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The rise of a vision that never intended to survive
When Saudi Arabia announced NEOM in 2017, the world was told it would become a revolutionary smart city rising from the desert. It would be a 170-kilometre urban corridor known as The Line, powered by renewable energy, governed by advanced technologies and offering a new model of sustainable living.
Over time, Saudi officials described it as a civilisation shift, a grand step towards the future and a symbol of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s intent to turn the kingdom into a global innovation hub. What unfolded behind the scenes was more complex.
By 2025, the project was quietly dismantled. Major contracts stopped, the leadership was reshuffled, assets were redistributed and thousands of international staff were dismissed. The Line was not paused. It was erased.
The end of NEOM was not announced publicly, nor will it ever be, because Saudi political culture does not permit large-scale public failure. To lose face is worse than abandoning the project itself. The Line will linger as a concept with no acknowledgement of cancellation. This silence fuels speculation, yet the real story is far more significant than a failed mega-project.
NEOM was an instrument designed for transformation, but not the transformation most people assumed. It was never only about a futuristic city. It was about reorganising the kingdom’s political, economic and cultural foundations, particularly the influence of Wahhabism, which had shaped Saudi Arabia for nearly three centuries.
The quiet struggle to end Wahhabi dominance
To understand what really happened to NEOM, one must understand the internal shift the kingdom was trying to achieve. Wahhabism, a strict interpretation of Islam dating back to the alliance between Muḥammad ibn Saʿūd and Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb in 1744, had long influenced every aspect of Saudi life.
The religious establishment held immense authority over education, law, cultural norms and the rhythm of daily existence. While this ideology had been the backbone of the state for generations, the Crown Prince believed it had become a barrier to economic and societal advancement.
Saudi Arabia’s future, in his assessment, depended on ending the power of the religious establishment without confronting it directly. Such a shift could not be done by decree. It required distraction, rebranding and a symbolic transition.
NEOM provided all of this. In public, it was framed as a bold leap forward. In private, it created a clean slate in a remote corner of the kingdom where the new Saudi Arabia could be modelled without the constraints of Wahhabi influence. Everything about the project, from its sci-fi designs to its hyper-modern values, stood apart from the old order. This was the point. NEOM was the theatre set where Saudi Arabia rehearsed a post-Wahhabi identity.
For the Crown Prince, replacing old ideology with new identity was essential to economic survival. Global markets were changing. The country needed foreign talent, outside investment and a diversified economy.
Conservative religious oversight limited all of that. Bold projects helped push those constraints aside. As each cultural reform took shape, from lifting driving restrictions to opening cinemas, NEOM held the world’s attention. It allowed the state to reshape society while the glare remained fixed on the desert’s shimmering vision of the future.
A project engineered for headlines rather than completion
By 2022, the global spotlight intensified. The Line’s mirrored walls and vertical cityscape were everywhere. Studies, renderings and videos flooded the internet. Many observers mocked them, others marvelled, and both reactions served a purpose.
The project’s visibility created the impression of unstoppable progress. The more extreme the concept, the more attention it attracted. This was not accidental. The dramatic presentation helped convince the public that the kingdom was transforming rapidly, creating political cover for deeper structural reforms inside Saudi Arabia.
Yet internally, the numbers did not add up. The cost was too high for a single sovereign wealth fund to support. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), responsible for footing the bill, operated under rules designed to protect the country’s long-term savings. It could use investment returns, but touching its principal was traditionally forbidden.
Classifying NEOM’s components as “investments” rather than “projects” allowed the leadership to shift funds more freely, but only if the investments could show realistic profit projections. NEOM’s management could not meet that requirement.
Revenue models for luxury resorts, futuristic transit and grand architectural experiments depended on inflated projections that did not survive scrutiny. Consultants were hired to present optimistic forecasts, but when auditors revisited the figures in 2024, the gap between ambition and reality became impossible to hide. When the accounts were corrected, the financial foundation collapsed.
The unravelling from within
By early 2025, the situation reached breaking point. No major new contracts had been awarded. Funding slowed to a halt. The executives leading The Line left for other roles. Large engineering firms wrapped up operations, not because the work was complete, but because it had become clear the project would not progress.
The massive trench carved into the desert as the first step of The Line’s infrastructure was covered and abandoned. It had never been a true foundation. It was a visual signal meant to assure potential co-investors that construction had begun. When no investors appeared, the illusion was no longer useful.
The PIF intervened. Projects were carved apart and redistributed. The green hydrogen plant was handed to Saudi Aramco. Sindalah Island was transferred to Red Sea Global, a company that had a track record of delivering sustainable luxury developments. NEOM’s headquarters relocated to Riyadh. Thousands of foreign workers received termination notices. Departments were shut down entirely. What had been presented as a living city of the future became a file to be archived.
Although the public was never informed of an official decision, the internal decision was final. The Line was no longer viable. What remained was an expensive lesson in ambition and a demonstration of how far the kingdom was willing to go to reshape itself.
Why the illusion was necessary
NEOM’s collapse may look like a miscalculation, but for the Saudi leadership it served its purpose. It signalled a break from the past, created a global narrative of modernisation, reduced the political influence of the religious establishment and supported reforms that would have been resisted under earlier conditions. Regardless of its fate as a physical construction, NEOM helped rebrand the country at a critical time.
By challenging the old order with a new cultural vision, it weakened the grip of Wahhabism without direct confrontation. Even its outlandish designs contributed to that objective. A society that could imagine living inside mirrored towers and walking above suspended stadiums could imagine a future where clerical dominance played a smaller role.
What happened to NEOM was not simply a matter of budgets and construction timelines. It was part of a deliberate campaign to reshape Saudi identity. The collapse of the project does not suggest failure of that broader mission. It suggests that the project had already served its role.
The legacy of a city that never came to be
The remnants of NEOM now sit in the desert, silent and incomplete. Yet its influence continues. Cultural restrictions have eased. Economic diversification is accelerating. Tourism is expanding along the Red Sea. Investment is flowing into sectors once kept under strict supervision. Whether these changes lead to long-term stability remains to be seen, but they represent a profound shift from the kingdom that existed only a decade earlier.
The official story of NEOM will remain one of ambition and delay. The real story is one of political strategy and cultural transition. The project was conceived as a symbol of a new era, not as a city that millions would one day inhabit. Its collapse does not erase the impact it had on Saudi Arabia’s direction.
Instead, it highlights the extraordinary scale of change underway. NEOM was the megaproject that helped dismantle an ideological structure older than the modern kingdom itself. The mirrored city may never rise, but the quiet revolution it enabled is already reshaping Saudi Arabia.
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