On 15 February 2023, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman unveiled New Murabba — a $50 billion redevelopment of downtown Riyadh centred on the Mukaab, a structure that would be the world’s largest single-built edifice. The Mukaab would be a cube: 400 metres on each side, enclosing approximately 2 million square metres of interior floor space. The interior would contain a dome — the largest AI-powered display on the planet — observed from a ziggurat rising over 300 metres within the cube’s shell. The structure would be, in the promotional material’s own framing, “large enough to fit 20 Empire State Buildings.”
The surrounding New Murabba district would contain 104,000 residential units, commercial space, hospitality venues, cultural facilities, and public services. It would create 334,000 jobs. It would transform Riyadh’s urban core. The completion date was 2030.
On 27 January 2026, Reuters reported that construction of the Mukaab beyond soil excavation and pilings had been suspended. Projects commissioned to date were valued at approximately $100 million. The completion date had been pushed from 2030 to 2040.
The ratio tells the entire story: $100 million contracted against a $50 billion plan. Two-tenths of one per cent of the announced budget had been committed to actual work. Ninety-nine point eight per cent of the project existed exclusively in renderings, press releases, and the architectural imagination. The Mukaab was not cancelled. It was never meaningfully started.
The Specifications
The Mukaab’s dimensions were designed to defy casual comprehension. At 400 metres per side, the cube would rise higher than the Empire State Building’s roof (381 metres) and would enclose an internal volume larger than any structure ever built. The 2 million square metres of floor space would exceed the Pentagon (600,000 square metres), the world’s current largest building by floor area. The AI-powered dome within the cube would project immersive environments — shifting skies, landscapes, virtual worlds — visible from every floor of the interior ziggurat.
The promotional materials invited comparisons to the ancient world: the cube as a modern pyramid, the ziggurat as a Babylonian reference, the scale as an assertion of civilisational ambition. The comparisons were apt in ways the promoters did not intend. The pyramids took decades to build with unlimited coerced labour. The Mukaab was supposed to take seven years with a sovereign wealth fund.
The architectural renderings showed a luminous cube rising from Riyadh’s low-rise sprawl, its faces reflecting the desert sky, its interior glowing with projected landscapes. The renderings did not show the construction workforce, the budget allocation, the engineering timeline, or the feasibility analysis that would determine whether a 400-metre cube was physically buildable on the announced schedule and budget.
Knight Frank estimated the total project value at roughly equivalent to the GDP of Jordan — a comparison offered admiringly when the project was announced. It reads differently when the project has been suspended with 0.2 per cent of its budget committed.
The Kaaba Question
The Mukaab’s cubic form drew immediate comparisons to the Kaaba — Islam’s holiest shrine, the cuboid structure at the centre of the Grand Mosque in Mecca toward which 1.8 billion Muslims pray. Saudi religious scholars and online commentators questioned whether a 400-metre cube in the secular commercial district of Riyadh could be perceived as a competitive or blasphemous echo of the sacred structure.
The comparison was never officially acknowledged by New Murabba’s development company. The project’s branding deliberately avoided religious language. But the visual parallel was inescapable — a black-clad cube of unprecedented scale in the capital of the country that serves as custodian of the Two Holy Mosques — and the religious sensitivity added a dimension of political risk that purely commercial megaprojects do not typically face.
The sensitivity was not fatal to the project. It was, however, a complication in a country where religious authority remains a political force and where the Crown Prince’s social liberalisation programme has already strained relations with the conservative religious establishment. A 400-metre cube in Riyadh could be many things. It could not avoid being compared to the one cube that Saudi Arabia is obligated to venerate.
The Announcement-to-Suspension Timeline
The timeline from announcement to suspension spans less than three years — a period in which the project moved from press conference to pilings to pause without passing through the intermediate stage of meaningful construction.
15 February 2023: Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman announces New Murabba and the Mukaab. The $50 billion figure is publicised. The completion target is 2030. Promotional video shows the cube rising from Riyadh’s skyline.
2023-2024: Soil excavation and preliminary pilings begin at the Riyadh site. The groundwork phase proceeds at a pace consistent with a project in its earliest stages. Contracts are awarded for site preparation — the $100 million that constitutes the project’s total committed spending.
December 2025: Michael Dyke, CEO of New Murabba, publicly acknowledges that the project is “challenging” — a word that in the lexicon of megaproject management means that the engineering, the budget, or the timeline is not performing as planned. Dyke’s statement represented the first official acknowledgement that the Mukaab faced obstacles beyond the routine difficulties of large-scale construction.
27-28 January 2026: Reuters reports that construction beyond soil excavation and pilings has been suspended. The surrounding real estate development — the residential and commercial components of New Murabba that do not depend on the cube — continues. The cube itself is paused.
Post-suspension: The completion date is revised from 2030 to 2040. The decade-long delay transforms the Mukaab from a near-term deliverable into a long-horizon aspiration — the kind of project that governments announce when they want to signal ambition without committing to execution on a timeline that would hold anyone accountable.
The $100 Million Reality
The $100 million in contracts awarded against a $50 billion budget represents a commitment ratio of 0.2 per cent. The number requires context to appreciate its implications.
On a $50 billion construction programme, the design and engineering phase alone — before a single cubic metre of concrete is poured — typically consumes 5 to 10 per cent of the total budget, or $2.5 to $5 billion. Site preparation and foundations consume another 10 to 15 per cent, or $5 to $7.5 billion. The $100 million in awarded contracts does not cover even the preliminary design phase of a $50 billion project.
The gap suggests one of two things: either the project was announced before its engineering had progressed beyond the conceptual stage, or the engineering progressed and produced cost estimates that made full commitment financially or technically impossible. In either case, the $50 billion figure — announced by the Crown Prince himself, repeated in every media report, and embedded in the investment narrative of Vision 2030 — was a number that bore no relationship to the project’s actual development trajectory.
The $100 million spent is not wasted in the conventional sense. It funded site preparation — excavation and pilings that establish the physical platform for whatever the site eventually becomes. If the Mukaab is eventually completed in 2040, the preparatory work will have been early investment. If the Mukaab is never completed, the site will host a different development — residential towers, commercial space, a mixed-use district — that uses the prepared ground for a project less ambitious but more achievable.
The real cost is not the $100 million. It is the credibility consumed by a $50 billion announcement that produced $100 million in action — a ratio that communicates to international investors, construction partners, and capital markets that Saudi Arabia’s megaproject announcements should be discounted by approximately 99.8 per cent until contracts are signed and construction is visible.
The 2026 Budget Silence
The Saudi government’s 2026 budget, released in December 2025, contained no specific references to the Mukaab or New Murabba — a notable omission given the project’s scale and the prominence of its announcement. Previous budget cycles had referenced megaprojects as evidence of the Kingdom’s investment commitment. The absence of the Mukaab from the 2026 budget aligned with the broader pattern of de-emphasising megaproject spending in favour of infrastructure, AI, and industrial investment.
The budget silence is not equivalent to cancellation. Saudi budget documents do not itemise every PIF-funded project. But the omission, combined with the construction suspension and the timeline extension, communicates a political message: the Mukaab does not currently carry the political protection necessary to command budget prominence.
PIF’s own financial disclosures tell a parallel story. The $8 billion writedown on giga-project investments disclosed in August 2025, and the reduction of giga-projects from 8 per cent to 6 per cent of PIF assets, describe a fund that is reallocating capital away from architectural spectacles and toward assets that generate returns. The Mukaab — a 400-metre cube with no revenue model beyond the assumption that Riyadh’s commercial market would fill 2 million square metres of floor space — does not fit the revised portfolio strategy.
What the Suspension Means
The Mukaab is not dead. It is in the state that megaprojects enter when the political will to fund them weakens but the political cost of cancelling them is too high. The project remains on the books. Its development company continues to operate. Its CEO continues to make public statements. Its renderings continue to circulate. But its construction has stopped, its timeline has doubled, and its budget exists in a category that financial analysts describe as “aspirational” — a number that describes an intention rather than a commitment.
The surrounding New Murabba development — the residential towers, commercial buildings, and public spaces that frame the cube — may proceed. These components have standalone commercial logic: Riyadh is growing, its commercial real estate market is active, and the New Murabba site occupies a central urban location with genuine development value. The irony is familiar from NEOM: the components with standalone utility may survive while the centrepiece — the architectural spectacle that justified the development’s announcement and gave it its name — may not.
The Mukaab was designed to be the most visible symbol of Saudi Arabia’s architectural ambition — a structure so large, so unprecedented, and so technically demanding that its completion would demonstrate the Kingdom’s capacity to build anything. Its suspension demonstrates the opposite: that the gap between architectural ambition and engineering execution is measured not in renderings but in concrete, and that a 400-metre cube cannot be willed into existence by a sovereign wealth fund any more than a 170-kilometre linear city can.
The rendering remains. The site is prepared. The pilings are in place. And the 20 Empire State Buildings that were supposed to fit inside the cube remain where they have always been: in the imagination of the men who announced the project, in the presentations of the consultants who validated it, and in the press releases of a kingdom that confused the announcement of a building with the act of building one.
This analysis draws on the New Murabba announcement by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (February 2023); Reuters reporting on the construction suspension (January 2026); statements by New Murabba CEO Michael Dyke (December 2025); PIF financial disclosures including the $8 billion writedown (August 2025); the Saudi 2026 budget (December 2025); Knight Frank’s project valuation; reporting by Arab News, Construction Week Online, Middle East Eye, Al Mayadeen, and Business Day; and architectural specifications from the New Murabba development company. Vision2030.AI is editorially independent and is not affiliated with New Murabba, PIF, or any official Vision 2030 entity.