The Line, a 170-km-long belt of skyscrapers built in the middle of the dessert, is one of Neom’s forefront projects. Revealed in 2021 with great ambitions of attracting 1.5 million residents by 2030, Saudi Arabia has now greatly lowered that target.
Instead of 1.5 million residents, the Line is now hoped to house under 300,000 people by 2030, according to a Bloomberg report citing a source familiar with the issue. Moreover, just 2.4 km of the complex development are expected to be completed by the end of the decade.
Although footage of the construction process underway was released earlier this year to prove the project is going well, the source told Bloomberg the scale back is due to Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund not approving Neom’s 2024 budget yet. Neom is earmarked to be a $1.5 trillion investment and it is just one of the Saudi Vision 2030’s many ambitions. But it seems that now decisions have to be made on which projects are prioritised.
Another sign that the country lacks sufficient funding for Prince Mohammed Bin Salman’s transformative vision came in March, when Saudi Tourism Minister Ahmed al-Khateeb announced a plan to complement the $800 billion state funding in the tourism industry with $60 billion to $80 billion in private investment by 2030.
The Saudi Vision 2030 programme is a project started by Prince Mohammed Bin Salman in an attempt to diversify the country’s economy from oil, and Neom is its biggest development yet. Presented as a “city of the future”, the “high-tech mega-city” includes other developments besides the Line, which, according to Bloomberg, are not affected by the pull back of investment. The mountain resort Trojena in particular is going ahead, as the aim is to have it up and running by 2029, in time for hosting the Asian Winter Games in 2029. A luxury island resort built in the Red Sea is also supposed to open this year.
The initial goal of the Vision 2030 was to attract 100 million yearly tourists by 2030, but since that benchmark was already achieved last year, the new aim is for 150 million yearly tourists. Besides Neom, the country is developing several mega projects that are meant to completely transform Riyadh by the end of the decade.
A new national airline, Riyadh Air, was also launched in March 2023, with the ambition of tripling Saudi Arabia’s air traffic to 330 million passengers by 2030 and turning the country into a regional travel hub. Moreover, tourism campaigns featuring football stars Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo have been developed to increase the international appeal of the destination. The country has been recently rumoured to even consider a partial lift of the ban on alcohol soon.
