NEOM Saudi Arabia, the $500 billion megacity development in the northwest of the Kingdom, entered 2026 as the most scrutinised infrastructure project on earth, with significant parts of its original vision suspended, scaled back, or under fundamental review. The project remains central to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Vision 2030 strategy, but the gap between initial ambition and present delivery has grown harder to ignore.
The flagship component of NEOM is The Line, a proposed 170-kilometre linear city designed to house 9 million residents in a zero-car, zero-emissions urban environment. As of May 2026, construction on The Line is suspended. The Public Investment Fund halted work on September 16, 2025, pending a strategic review that has yet to conclude publicly. Drilling rigs and construction equipment remain on site, but active building has stopped. Reports from Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal indicate that the number of residents expected to be housed in The Line by the end of the decade has been revised sharply downward, with fewer than 300,000 now the internal working target rather than the multi-million figure originally announced.
NEOM officials and PIF governor Yasir al-Rumayyan have pushed back against characterisations of widespread cancellation, insisting that spending priorities have been reassessed rather than projects formally scrapped. The Oxagon floating industrial city and green hydrogen facility represents the clearest success story within the NEOM ecosystem, reaching 80% completion as of early 2026 and on track for a mid-year delivery milestone. Green ammonia exports from the plant are projected to begin in 2027, representing a commercially meaningful output that aligns with global decarbonisation demand.
The Trojena mountain resort and ski destination, which received significant attention when NEOM was selected to host the 2029 Asian Winter Games, suffered a blow when those Games were postponed indefinitely in January 2026. Construction at Trojena has slowed materially, and contract cancellations have been confirmed across multiple sub-projects within the NEOM development zone, according to industry tracking of tenders and legal notices.
One area where visible progress has been recorded is NEOM Port, which has reached an advanced operational stage in 2026. The port is positioned as a Red Sea logistics hub connecting Europe to the Gulf Cooperation Council states via an overland trade corridor. The main container terminal, built to handle the world’s largest vessels, is targeting a capacity of 1.5 million TEUs and is expected to open in 2026. Automated cranes, the first of their kind in the Kingdom, have been operational since mid-2025.
The broader macro context matters here. Fluctuating oil revenues have placed pressure on PIF’s available capital, forcing prioritisation decisions across a portfolio of projects competing for resources. The PIF’s approved 2026-2030 strategy explicitly names NEOM as a central pillar but signals a shift toward sustainable value delivery and operational efficiency rather than pure expansion. A $5 billion data centre partnership with DataVolt, targeting AI infrastructure, represents a pragmatic adaptation of NEOM’s mission toward sectors with clear near-term commercial return.
The Saudi government has already committed more than $50 billion in foundational infrastructure to the region, meaning abandonment is not a realistic option. What NEOM looks like by the end of the decade will likely be considerably more modest than the original vision, but the port, hydrogen, and data infrastructure suggest a functional economic zone is emerging even if the utopian city concept remains far from realisation.