Satellite images show Saudi Arabia’s £1.6tn megacity with huge line carved into desert

New satellite images show what appears to be painfully slow progress on Neom, Saudi Arabia’s “city of the future.” 

At least part of the planned 110-mile-long city was originally expected to be completed by 2030, with the entire structure completed by 2045. However the latest satellite imagery shows that, while a small town has been built to house site workers, little progress has been made on the main structure in recent years.

While 2023 photos show earthworks under way along almost the total length of the megastructure, more recent images appear to show significantly less activity. Bloomberg has reported that plans for the project have been scaled back, and many workers laid off – a claim rejected by Saudi Economic Minister, Faisal F. Alibrahim.

The city – consisting of two immensely-long continuous blocks – is the brainchild of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who hopes to free the Middle-Eastern country from its dependence on fossil fuels and create a new economy based on science and leisure. But some who have worked on the project have privately described the plans as “untethered from reality”.

The city has also been described as potentially deadly. The mirrored-glass structure is essentially a “giant greenhouse,” says University of Greenwich expert Melissa Sterry. With temperatures on the rise worldwide June 2024’s 40C heatwave in Saudi Arabia killed over 1,000 people making the traditional Haj pilgrimage to Mecca.

How to provide sufficient water for around nine million inhabitants, and cooling the interior of the massive structure enough for them to survive, remains an unanswered question.

Analysts estimate that the total cost of the ambitious linear city could exceed two trillion dollars, four times the original projected budget.’s Beatrice Nolan says that over the past year, Saudi Arabia “might be starting to feel some strain at the financial pressure of the project”.

Fluctuations in global oil prices have affected the country’s ability to pay for the project’s staggering cost. When the Crown Prince originally announced the project, in January 2021, he predicted that it would be worth some $48billion to the Saudi economy, but those benefits remain far in the future. 

While insiders admit that it could take a century to complete and populate Neom, there’s a more imminent deadline. A projected stadium high in the planned city’s upper reaches has been earmarked as one of the venues for the 2034 World Cup.

For now, the only portion of the Crown Prince’s hugely-ambitious Project 2030 likely to appear on schedule is a canal leading from the heart of Neon to the sea.

Ninety million cubic metres of desert are being excavated to form the so-called “hidden marina”. It is planned to enable the city’s eventual nine million residents to board a ship virtually at their front door, and sail from the interior of the city into the Red Sea.

But alongside the financial strains, there’s also a huge human cost to Mohammed bin Salman’s dream. Business Insider alleges that that thousands of migrant workers have already died since construction work began in 2021, and as many as 20,000 inhabitants of villages scattered along the city’s 110-mile course have been evicted.

Anyone refusing to be located by the Saudi authorities has been arrested on terrorism charges, with three prisoners currently awaiting execution. One man, Abdul Rahim al-Huwaiti, was shot dead by the Saudi security services after he refused to leave his home.

Optimistic artists’ impressions of Neon show a mirrored line of integrated homes, gardens and workplaces extending through the desert – pointing the way to an entirely new AI-driiven way of living for humanity. 

But what the satellite photos show so far is simply an ugly – and potentially deadly – line in the sand.