In a bid to explain the scale of the massive project he is overseeing in Riyadh, Jerry Inzerillo points through his office window at the forest of cranes towering over a construction site.
Around 80 are there now, but “we’ll have 275 cranes by 2027,” says Inzerillo. “Last year, we poured 500,000 cubic metres of concrete.”
The New Yorker, a veteran of the hospitality industry, is now chief executive of the $65bn Diriyah Gate project, a high-end, retail, residential and cultural development beginning to take shape on the outskirts of the kingdom’s capital.
Eventually, opulent villas and Michelin-starred restaurants will butt up against the remnants of a centuries-old village of mud houses that was the ancestral home of the ruling al-Saud family.
Diriyah is one of five so-called “giga-projects”, being developed by the Public Investment Fund that are deemed vital to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s “Vision 2030” drive to modernise the kingdom, reduce its addiction to oil revenues and project it on the global stage.
They have been at the core of a frenzy of activity led by the PIF that has transformed the once conservative kingdom into one of the world’s largest construction sites and a magnet for international consultants and contractors. In tandem, the PIF has been on a global spending spree as it has metamorphosed from a near-dormant state holding company into the oil-rich Gulf’s highest profile and one of its largest sovereign wealth funds, with $925bn of assets under management.
But after almost a decade of the frenetic pace, Saudi Arabia is entering a new phase — one that interviewees describe variously as a “recalibration” or “reprioritisation,” as a sense of realism and pragmatism takes hold. Government departments are being instructed to slash spending on consultants, while state-related entities are being forced to tighten their belts; some projects are being scaled back, or phased over a longer time period.
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