Currently under construction in the Saudi desert, the highly ambitious megacity Neom has become a financial disaster, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal (WSJ).
Neom was first announced in 2017 by the project’s mastermind Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.
Plans for the gigaproject included a 170km linear city called The Line, which will span three countries (Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan) across 26,500km2 of desert along the Red Sea.
In October 2024, Saudi Arabia opened the first area of Neom, a luxury island known as Sindalah, and last month construction began on the Hidden Marina development, the first phase of The Line.
According to a recent article in Arabian Gulf Business Insight, the Neom project is using one-fifth of the entire world’s available steel.
However, work on the project has been slow, plagued by delays, cost overruns and controversy. For instance, Sindalah was more than three years late, cost three times its initial budget of $4bn and...