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THE LINE is one of the most ambitious urban development concepts ever announced in the modern era. It is central to Saudi Arabia’s broader transformation agenda, Vision 2030, which aims to diversify the economy, expand tourism, and build a more sustainable future. Unlike conventional cities that spread outward through roads and neighborhoods, THE LINE proposes a linear urban model designed to reduce car dependence and maximize efficiency. Its concept has captured global attention because it challenges nearly every assumption about how cities are built, powered, and experienced. As of today, the project remains in development, with early-stage work, planning revisions, and major infrastructure decisions shaping its future.
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00:00The line promised a futuristic car-free city for 1 million people by 2030.
00:04With just four years left, the project has entered a critical stage.
00:08In this video, I'll reveal where the line stands today,
00:10why sources say it still hasn't completed a single apartment, and whether it can beat the clock.
00:16The site today, what is actually there?
00:18If you flew over the coast of Tabuk province today, you would not see a city,
00:22you would see a trench. The Public Investment Fund formally suspended construction on the line
00:27around September 16, 2025. In May 2026, Semaphra reported that NEOM had delayed further substantial
00:34work until at least after 2030. What exists on the ground is the foundation work for the first
00:39coastal segment, known as Hidden Marina. That segment runs about 2.4 to 2.5 kilometers,
00:44against the announced length of 170 kilometers, that is roughly 1.4% of the city. Inside that
00:50stretch sit more than 16,000 piles, many 2.5 to 3 meters in diameter, and reaching up to 70
00:56meters
00:56deep, plus a continuous foundation trench and concrete substructure works. Above ground, there
01:01is nothing. No superstructure, no tower cores, and no mirrored facade have been built. The 500-meter
01:06walls that defined every render of this project have never risen. Equipment, piling rigs, and
01:11batching plants remain on site in a maintenance state. Hidden Marina was not meant to be a modest
01:15opening. On paper, the segment was designed at 2.5 kilometers long and 500 meters high, with a built-up
01:21area exceeding 21 million square meters. For scale, the Burj Khalifa has roughly 350,000. It was intended
01:27to hold more than 200,000 residents, thousands of hotel rooms, schools, fire stations, and an inland
01:33marina with a canal cut through the structure wide enough for cruise ships. None of that exists.
01:38Supporting infrastructure built to serve the project is still there too. Cumulative excavation at the
01:43marina zone reached around 100 million cubic meters, a figure NEOM compared to roughly 40 Great Pyramids of
01:49Giza. A dedicated ready-mix concrete plant, valued at about $186 million, was built to produce over
01:5520,000 cubic meters per day. Deutering system described as the world's largest, with around
01:592,000 sensors, hundreds of wells, and about 200 kilometers of discharge pipeline, was installed
02:04to manage groundwater near the coast. Satellite imagery confirmed a continuous foundation trench
02:09along the initial alignment, visible from space and places. At peak, the workforce across the line
02:13and supporting NEOM activity was reported above 100,000, and in some accounts over 140,000.
02:20The twin mirrored skyscrapers are undergoing redesign to reduce costs, and no restart timeline
02:25or new major funding allocation has been publicly confirmed. Some reporting has suggested the existing
02:30foundations could be repurposed, including for data center use, though that remains speculative.
02:35The decisions came out of a comprehensive strategic review, led by NEOM CEO Ayman Almudafer, appointed
02:41after the November 2024 departure of longtime chief executive Nadmi Al Nasser. The review examines
02:47scope, prioritization, costs, and delivery feasibility across NEOM's entire portfolio. Its
02:53conclusions produced the deferral of the line, the postponement of other destinations, and the
02:57redirection of capital toward assets expected to generate returns sooner. There is also a document
03:03that explains the halt better than any official statement. It runs more than 100 pages, it was never
03:08written for the public, and what it found about the project's own finances is where this story turns.
03:13We will come back to it.
03:14The population numbers have moved further than anything else. The original capacity was 9 million,
03:19an intermediate target of 1.5 million residents by 2030 was cut to fewer than 300,000. By the 2026
03:25review period, NEOM-wide ambitions for 2030 were reduced to up to around 100,000 people across the
03:31entire region, not just the line. PIF Governor Yasser Al-Roumian stated in April 2026 that no
03:37NEOM projects had been canceled, describing the process as a reorganization of spending to maximize
03:42returns. He said having the line by 2030 was not a must while calling oxygen essential, and noted that
03:48future phases would rely more on private sector participation and less on direct PIF funding.
03:53Finance Minister Mohamed Al-Jadun had earlier said the government had
03:57no ego and would accelerate, defer, downscale, or cancel projects as needed.
04:01Around $3 billion was directed toward Oxagon, the industrial and port zone on the Red Sea.
04:07A reported $5 billion partnership with DataVolt covers a 1.5 gigawatt AI data center campus,
04:13with a first phase targeting 300 megawatts by around 2028. Green hydrogen has continued to advance.
04:19Multiple contracts tied to the line were terminated or suspended, including a high-speed rail connector
04:24between Oxagon and the line, tunnel works, and elements tied to Trojna. Unwinding those agreements
04:29carries its own bill. NEOM's 2026-2030 budget includes around $16 billion in anticipated payments
04:37to contractors for terminating long-term contracts. For some packages, that exit spending is projected
04:42to exceed spending on new construction over the same period. What was promised?
04:48Now rewind five years. On January 10, 2021, Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman announced the line as
04:54chairman of the NEOM board. The line was presented as the first major urban development in 150 years
05:00designed around people rather than roads, and a city defined by three absolutes, zero cars, zero
05:05streets, and zero carbon emissions. Then came the shape, and the shape is the part nobody could quite
05:09picture. Two parallel walls, each 500 meters tall, higher than the Empire State Building, running side
05:15by side across desert valleys for 170 kilometers, separated by a gap of just 200 meters from the Red Sea
05:21coast inland toward the mountains. Between them, an open canyon of city life. Around them,
05:26a continuous skin of mirrored glass, engineered so the structure would reflect the desert mountains
05:30and sky and dissolve into the landscape, instead of dominating it. The reasoning offered was that a
05:35dark facade would announce itself against the desert, while a mirror would make the building disappear
05:39into it. The density figures were where the proposal stopped sounding like architecture,
05:43and started sounding like science fiction. The entire city was to occupy a footprint of just 34
05:48square kilometers while eventually housing 9 million people. That works out to roughly 260,000
05:53people per square kilometer, about six times denser than Manila, than the densest major city on earth,
05:58and approaching the compression of the old Kowloon walled city. For comparison, some analyses put its
06:03footprint at around 2% of London's for a comparable population. Making that work required a genuinely new
06:09idea, and it carried a deliberately strange name, zero gravity urbanism. Rather than spreading outward,
06:14every function of a city homes, offices, schools, clinics, parks, theaters, shops would be stacked
06:19vertically inside those 500 meters, so residents moved up, down, and across instead of out. The
06:23promise attached to it was specific. Everything you need within a five-minute walk, and in some
06:27materials, nature within two minutes. The structure would be assembled from a chain of modules roughly
06:32800 meters long, each conceived as a neighborhood of around 80,000 people with its own character, so you
06:38could drift between communities horizontally, and never touch ground level. The structure was organized into
06:43strata. Early materials described three. A surface layer for people in public realm,
06:47an infrastructure layer beneath it, and a transport layer deeper still. Later visualizations added
06:52nuanced multilevel mobility corridors at different heights, pods, light rail, horizontal elevators
06:57moving people sideways as easily as lifts move them up. The self-shading geometry of the twin walls was
07:02meant to generate its own microclimate. Tuned to the high summer and low winter sun of the region,
07:07delivering optimized natural light and ventilation, the southern face was to carry solar elements. The
07:12result in the pitch, was an ideal year-round climate in which outdoor life became a daily
07:17default rather than a seasonal escape. For the long distances there was the spine,
07:20a high-speed rail line buried in the base of the structure, targeting speeds around 510 kilometers per
07:26hour, so a passenger could cross the entire 170 kilometers end to end in roughly 20 minutes.
07:31No cars, no streets, freight and logistics handled invisibly inside a dedicated infrastructure layer,
07:36so the surface stayed human. Then there was the layer nobody could photograph. The line was
07:41marketed as a cognitive city, saturated with artificial intelligence, where more than 90%
07:45of collected data would be analyzed in real time to produce services that anticipated residents' needs
07:50rather than reacting to them. Elevator availability, energy use, public services, predictive maintenance,
07:56all optimized by machine. Early concepts even floated paying residents for contributing their
08:01personal data to improve the system. Hold that idea, because it would later attract a very different
08:06kind of attention. The environmental case was the moral spine of the whole pitch. That impossibly
08:10small footprint was precisely what would allow 95% of NEOM's land to remain untouched. With residents
08:16enjoying wilderness on both sides across four ecological zones, coast, coastal desert, mountains,
08:21and upper valleys, power would be 100% renewable, from solar, wind, and hydrogen.
08:27What Actually Got Builds? Earthworks began in October 2021, months after the announcement,
08:32with clearing, access roads, and ground investigation along the alignment. Piling started in spring 2022,
08:38and right there, at the very beginning, sits a decision that would quietly poison everything
08:42downstream. The piles were driven while the design of the building above them was still being worked
08:46out. To absorb that uncertainty, engineers deliberately oversized them, maximizing diameters
08:52at 2.5 to 3 meters so the foundations could carry whatever the architects eventually settled on.
08:57Remember that choice. It comes back. The contractor list read like a roll call of the global
09:01foundations industry. An umbrella framework agreement was signed with Keller in summer 2022,
09:06and specialists including Bauer subsidiaries, Trevi Group, Baki Soltanj, PowerChina, NSCC,
09:12Al Asais, Huda, and Saudi Bader joined the effort. Early reports noted peak installation rates exceeding
09:1760 piles per day, with dozens of large rigs working around the clock. To feed them, a dedicated multi-plant
09:22ready-mix concrete facility, worth around SAR $700 million, roughly $186 million, was established with
09:29the SAS Al Mohailab, designed for green concrete production with carbon capture technology, and a
09:34target capacity above 20,000 cubic meters per day. Then the earth moving reached a scale that is
09:39genuinely difficult to hold in your head. At peak, the hidden marina zone was swallowing about 1 million
09:43cubic meters of earth every week. Across the broader site in 2024 updates, that figure approached
09:482 million cubic meters weekly, moved by roughly 260 excavators and around 2,000 trucks running 24 hours a day.
09:55By late 2024 and early 2025, cumulative excavation at the marina alone had reached around 100 million
10:02cubic meters, a volume NEOM liked to translate as roughly 40 Great Pyramids of Giza. By 2023,
10:09the operation had found its rhythm. Piling intensified through the marina zone, excavation
10:13hit its stride, and the project was publicly framed as hosting the world's largest piling project and one
10:18of the largest continuous earthworks operations anywhere on the planet. Holding back the sea was its own
10:24engineering campaign. Groundwater near the coast was managed by a deutering network claimed as the
10:29world's largest and smartest. Around 2,000 sensors, more than 800 wells in some accounts, roughly 200
10:34kilometers of HDPE discharge pipeline, monitoring wells, and peak flow capacity in the tens of thousands
10:40of cubic meters per hour, running continuously so the excavation and piling could go deeper. But the
10:46signature boast was always the piling. Marketed as the largest piling project on the planet,
10:50it drove shafts of a size the industry rarely sees, more than 5,500 piles per module, up to 70
10:56meters deep,
10:56typically 2.5 meters in diameter, weighing as much as 850 tons, and reinforced with steel cages.
11:03Phase 1 totals climbed past 16,000 piles, consuming over 3.5 million cubic meters of concrete,
11:09with more than 120 piles cast weekly in peak windows. NEOM's favorite comparison made the point
11:14brutally. The Burj Khalifa needed about 192. And the segment those foundations served was enormous on
11:20paper. Hidden Marina was designed as a 2.5-kilometer opening act carrying more than 21 million square
11:26meters of built-up area and over 200,000 residents, with its three modules engineered to progress
11:31independently while staying interconnected. The foundations going in were not for a demonstration
11:35block, they were for a district larger than most cities. Internal analyses estimated that individual
11:40modules would demand millions of tons of steel and concrete apiece. And the concrete plant was
11:45expected to create more than 500 local jobs while serving both the substructure and the superstructure
11:51that was supposed to follow. Work concentrated on modules 44 through 48, and above all on the three
11:56interconnected modules of Hidden Marina, 45, 46, and 47. By March 2025, piling was reported as nearing
12:03completion on module 46. Each module raft measured roughly 311 by 200 meters, subdivided into sections named
12:10the North Blade, the Canyon, and the South Blade. Raft tenders followed, including plans for what was
12:15billed as the world's second-largest single concrete core, 43,000 cubic meters, onto a megacore. Piledraft
12:21techniques transferred loads through surface material into deeper strata. Early tunneling for the spine
12:26advanced in limited sections, running toward Oxagon and the planned airport. At its height, the workforce
12:31engaged across the line and supporting any OM activity was reported above 100,000, and in some accounts
12:37over 140,000 people. Why it stopped and where the money went
12:42The first public crack appeared in April 2024, and it came dressed as a routine adjustment. Bloomberg
12:48reported that Saudi officials had cut the 2030 population target from 1.5 million residents to
12:53fewer than 300,000, and that the length expected by 2030 had been reduced to 2.4 kilometers. Officials
12:59insisted the full 170-kilometer vision was intact and would simply arrive in stages. But at least one
13:05contractor began dismissing workers, and anyone reading carefully could see what had happened.
13:10The city had not been rescheduled, it had been redefined. Behind that adjustment sat pressures
13:15that had nothing to do with architecture. Foreign direct investment had fallen short of expectations,
13:19global interest rates stayed high, and oil price volatility squeezed the public investment fund's
13:24capacity to fund every gigaproject at full scale. Riyadh's own population targets were moderated,
13:29the kingdom was running too many simultaneous futures, and the money had begun asking harder
13:33questions of all of them. Then there were the internal projections, and this is the number
13:37that ends arguments. A draft board presentation reviewed in reporting put the capital expenditure
13:42required for NEOM's full original in-state by 2080 at approximately 8.8 trillion dollars,
13:47more than 25 times Saudi Arabia's entire annual government budget at the time, with around 370
13:52billion needed just for a first phase by 2035. Phase 1 estimates for the line itself had earlier
13:58circulated in the 320 to 370 billion dollar range. Against cumulative NEOMs spending already in the
14:0650 to 64 billion range, these were no longer the numbers of a project running over budget. They were
14:11the numbers of a project that could not be financed by anyone, ever. That brings us to the document
14:15promised earlier. In March 2025, the Wall Street Journal reported on a more than 100-page internal audit,
14:21a final draft presented to the NEOM board the previous spring, and its findings were not about
14:26concrete. The audit found evidence of deliberate manipulation of finances by certain members of
14:31management. According to the reporting, executives inserted unrealistically optimistic assumptions
14:36into business plans, inflating projected revenues such as hotel rates, in order to justify rising
14:41cost estimates rather than confront the overruns. The audit described a pattern in which the crown
14:45prince pushed increasingly fantastical concepts, while executives shielded him from the true scale of
14:50the problems and costs, a dynamic the reporting characterized as mutual delusion. The leadership went
14:55next. In November 2024, Nadmi Al Nasser, chief executive since 2018, departed abruptly. Official
15:01statements called it a natural evolution. Reporting pointed to performance shortfalls against key
15:05indicators, chronic delays, cost overruns and concerns about management style. Ayman Al Mudefer,
15:10previously head of the PIF's local real estate division, stepped in and immediately launched the
15:15comprehensive strategic review. Other senior figures tied to the project's vision and media operations
15:20exited around the same period. Through mid-2025, staff reductions of up to around
15:251,000 people were reported as under consideration. The PIF recorded an $8 billion write-down related to
15:31major projects including NEOM around August 2025. Finance Minister Al Jadun had already prepared the
15:37ground publicly, declaring the government had no ego and would accelerate, defer, downscale, or cancel
15:42projects as the public interest required. On or around September 16, 2025, the PIF formally suspended
15:49construction. What replaced the line tells you what the kingdom actually learned. The review pivoted
15:53capital toward assets that could earn rather than consume, and the symbol of that turn is a word
15:58with no glamour attached to it whatsoever. Oxagon, the industrial port and logistics zone on the Red
16:03Sea. Roughly $3 billion was earmarked to push it forward, with a reported $5 billion partnership with
16:09DataVolt for a 1.5 gigawatt AI data center campus, its first phase targeting 300 megawatts by around 2028.
16:16Green Hydrogen, through a roughly $8.4 billion plant, kept advancing as one of the few components
16:21behaving like an actual business. Heightened risk around the Strait of Hormuz sharpened the logic
16:26further, raising the strategic value of Red Sea port capacity at exactly the right moment.
16:31Inside the PIF's 2026-2030 strategy, projects were increasingly sorted into must-have and good-to-have,
16:37and the line, for all its symbolic weight, had landed in the second column. Even the retreat is
16:41expensive. NEOM's 2026-2030 budget sets aside around $16 billion in anticipated payments to
16:49contractors purely to terminate long-term agreements, a figure projected to exceed spending on new
16:54construction for some packages. Confirmed cancellations already run into billions,
16:58a Trojna dams and lake package near $4.7 billion, a high-speed rail connector around $1.6 billion,
17:04plus tunnels and structural steel, with final amounts still under negotiation. The kingdom is now
17:09paying, at extraordinary cost, for the privilege of not building what it announced.
17:13The Gulf already ran this experiment. The Gulf has spent 40 years turning sand and money into cities,
17:20and it has kept the receipts. Some of those projects became landmarks that print money to this day.
17:24Others became warnings visible from orbit. Start with the one that worked.
17:28Dubai's Palm Jumara began construction in June 2001 under Nakhil, conjuring a 5.72-square-kilometer
17:34landform out of roughly 120 million cubic meters of dredged sand and 7 million tons of rock. No steel or
17:40concrete in the island itself, just GPS-guided rainbowing of sand into a palm shape, with a
17:45crescent breakwater built first to tame the waves and vibrocompaction to densify the ground. The
17:50whole island was delivered in roughly six years for a widely cited $12 billion, with first residents
17:56arriving around 2007, Atlantis the Palm opening in 2008, and the Monorail in 2009. Today it holds more
18:02than 35,000 residents and draws around 2.5 million visitors a year. Its property market remains ferocious.
18:08The first five months of 2026 alone recorded 507 transactions worth AED $6.78 billion,
18:15with branded residences trading at a premium, and the Monorail reopened in July 2026 after a
18:20six-month refurbishment. It survived the 2008 crash, a pandemic and regional tension.
18:24Qatar's Lucille City proves the same thesis through a different door. Spanning about 38 square kilometers
18:30north of Doha and organized into 19 districts by Qatari Dyer, Lucille targeted 200,000 to 250,000
18:36residents and a daytime capacity near 450,000, with infrastructure investment cited in the $40 to
18:42$45 billion range. When Qatar won the 2022 World Cup, the tournament became a forcing function,
18:49and the 88,966-seat Lucille Stadium hosted the 2022 final between Argentina and France.
18:56Today it is a functioning city, operational residential districts, commercial boulevards, retail,
19:01a light rail link into Doha freehold ownership that pooled in foreign buyers, a construction
19:05pipeline reported in the hundreds of billions, and Parsons still managing infrastructure in 2026.
19:11Then comes the parallel that should have stopped the line before it started.
19:14Abu Dhabi's master city was announced in 2006 as a $22 billion attempt at the world's most
19:19sustainable eco-city, masterplan by Norman Foster's firm. Zero carbon, zero waste, car-free,
19:24moved by driverless electric pods, around 50,000 residents on six square kilometers by 2016. Read
19:30that list again, because it is the line's pitch in miniature, written 15 years earlier.
19:35What happened next is almost a script. The 2008 financial crisis forced budget cuts. Completion
19:39slipped to 2020, then 2025, then toward 2030. Zero carbon was quietly downgraded to low carbon.
19:45The pod transit system was abandoned after a small pilot when the required
19:49undercroft proved too expensive. The elevated podium design was dropped from phase 2 onward.
19:54In 2016, the city was connected to Abu Dhabi's external grid, ending the off-grid dream entirely.
20:00By the mid-2020s, only around a sixth of the planned area had been developed,
20:04housing roughly 5,000 residents against that 50,000 target. The lesson that extreme urban
20:09visions require constant recalibration, private demand, and realistic phasing, was written down
20:14and available years before the line broke ground. The failures are blunter still,
20:18and several are Palm Jumara's own siblings. Palm Jebel Ali started in 2002 and targeted
20:23for 2008, stalled for roughly 15 years after the crash before a 2023-2024 relaunch,
20:29and still trails its original timeline amid investor arbitration. Palm Dara was shrunk
20:33and rebranded into Dubai Islands, the Grand Palm concept abandoned. The world islands,
20:38roughly 300 islands shaped as a map of the world, finished reclamation, only for the crisis to leave
20:43most of them barren sand platforms visible from space and eroding. The Arabian Canal and Dubai
20:48waterfront froze mid-execution after 2009, proving that integrated land plus canal plus city schemes
20:53seize completely when financing stops mid-dig. Saudi Arabia's own history should have been the loudest
20:59alarm of all. King Abdullah Economic City, launched in the mid-2000s with an $80 to $100 billion plan
21:05and ambitions once reaching 1 to 2 million residents, delivered a functioning port and a population
21:10reported around just 10,000 by the mid-2020s. Hard infrastructure without the urban life it was
21:16supposed to summon. Other Saudi economic cities from that era, from Jazan to knowledge economic
21:21city in Medina, either never advanced substantially or were downgraded into modest industrial zones.
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