The desert is quiet at night in northwest Saudi Arabia, but the lights at the NEOM construction camp don’t sleep. Trucks rumble across the sand, cranes glow like strange metal trees, and a faint line of foundations stretches into the darkness before suddenly… stopping. A year ago, this was supposed to become a 100-mile straight-line megacity called The Line, running like a silver blade through the dunes. Today, workers say they’re not sure how far it will really go.
Some shake their heads, others just shrug.
On the horizon, you can feel that something has shifted.
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From limitless desert dream to shorter, sharper reality
When Saudi Arabia first unveiled The Line in 2021, the world stared. A mirror-clad, 100-mile-long city with no cars, no streets, and a perfect microclimate in the middle of the desert. It sounded less like urban planning and more like science fiction. Renderings showed sleek towers, suspended gardens, flying trains.
On social media, people zoomed in on the details: “Where are the windows?” “Who’s paying for this?” “Will anyone actually live there?”
Now the questions are different. They’re about what happens when a fantasy hits the limits of cash, time, and physics.
The original plan was staggering: a 170-kilometer urban corridor meant to house up to nine million people, squeezed into two parallel skyscraper walls just 200 meters wide and 500 meters high. The budget? Hundreds of billions of dollars, much of it from the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund.
Over the past year, contractors, engineers, and insiders began quietly admitting what many suspected. Only a fraction of that 100-mile stretch would realistically be finished by 2030, the big target year for Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 reforms. Some reports suggest just 2–3 kilometers may be fully built in the first phase, alongside a broader scaling back of ambitions.
On the ground, that looks like half-finished foundations and paused bids, not infinite mirrored walls.
Why the slowdown? Part of the story is brutally simple: money and risk. Billions have already been spent on NEOM — not only on The Line, but on roads, airstrips, worker housing, and other futuristic projects like the floating industrial city Oxagon and the ski destination Trojena. Construction costs have soared worldwide. Global interest rates climbed. Investors grew more cautious.
Inside Saudi Arabia, officials started facing sharper questions. How much of this is visionary nation-building, and how much is expensive experimentation? *Grand visions meet balance sheets sooner or later.* Scaling back the 100-mile megacity doesn’t kill the dream, but it does put a price tag on it.
The quiet pivot: from endless line to testbed city
The new strategy emerging around The Line looks less like “build everything now” and more like “prove a piece, then see.” Instead of racing to complete a full desert corridor, planners are reportedly focusing on a shorter initial section. Think of it as a live prototype: a compact stretch where people actually move in, technology actually runs, and the glittering concepts meet messy human life.
That pivot changes the story. A 2-kilometer functioning city slice can be tested, adjusted, even partially reimagined. A 170-kilometer promise etched into contracts is far harder to walk back.
This kind of recalibration is not unique to Saudi Arabia. Look at Masdar City in the UAE, once hyped as a fully carbon-neutral city of the future. The original all-in-one vision quietly softened; today, Masdar is more of a sustainable district than a complete utopia. Same pattern: big narrative, then gradual scaling to what can be built, leased, and lived in.
We’ve all been there, that moment when the Pinterest board meets the renovation bill. Saudi Arabia’s version just involves excavators and sovereign funds instead of kitchen tiles. The kingdom is learning in public, at a terrifyingly expensive scale.
Underneath the headlines, there’s a deeper logic to trimming the megacity. **Investors want proof of concept, not just glossy renders.** Residents want something livable, not a theoretical paradise. Engineers want time to solve basic questions: How do you ventilate a 500-meter-high mirrored canyon in a desert that can reach 50°C? How do you evacuate people in an emergency when the whole city is one long corridor?
There’s also the political angle. Vision 2030 is at the heart of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s project for Saudi Arabia’s future. Letting The Line fail outright would be politically costly. Redefining success — from a continuous 100-mile city to a world-famous “new-model urban district” — is far easier to defend at home and abroad.
Big dreams, smaller steps: what this shift really signals
One very practical move behind the scenes is phasing. Instead of locking in contracts for the full linear stretch, NEOM is slicing the build into segments, milestones, and pilot zones. That means fewer irreversible commitments and more room to adapt if costs spike or technologies underperform.
There’s also a push to prioritize what can generate revenue sooner: luxury tourism, branded residences, and high-profile hotels along the Red Sea and in the NEOM region. Those bring in cash and attention faster than a fully functioning, nine-million-strong city.
If you zoom out, the pattern feels familiar. Bold masterplans often die not from lack of ambition, but from lack of flexibility. When all the pressure sits on one grand, unchangeable design, every delay becomes a crisis. The smarter path is less glamorous: prototype, learn, iterate, then scale.
Let’s be honest: nobody really does this every single day — by “this” I mean calmly trimming their biggest dreams into safer versions. Nations don’t like to admit it. Tech CEOs don’t. Ordinary people don’t either. Yet that’s usually how big transformations actually stick: painful edits, not just heroic speeches.
Saudi officials still insist NEOM and The Line represent a new model for urban life. One regional planner told a Gulf-based outlet: “We are not killing the idea. We are learning how much of it belongs to the future, and how much has to pass through the present.” It’s a telling line: the future has to survive contact with budgets, labor shortages, and engineering reports.
- Phased building instead of all-at-once
- Shorter initial length for The Line, possibly a few kilometers
- More focus on revenue-generating tourism and luxury projects
- Quiet revisions of population targets and completion dates
- Testing technologies on a smaller scale before wider rollout
What a shrinking megacity says about our future cities
There’s something oddly human about watching one of the wildest city ideas of our time get cut down to size. On one hand, it’s a reminder that money, time, and physics still win most arguments. On the other, it raises thorny questions we can’t dodge forever: How radical should we be in redesigning cities for a warming planet? How much failure are we willing to tolerate in the name of innovation?
Saudi Arabia’s pivot on The Line doesn’t end the story of megaprojects. It updates the script. **Spectacle alone isn’t enough anymore; people want proof that these places can be lived in, afforded, and sustained.** The desert mirrors may still rise, but they’ll likely do so as a shorter, denser, more grounded experiment.
Whether you see that as disappointing retreat or sensible adulthood probably says as much about you as it does about NEOM.
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| Key point | Detail | Value for the reader |
|---|---|---|
| Scaled-back length | Initial build now focused on a small segment instead of full 100 miles | Helps understand how grand visions adapt to real constraints |
| Phased approach | Project broken into stages with pilots and test zones | Shows a model for handling risk in any large, ambitious plan |
| Budget and optics | Billions already spent are pushing Saudi Arabia toward more pragmatic choices | Offers a clear lens on how money, politics, and ambition collide in megaprojects |
FAQ:
- Question 1Why is Saudi Arabia scaling back the 100-mile plan for The Line?
- Answer 1Rising costs, tight timelines, engineering challenges, and investor pressure are all pushing the project toward a shorter, phased version that’s easier to deliver and defend.
- Question 2Does scaling back mean The Line is cancelled?
- Answer 2No, the project still exists, but the first phase looks far more modest in length and population than the original 100-mile, nine-million-resident vision.
- Question 3How much money has already been spent on NEOM and The Line?
- Answer 3Exact figures are hard to verify, but estimates point to tens of billions of dollars already committed to NEOM’s infrastructure, planning, and early construction.
- Question 4Will people actually live in The Line?
- Answer 4That’s the goal. The scaled-back plan aims to create a smaller, real section where residents and businesses can move in, turning the concept into a functioning city slice rather than a pure showpiece.
- Question 5What does this mean for future megaprojects worldwide?
- Answer 5It signals a shift toward testable, phased “future cities” instead of all-or-nothing utopian builds, with more emphasis on flexibility, revenue, and real-world performance.
