The arithmetic is simple. NEOM has spent over $50 billion, confirmed by deputy CEO Rayan Fayez at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2025. The Line — NEOM’s centrepiece, the 170-kilometre mirrored linear city that was supposed to house 9 million people with no cars, no streets, and no carbon emissions — has produced 2.4 kilometres of foundation work. That is $20.8 billion per kilometre of foundation trench. Not per kilometre of finished city. Not per kilometre of habitable structure. Per kilometre of below-ground preparation for a structure that has not risen above the desert floor.
The number is not an approximation. It is $50 billion divided by 2.4 kilometres. It is the cost of what exists. It is the most expensive per-kilometre construction cost in the history of human infrastructure — exceeding the Channel Tunnel ($13.6 billion for 50.5 kilometres, or $269 million per kilometre at current values), the Three Gorges Dam ($37 billion for a 2.3-kilometre dam, or $16 billion per kilometre), and Dubai’s Palm Jumeirah ($12 billion for the full artificial island). The Line costs more per kilometre than any of these projects cost in total.
The comparison is unfair in one direction: the $50 billion includes NEOM’s airport, road networks, port facilities, worker housing, and the green hydrogen plant — infrastructure that serves the broader zone, not The Line alone. It is also unfair in the other direction: the comparisons above produced finished, operational infrastructure. The Line has produced a trench.
The Original Announcement
The Line was unveiled on 10 January 2021 by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in a promotional video that presented the concept as a revolution in urban design. The city would stretch 170 kilometres from the Red Sea coast to the mountains of Tabuk province. It would be 200 metres wide and 500 metres tall — a continuous mirrored structure running in a straight line across the desert. The mirrors would reflect the landscape, making the city appear to vanish into its environment. No cars. No streets. No carbon emissions. A high-speed rail system running the length of the structure would transport residents from end to end in 20 minutes.
The population target was 9 million. The cost was publicly stated at $500 billion, though internal projections placed it at $1.5 trillion. The completion date was 2030. Every element of the announcement — the population, the cost, the timeline, the technology — has since been revised, scaled back, or abandoned.
NEOM claimed the project would consume 20 per cent of the world’s available steel. Chief investment officer Manar Al Moneef stated that NEOM would be “the world’s largest customer for construction materials for several decades.” Those materials are no longer being ordered.
The Scale-Down
The first public reporting of The Line’s scale reduction came in April 2024, when Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal reported that the first phase had been cut from 170 kilometres to 2.4 kilometres. The population target for 2030 was revised from 1.5 million to fewer than 300,000. Officials initially denied the reports. The construction site confirmed them.
The 2.4-kilometre figure represents 1.4 per cent of the planned length. If the analogy were a novel, the author would have completed the first two pages of a 143-page book. If the analogy were a marathon, the runner would have covered 590 metres and been taken off the course.
By October 2024, reporting indicated that Saudi Arabia intended to complete a 5-kilometre central segment by 2030, with the full 170-kilometre completion rescheduled to 2045. Even this revised target assumes a construction rate that has not been demonstrated: completing 5 kilometres in six years when 2.4 kilometres took nine years, then completing 165 kilometres in the subsequent fifteen years. The mathematics require an acceleration of roughly six times the current pace, sustained for a decade and a half, funded by oil revenue at prices above the current fiscal breakeven.
The Internal Audit
The document that transformed The Line from a questionable investment into a mathematical impossibility was 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.
The audit’s central finding: completing The Line to its original specification would cost an estimated $8.8 trillion and would not be finished until 2080.
Eight point eight trillion dollars exceeds 25 times Saudi Arabia’s annual government budget. It is more than four times the Kingdom’s GDP of approximately $1.1 trillion. It is larger than the GDP of every country on earth except the United States and China. It is approximately ten times the combined sovereign wealth of all Gulf states.
The audit was prepared with assistance from McKinsey and Company, NEOM’s principal strategy consultant. McKinsey’s role in the audit was dual: the firm had helped design the original scope that the audit was evaluating, and it was now assisting in the evaluation of its own designs. 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.
The manipulation was specific. Revenue estimates were inflated to cover cost increases, artificially sustaining the internal rate of return that determined whether the project appeared financially viable. Example: a boutique hiking hotel room was repriced in projections from $489 per night to $1,866 per night. An “inventive glamping” site was repriced from $216 to $794 per night. The adjustments were not market research. They were accounting fiction — numbers entered into spreadsheets to produce the conclusion that the project’s costs could be recovered, by imagining customers who would pay four times market rate for a hotel room in a desert.
What Was Actually Built
The $50 billion produced the following physical infrastructure:
An operational airport capable of handling commercial flights. The airport serves the Red Sea coastline and the NEOM zone. It would exist regardless of whether The Line was built, because NEOM’s remote location requires air access.
Road networks connecting the project zone. The roads serve construction logistics and, eventually, whatever development the zone supports. They are not dependent on The Line.
Worker housing for the approximately 140,000 labourers who constituted NEOM’s construction workforce at peak. The housing consists of vast settlements of identical blocks in the desert, surrounded by fences, accessed through guard houses. It is temporary infrastructure for a temporary workforce.
Port facilities on the Red Sea coast. The port at Oxagon is 68 per cent complete, with more than four kilometres of quay wall and seven berths. It has standalone commercial utility as a container terminal with 1.5 million TEU annual capacity.
The NEOM Green Hydrogen plant, an $8.4 billion joint venture between NEOM, Air Products, and ACWA Power. The plant is 80 to 90 per cent complete and on track to produce 600 tonnes of green hydrogen daily from 2027. It is the single most successful component of NEOM and the single component most independent of The Line.
And 2.4 kilometres of foundation work for The Line itself, including 16,000 deep piles laid into the desert floor. No above-ground superstructure exists. No residential unit has been completed. No commercial space has been fitted out. No transport system has been installed. The foundation is a trench — an excavation that demonstrates the project’s beginning without any evidence of its continuation.
The Suspension
On 16 September 2025, the Public Investment Fund formally suspended all construction on The Line until further notice. The suspension was not announced with a press release. It was communicated through operational channels: contracts were paused, workforce relocations were initiated, and the flow of materials to the site was reduced to maintenance levels.
The on-site workforce was relocated to Riyadh. Approximately 1,000 NEOM employees — 20 per cent of the 5,000 direct staff — were laid off. The remaining employees lost on-site benefits including housing and meals, a de facto pay cut delivered as a logistics decision.
The suspension has not been described as a cancellation. NEOM’s official position, reflected in statements by government officials and PIF representatives, is that The Line is a multi-decade project and that the current pause represents a phasing adjustment, not an abandonment. 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.”
The statement was received as evidence of pragmatic governance. It was also an acknowledgement that the original plan — the plan that consumed $50 billion and displaced 20,000 tribal members — was wrong, and that the government was prepared to walk away from it. The pragmatism is real. The cost of the pragmatism’s absence — during the nine years between announcement and suspension — is $50 billion and a displaced tribe.
The Comparison
The Channel Tunnel connects England and France through a 50.5-kilometre underwater rail link. It was completed in 1994 at a cost of approximately $13.6 billion (adjusted for inflation). The project was over budget, behind schedule, and politically contentious. It is also fully operational, carrying approximately 10 million passengers per year. Cost per kilometre: approximately $269 million.
Dubai’s Palm Jumeirah is an artificial island in the shape of a palm tree, extending 5 kilometres into the Persian Gulf. It required the dredging and placement of approximately 94 million cubic metres of sand and rock. It was completed in 2006 at a cost of approximately $12 billion. It hosts hotels, residences, and commercial properties. It is fully occupied.
The Three Gorges Dam in China is a 2.3-kilometre hydroelectric dam on the Yangtze River, completed in 2006 at a cost of approximately $37 billion. It generates approximately 100 TWh of electricity per year — enough to power a mid-sized European country.
The Line has spent $50 billion and produced nothing that generates revenue, houses residents, transports passengers, or serves any function beyond demonstrating that 2.4 kilometres of desert can be excavated at a cost that exceeds the total construction value of most countries’ infrastructure programmes.
The comparison is not between projects of similar ambition. The Channel Tunnel, the Palm Jumeirah, and the Three Gorges Dam were all ambitious, controversial, and over budget. They were also completed. The Line is not over budget in the sense that these projects were over budget. It is over budget in the sense that $50 billion produced 1.4 per cent of the planned output. It is not behind schedule. It is suspended. The distinction between “delayed” and “suspended” is the distinction between a project that is taking longer than expected and a project that has stopped.
The FIFA Minimum Viable Product
The NEOM Stadium, planned as a FIFA 2034 World Cup venue sitting 350 metres above ground within The Line’s architectural envelope, creates the most realistic version of The Line — not by validating the megacity thesis but by contradicting it.
FIFA’s deadline requires that at least one functioning section of The Line be completed by 2032: a sports neighbourhood with transport, accommodation, and airport connectivity. The stadium district would house tens of thousands of spectators, not 9 million residents. It would serve a single purpose — a sporting event — not the comprehensive urban programme that the original design imagined.
The FIFA deadline accomplishes what NEOM’s internal ambitions could not: it imposes an external timeline with reputational consequences for non-delivery. Saudi Arabia’s withdrawal from the 2029 Asian Winter Games — surrendering the event to Almaty, Kazakhstan in January 2026 — demonstrated that the Kingdom will abandon sporting commitments that cannot be met. Whether it would abandon a World Cup commitment, with all the global attention and sponsorship obligations that entails, is a different calculus.
The stadium district is, paradoxically, the most honest version of NEOM: a venue, not a city. A destination, not a civilisation. A structure that serves a function its builders can articulate and its users can access, rather than a 170-kilometre mirror that serves a theory about urban living that no one has tested and that the project’s own audit has demonstrated cannot be built.
The 2080 Question
The internal audit’s projection — $8.8 trillion and 2080 — raises a question that transcends the project itself: what does it mean for a government to commit to a project that exceeds the fiscal capacity of the state and the career span of every official involved in its creation?
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was 31 years old when he announced NEOM in 2017. If The Line were completed in 2080, he would be 95. The project’s timeline exceeds the actuarial life expectancy of its creator. It exceeds the planning horizon of any fiscal institution. It assumes continuity of political will, oil revenue, and construction capacity across a period that will encompass multiple global recessions, at least one major energy transition, and the political succession of the House of Saud.
The $8.8 trillion figure is not a construction estimate. It is a reductio ad absurdum — a number so large that it does not argue against the project so much as it describes a project that exists outside the category of things that can be argued about. A project that costs $8.8 trillion is not a project. It is a mathematical expression of an idea that cannot be realised.
The idea was real. The money was real. The displacement was real. The deaths were real. The trench is real. The city is not.
NEOM spent $50 billion and built 2.4 kilometres of the future. At that rate, completing the remaining 167.6 kilometres would cost $3.4 trillion — less than the audit’s $8.8 trillion projection, but still more than three times Saudi Arabia’s GDP. The rate is itself an abstraction, because the cost per kilometre increases as the project moves from foundation to superstructure, from below ground to above ground, from excavation to habitation.
The desert of Tabuk province remains. The airport works. The hydrogen plant nears completion. The port is operational. And 2.4 kilometres of foundation trench — the most expensive hole in the world — sits in the sand as evidence of what sovereign capital can imagine, what physics will tolerate, and what $50 billion buys when the imagination and the physics do not agree.
This analysis draws on PIF’s spending confirmation by deputy CEO Rayan Fayez at the World Economic Forum (Davos, January 2025); the NEOM internal audit as reported by the Wall Street Journal (March 2025); McKinsey’s dual advisory role as reported by TechCrunch and DeSmog; Bloomberg’s reporting on scale-down (April 2024); reporting by New Civil Engineer, Dezeen, Construction Week Online, and the Financial Times; construction comparisons from the Channel Tunnel, Palm Jumeirah, and Three Gorges Dam historical records; PIF’s September 2025 suspension announcement; and public statements by Finance Minister Mohammed Al-Jadaan (December 2025). Vision2030.AI is editorially independent and is not affiliated with NEOM, PIF, or any official Vision 2030 entity.