to 2026-2027 backlog growth projections.
The contractor community responded with the pragmatism that characterises an industry accustomed to sovereign clients changing their minds. Companies pivoted from NEOM packages to FIFA World Cup stadium construction, Expo 2030 infrastructure, and the data centre buildout that HUMAIN and SDAIA are driving. The Saudi construction market has not shrunk. It has rotated. The firms that can rotate will recover their order books within two to three years. Those locked into NEOM-specific contracts face writedowns.
The Pivot
Finance Minister Mohammed Al-Jadaan told Bloomberg in December 2025: “We have no ego — absolutely no ego. If we announce something and we need to adjust it, accelerate it and make it a priority more than others, or defer or cancel it, we will without blinking.” Economy Minister Faisal al-Ibrahim stated: “We’re very transparent. We’re not going to shy away from saying we had to shift this project, delay it, re-scope it.”
The honesty arrived two years after the decisions. The first public acknowledgement that timelines were slipping came from Al-Jadaan in December 2023, when he noted that the government had decided to extend timelines for some Vision 2030 projects “to build capacity and avert inflationary pressures.” The language of capacity building obscured the reality of fiscal triage: oil prices had fallen below the levels required to fund the programme comfortably, and the integrated megacity thesis had been mathematically disproven by NEOM’s own internal audit.
PIF’s 2026-2030 strategy, soft-launched with investors in February 2026, made the pivot explicit. The emphasis shifted to AI infrastructure, manufacturing, minerals, and tourism. The fund created 16 new domestic companies in 2024, including HUMAIN for artificial intelligence, ALAT for advanced manufacturing, and Neo Space for commercial aerospace. Domestic assets rose to approximately 80 per cent of the portfolio. An anticipated 15 per cent further reduction in capital spending was projected.
The NEOM Stadium — planned as a FIFA 2034 World Cup venue sitting 350 metres above ground within The Line’s architectural envelope — creates a paradoxical minimum viable product. FIFA’s deadline forces the construction of at least one functioning section of The Line by 2032: a sports neighbourhood with transport, accommodation, and airport connectivity. It is the most realistic version of NEOM — not a 170-kilometre city, but a stadium district that happens to sit inside the shell of one. The external deadline accomplished what internal ambition could not: a deliverable scope.
The post-fantasy strategy is visible in the contract values. DataVolt: $5 billion for AI data centres. Hexagon: $2.7 billion for smart-city infrastructure. These are the investments that replaced the ski resort and the floating platform. They do not require 9 million residents. They require electricity, cooling water, and fibre optic cable — all of which NEOM’s $50 billion in infrastructure spending has conveniently provided.
The desert of Tabuk province remains. Twenty-six thousand square kilometres of mountains, coastline, and sand where Saudi Arabia planned to build a civilisation from nothing. The airport works. The hydrogen plant nears completion. The port is operational. The roads connect points that no longer have destinations. And 2.4 kilometres of foundation — one-fiftieth of a linear city that was supposed to house 9 million people — sits in the sand as the most expensive archaeological site in human history: a monument to what sovereign capital can imagine and what physics, geology, and budgets will not allow it to build.
The vision was real. The money was real. The buildings were not.
This analysis draws on contractor filings from Webuild, Hyundai E&C, Eversendai, DSV, and BESIX; PIF annual reports, financial disclosures, and the $8 billion writedown announcement; the NEOM internal audit as reported by the Wall Street Journal (March 2025); McKinsey fee reporting by DeSmog and TechCrunch; Bloomberg, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, AGBI, CNBC, Arabian Business, Engineering News-Record, New Civil Engineer, Construction Week Online, and Middle East Eye; data from the IMF, NEOM, Qiddiya, Red Sea Global, Diriyah Gate, KAFD, and the Saudi Ministry of Finance; and public statements by Finance Minister Mohammed Al-Jadaan, Economy Minister Faisal al-Ibrahim, and NEOM deputy CEO Rayan Fayez. Vision2030.AI is editorially independent and is not affiliated with NEOM, PIF, or any official Vision 2030 entity.