Saudi Arabia has announced for the first time how it plans to finance Neom — the Crown Prince’s flagship megaproject that is seen as a showpiece to transform the kingdom’s economy.
The first phase of the project, which runs until 2030, will cost 1.2 trillion riyals ($320 billion), with about half of that covered by the Public Investment Fund, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said. Officials will seek to raise another 600 billion riyals from other sovereign wealth funds in the region, private investors in Saudi Arabia and abroad, and the rest will be funded by an initial public offering of Neom itself on the Saudi stock market — an idea the prince first floated in 2017.
It also will set aside 300 billion riyals for an investment fund tied to Neom, MBS said.
The kingdom is working on of one of the largest and most difficult construction projects in history, which involves turning an expanse of desert the size of Belgium into a high-tech city-region called Neom.
MBS bills Neom as a showpiece that will transform Saudi Arabia’s economy and serve as a testbed for technologies that could revolutionize daily life — as well a way to attract foreign investment and diversify the oil-dependent economy. But five years in, Neom has been plagued by setbacks, many stemming from the difficulty of implementing the prince’s grand and ever-changing ideas, according to current and former employees.
Saudi Arabia also plans to build a wafer-thin megacity a hundred miles long in the middle of Neom, and have it be a nice place to live that accommodates 9 million people, with a transit system capable of sending them end-to-end in 20 minutes, MBSsaid.
The city, called The Line, takes the shape of two parallel buildings with mirrored surfaces, rising 500 meters (1,640 feet) above sea level — taller than the Empire State Building — and stretching horizontally for more than 100 kilometers. The Line was initially described as a series of walkable communities close to nature in 2021, but it has since transformed into the current idea to build a megastructure that makes up the entire city, with gardens and parks along the inside.
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