Saudi Arabia has stopped building the hardest part of its trillion-dollar megacity. Work on The Line, the 170-kilometer mirrored city that came to stand for everything ambitious and improbable about NEOM, won’t restart until sometime after 2030. The kingdom’s Public Investment Fund has dropped the signature phase down its priority list and is steering money toward ports, power, and data centers, according to a Semafor report this week.
This isn’t a surprise so much as a confirmation. Crews quietly went idle on the most aggressive sections in late 2025 while PIF ran a strategic review. What’s new is the timeline: the version of The Line sold in glossy renders, two parallel 500-meter glass walls running across the desert, is now a post-2030 question at best.
What ‘after 2030’ actually means for The Line
The near-term build is a stub. Reporting puts the first usable phase at roughly 2 kilometers against the 170 originally promised, with a price tag in the $15-25 billion range rather than the $500 billion to $1 trillion once attached to the full concept. The population math moved too. NEOM’s 2030 target has slipped to around 100,000 residents, a fraction of the 1.5 million the project once advertised for that date.
Strip away the mirrored facade and the reset reads like an engineering reality check. Linear cities concentrate every hard problem at once: vertical transit, structural movement across kilometers of continuous building, mechanical systems with no redundancy, evacuation. None of that got cheaper since 2022.
Where the megaproject money is going now
PIF’s construction commitments fell from about $71 billion to $30 billion, a cut of roughly 60%, as the fund reweights toward things that can actually open this decade. FIFA 2034 stadium work and Expo 2030 preparation are pulling capital. So is industrial NEOM: the territory is being repositioned as a hub for ports, energy, and data centers, the same compute-and-power buildout reshaping construction pipelines elsewhere.
Saudi Arabia is still pouring plenty of concrete. The Riyadh Metro is running and expanding, and Jeddah Tower is back under active construction after its own long pause. The difference is that those projects answer a question, transit and an icon, while The Line was answering a brief nobody had written.
The read
Call it a correction, not a collapse. NEOM isn’t going away, and the parts that survive, energy, logistics, and the FIFA and Expo work, are the parts a contractor can bid, schedule, and finish. The mirrored city may yet get built in some form. Just not on the timeline, the budget, or the scale that made it famous.