There are few projects that better capture Mohammed bin Salman’s ambitions for Saudi Arabia than NEOM. Announced in 2017 and launched as part of Vision 2030, the vast development on the Red Sea was supposed to demonstrate what the kingdom could accomplish when combining its almost limitless capital with cutting-edge technology and political will. In its promotional materials, the centerpiece of the project, The Line, was presented as an entirely new kind of city stretching 170 kilometers through the desert. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund described NEOM as a “living laboratory” in which “innovation will chart the course for a new future.” Speaking in 2022, MBS declared the project nothing short of a “civilizational revolution” that would “challenge the traditional flat, horizontal cities” and “shine a light on alternative ways to live.”
But in recent years, skyrocketing costs, changing economic and political circumstances, and the monumental engineering, infrastructure, and logistical demands of the project have forced the Saudi government to scale back its ambitions. By 2024, construction plans were reportedly concentrated on an initial 2.4-kilometer section of the proposed 170-kilometer city. By October 2026, the Public Investment Fund acknowledged that The Line was no longer a priority for completion by 2030, and plans for a spectacular elevated World Cup stadium were reportedly shelved. It seems unlikely that whatever emerges from the deserts of Tabuk Province will be anything like what the marketing videos and slide decks once promised.
NEOM, in both its conception and its fate, is a Babelian monument to the belief that sufficient wealth and political will could overcome the constraints of geography, labor, and technology. As such, the scheme is emblematic of a deeper contradiction within MBS’s political project. Rising to power in the mid-2010s, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler sought to use the accumulated rents of the old oil economy to construct a new social order—a technocratic, hypermodern, consumption-oriented society capable of projecting economic and political power far beyond the Arabian Peninsula. This enterprise brought significant changes to everyday life, including curbs on the religious police, greater freedom for women to drive and travel independently, the reopening of cinemas, and the expansion of public entertainment.