In the first week of March 2026, three contractor disclosures landed in sequence. Each used the careful, liability-conscious language of publicly listed companies describing events that, in plainer English, meant they had been fired. Webuild, Italy’s largest engineering group, announced that NEOM had terminated its $4.7 billion contract for three dams and a 2.8-kilometre freshwater lake at Trojena. The project had reached 30 per cent completion. Hyundai Engineering and Construction confirmed that NEOM had terminated its tunnel construction package, originally awarded in June 2022 for a $1 billion, 12.5-kilometre section. Eversendai Corporation of Malaysia reported the cancellation of its structural steel and fireproofing works for Trojena’s Ski Village resort.
Combined, the three terminations removed approximately $6.85 billion from active construction in a single month. In a different context — a different country, a different project — any one of these cancellations would have been a major industry event. Together, they constituted the most concentrated destruction of contract value in the history of a single construction programme.
Each contractor noted that the terminations were exercised by NEOM under contractual rights and would not result in financial losses after settlement of completed works. The diplomatic language served its purpose. It obscured the fact that nearly $7 billion worth of construction had been stopped not because it was defective or behind schedule but because the client had decided the project should not exist.
The Project
Trojena was designed as a 1,400-square-kilometre mountain tourism destination within NEOM, located in the Sarawat mountains of Tabuk province at an altitude of approximately 1,500 to 2,600 metres. The concept combined elements that had never been assembled in a single project in a desert environment: a ski resort with year-round artificial snow production, a 2.8-kilometre freshwater lake created by damming a desert wadi system, luxury hotels, wellness facilities, and outdoor recreation infrastructure including hiking, mountain biking, and climbing.
The altitude provided the justification. The Sarawat mountains experience cooler temperatures than the coastal plains — winter nights can approach freezing. Saudi Arabia’s promoters argued that the altitude made winter sports viable with artificial snow production. The argument had a physical basis: the mountains are cooler. It did not have an economic basis: the cost of producing and maintaining artificial snow at altitudes where summer daytime temperatures regularly exceed 30 degrees Celsius, using water resources in a country classified as “extremely water-stressed” by the World Resources Institute, was never reconciled with a revenue model that depended on tourist volumes large enough to justify the investment.
The freshwater lake was the most environmentally contentious element. Creating a 2.8-kilometre lake in a desert wadi required constructing three dams to capture and retain water in a system that has evolved over millennia to drain, not hold, rainfall. The wadi’s natural function — channelling flash flood water through the mountains to the coast — would have been permanently disrupted. The lake’s water supply would require either desalination (energy-intensive) or groundwater extraction (aquifer-depleting) or rainfall capture (unreliable). The environmental review for the lake project was not published. The environmental critique was rendered academic when the project was cancelled.
The Winter Games
On 4 October 2022, the Olympic Council of Asia awarded the 2029 Asian Winter Games to Trojena. The decision represented the most aggressive sporting investment in NEOM’s portfolio: a commitment to host a multi-sport winter competition at a site that did not yet possess a single piece of winter sports infrastructure, in a climate incompatible with winter sports, on a timeline that required the fastest construction of competition-grade skiing facilities in the history of the Winter Games.
Industry observers estimated that Trojena would need $3-4 billion in new construction awards within six months to have any realistic chance of hosting on time. Instead of awards, it received cancellations.
On 24 January 2026, the Olympic Council of Asia and the Saudi Olympic Committee jointly announced a “postponement” — the diplomatic formulation for surrender. 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.” The statement described the abandonment of a sporting commitment as evidence of commitment to a larger vision — a rhetorical manoeuvre that transformed failure into strategy.
On 5 February 2026, Almaty, Kazakhstan was named as the replacement host. Almaty was selected for a quality that Trojena definitionally lacked and could not manufacture: existing winter sports venues. The city had bid for the Winter Olympics twice. Its venues were built. Its snow was real. Its mountains were cold enough to ski on without industrial refrigeration.
The Saudi government’s response to the Winter Games withdrawal was notable for its absence of protest. The Kingdom did not contest the replacement. It did not challenge the timeline. It accepted the transfer with what industry analysts interpreted as relief — the removal of an impossible deadline from a project that had already been acknowledged, internally if not publicly, as undeliverable.
Contract by Contract
Webuild — $4.7 billion
Webuild’s contract was the largest single construction package at Trojena and one of the largest individual contracts in NEOM’s history. Awarded in January 2024, the contract covered the construction of three dams designed to feed a 2.8-kilometre freshwater lake, plus a curved architectural structure called “The Bow” that would serve as the resort’s visual centrepiece.
The contract was terminated effective 29 March 2026, with Trojena having reached approximately 30 per cent completion. Webuild’s remaining backlog from the contract was approximately EUR 2.8 billion — roughly $3.2 billion in uncompleted work.
Webuild stated in its filings that it would be “unharmed” by the termination, with NEOM reimbursing all costs incurred including mobilisation, completed works, and demobilisation. The language indicated a termination for convenience rather than for cause — NEOM exercising its contractual right to end the engagement without alleging defective performance. Webuild had been doing exactly what it was asked to do. NEOM had decided it should stop.
The 30 per cent completion figure is the most revealing number in the Trojena story. At $4.7 billion total and 30 per cent complete, approximately $1.4 billion had been spent on dam construction that will now serve no purpose. The dams are partially built. They hold no water. They serve no lake. They support no resort. They exist as the most expensive unfilled bathtubs in human history — concrete structures in a desert wadi, built to create a lake that was cancelled before the lake could form.
Hyundai Engineering and Construction — approximately $500 million
Hyundai E&C held its share of a $1 billion tunnel construction package as part of a consortium with Samsung C&T and Archirodon. The contract, awarded in June 2022, covered a 12.5-kilometre underground tunnel for highways, metro, and freight rail beneath The Line. While classified as a Line contract rather than a Trojena contract, the tunnel’s termination on 12 March 2026 was part of the same cascade of cancellations.
Hyundai’s share was approximately 723.1 billion won — roughly $500 million. The consortium finalised settlements for completed works and reported no financial loss. Like Webuild, Hyundai was paid for work performed and released from obligations to perform further work that the client no longer wanted.
Eversendai Corporation — undisclosed value
Eversendai, a Malaysian steel construction specialist, held a contract for structural steel and fireproofing works at Trojena’s Ski Village resort. The contract had been awarded in March 2024 — barely a year before termination. Eversendai worked in collaboration with Al Bawani Company, a Saudi construction firm.
The termination was effective 26 March 2026. Eversendai’s filing cited the “escalating Middle East conflict/geopolitical situation” as the stated reason for the cancellation — a framing that attributed the decision to regional instability rather than NEOM’s fiscal triage. The company was preparing claims for compensation including demobilisation costs.
The geopolitical framing is worth noting because it was unique to Eversendai’s filing. Webuild’s and Hyundai’s filings described terminations under contractual provisions without attributing them to external events. The different framing may reflect different contractual terms, different legal advice, or different assessments of which narrative best positioned each company’s compensation claim.
The Environmental Verdict
The cancellation of Trojena resolved, by fiscal decision, an environmental debate that no environmental review had settled.
The freshwater lake required continuous water supply in a country where water is a strategic resource. Saudi Arabia desalinates more seawater than any country on earth — approximately 7.9 million cubic metres per day — but the energy cost of desalination is substantial, and the transport of desalinated water from the Red Sea coast to the Trojena site at 2,000 metres altitude would have added significant energy and infrastructure costs.
The ski resort required continuous artificial snow production at temperatures incompatible with natural snow formation. Artificial snow production uses snow cannons that compress water and air to produce ice crystals. The energy consumption scales with ambient temperature — the warmer the air, the more energy required. At Trojena’s summer temperatures, the energy cost of maintaining ski-able snow cover would have been orders of magnitude higher than at alpine resorts where ambient temperatures assist the process.
The dam system would have permanently altered the hydrology of a mountain wadi — one of the rare surface water features in a hyper-arid environment. Desert wadis are ecologically significant precisely because they channel the region’s scarce rainfall to ecosystems that depend on episodic flooding. Damming a wadi to create a recreational lake replaces an ecological function with an amenity — a trade-off that environmental assessment processes are designed to evaluate and that, in this case, was never publicly evaluated.
Whether the environmental case against Trojena was decisive is unknowable, because the project was not cancelled on environmental grounds. It was cancelled on fiscal grounds. The desert won not because anyone argued that a ski resort in the mountains was ecologically destructive but because no one could argue that a ski resort in the mountains was financially rational. The economics defeated Trojena. The environment did not need to try.
The Pattern
Trojena’s cancellation fits the pattern documented across NEOM’s portfolio: every component that depended on the integrated megacity thesis has failed; every component with standalone economic utility has survived.
The ski resort required tourists. Tourists required accommodation. Accommodation required transport. Transport required the airport. The airport exists. The transport does not. The accommodation was suspended. The tourists will not come. The ski resort was cancelled because the chain of dependencies broke at the link where the megacity was supposed to connect the mountain resort to the people who would use it.
The green hydrogen plant, by contrast, produces a commodity — green ammonia — that ships can load at the Red Sea port without any reference to skiing, swimming, or urban living. It survived because it does not need NEOM to be a city. It needs NEOM to be a port with a power grid. That is what NEOM is.
Trojena needed NEOM to be a destination — a place where wealthy tourists would travel to ski in a desert, swim in an artificial lake, and experience a mountain resort engineered against every natural condition of the site. The destination thesis requires customers who choose Trojena over Chamonix, Whistler, or Niseko — resorts with natural snow, established infrastructure, and centuries of alpine culture. The thesis was never tested by the market because the market was never presented with a product. The product was cancelled at 30 per cent completion, $1.4 billion into a dam system, and one surrendered Winter Games into a sporting programme that demonstrated only that Saudi Arabia’s construction capacity could not keep pace with its promotional calendar.
The dams remain in the mountains. They hold no water. They serve no lake. They support no resort. They are the most expensive monuments to fiscal sobriety in the Kingdom’s modern history — the point at which the Public Investment Fund looked at the numbers, looked at the environment, and decided that some futures are not worth building, even if the renderings were beautiful.
This analysis draws on contractor filings from Webuild, Hyundai Engineering and Construction, and Eversendai Corporation; Olympic Council of Asia announcement of the Asian Winter Games withdrawal (January 2026) and Almaty’s appointment (February 2026); NEOM’s Trojena specifications; reporting by AGBI, Bloomberg, MEP Middle East, ArchDaily, Dezeen, Construction Week Online, and Oil & Gas Middle East; environmental assessments of Saudi water resources; and the World Resources Institute’s water stress classifications. Vision2030.AI is editorially independent and is not affiliated with NEOM, PIF, or any official Vision 2030 entity.