The Line & NEOM Timeline: Construction, Progress and What Comes Next

As a long-term design vision, 170 km is still the figure NEOM’s own materials use for The Line’s full concept. It has never been officially withdrawn or replaced with a shorter number in any NEOM or PIF statement. But 170 km was never a description of what was under construction at any given time — it was always the endpoint of a multi-decade build-out, and phased development means portions of the project were meant to be delivered well before the full length existed.

What changed is the near-term target. Reports from Bloomberg and other outlets in April 2024, citing people familiar with internal planning, said Saudi officials had privately cut the 2030 milestone from 170 km to roughly 2.4 km, and the associated population target from 1.5 million residents to about 300,000. Saudi Arabia did not officially confirm this change at the time — it was reported, not announced. What makes it notable in hindsight is that 2.4 km is almost exactly the figure independent reporting has since converged on as the actual amount of foundation and earthworks completed before the September 2025 pause. The leaked number and the built number line up, even though neither was ever an official NEOM statement.

So: the 170 km vision has not been formally cancelled, but no evidence supports describing 170 km of continuous active construction at any point in this project’s history. The honest description, as of August 2026, is a long-term 170 km concept, a scaled near-term target that was reported but never confirmed, and roughly 2.4 km of physical work on the ground.

The honest answer has two parts that are both true. First: no official Saudi or NEOM statement has ever announced a reduced scope for The Line, and PIF governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan explicitly said in April 2026 that no NEOM projects had been cancelled. Second: the reported April 2024 target cut from 170 km to 2.4 km by 2030 has, in effect, already happened on the ground — roughly 2.4 km is what independent reporting says was actually built before the September 2025 pause, and that pause has since been extended past 2030 per the May 2026 Semafor report. Contracts specifically tied to Line infrastructure (the 12.5 km tunnel package) and to Trojena (steel, dams) were formally terminated in March 2026, which is a harder fact than any leak: a contractor does not disclose a termination to its shareholders unless the contract is actually gone.

What this page will not do is call the project “cancelled.” Nothing in the public record supports that word being applied to NEOM as a whole, and PIF has explicitly rejected it for The Line specifically. What the record does support is that the near-term, 2030-dated version of The Line described in 2021 launch materials is not happening on that timeline, by any reasonable reading of the contract terminations, the funding writedown and the leaked audit together.

Even setting the funding and governance questions aside, The Line’s original design was an unusually hard engineering problem. A continuous structure running 170 km through desert terrain has to cross varied ground conditions along its entire length, each requiring its own foundation approach, rather than the single, well-characterized site a normal skyscraper or campus is built on. Concrete curing in a hot desert environment behaves differently than in temperate climates, requiring closer control of pour timing, cooling and logistics — a genuine constraint at any scale, though this page does not have verified figures for exact concrete volumes used to date and will not invent them.

The site’s remoteness compounds ordinary construction logistics: materials, workers and heavy equipment all have to reach a stretch of coastal desert with limited existing infrastructure, which is part of why NEOM built its own airport (2021) before major Line construction began. A citywide high-speed transit spine, water desalination and distribution, and renewable power generation all had to be built essentially from nothing, in parallel with the structure itself, rather than tapped from existing regional grids.

NEOM’s energy strategy centres on Oxagon rather than The Line specifically. The NEOM Green Hydrogen Company — a joint venture of ACWA Power, Air Products and NEOM — was reported roughly 90%+ complete by April 2026, targeting first hydrogen production and export in late 2026 or 2027. Separately, the February 2025 DataVolt agreement adds a 1.5-gigawatt AI data centre campus at Oxagon, with a $5 billion first phase targeting around 300 MW operational by 2028. Both of these are Oxagon projects, not Line infrastructure — a distinction this page keeps deliberately, since NEOM’s own materials sometimes present them under one energy narrative.

Water for the site relies on desalination, standard for large-scale development on the Red Sea coast, alongside planned wastewater recycling. This page does not have verified, dated figures for a NEOM-specific desalination plant’s current capacity or completion status, and will not present an estimate as fact.

NEOM’s construction workforce and its effect on the local Huwaitat tribe have drawn sustained, independent scrutiny. Human rights organisation ALQST published a report, “The Dark Side of NEOM,” in February 2023, documenting forced displacement of Huwaitat families from land inside the project’s footprint. Abdul Rahim al-Huwaiti, a Huwaitat tribesman, was killed by Saudi security forces in April 2020 after refusing to leave his family’s land — an incident widely reported at the time (Al Jazeera and others) and cited since as a flashpoint in the displacement dispute. Rights groups, including the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, have separately reported that dozens of Huwaitat tribe members were arrested for opposing displacement, with several sentenced to death in cases dating to 2020–2023; this page cites those as documented allegations tied to specific reporting dates, not as an independently verified current tally, since Saudi authorities have disputed elements of this coverage.

On working conditions, ITV’s undercover documentary “Kingdom Uncovered,” broadcast October 24, 2024, filmed workers on The Line describing 16-hour shifts across up to 14 consecutive days, unpaid commutes of roughly three hours, and around four hours of sleep per night, with several workplace accidents cited within a single month. Human rights researcher Nicholas McGeehan, interviewed for the documentary, said the reported hours were “way beyond international minimum standards.” A separate, frequently cited figure — roughly 21,000 migrant worker deaths — refers to Vision 2030’s broader construction sector since 2016, compiled from Indian, Bangladeshi and Nepali government data on their nationals’ deaths in Saudi Arabia generally; it is not a NEOM- or Line-specific death toll, and should not be presented as one.

Independent academic research has raised specific, measurable concerns about NEOM’s coastal construction. A sediment-dispersal modelling study led by researchers at UCLouvain, presented at the EGU General Assembly in 2025, found that fine sediment disturbed by NEOM’s coastal development can remain suspended in the water column for up to a month and travel as far as 200 km from its release point — a mechanism that could threaten Gulf of Aqaba and northern Red Sea coral reefs otherwise known for unusual heat resilience. This is the strongest independently sourced environmental evidence available on NEOM’s coastal impact as of this update, and it is a modelling study, not a measured outcome, so it is presented here as such.

The Line is unusual even among modern megaprojects for how much of its identity rested on a single geometric claim — a 170 km straight line — rather than a functional description. Saudi Arabia’s own high-speed rail comparisons internationally, like India’s Mumbai–Ahmedabad bullet-train corridor, show a more conventional megaproject pattern: a fixed route between two existing cities, phased station-by-station delivery, and a single primary technical challenge (in that case, elevated viaduct construction) rather than an entirely new city built from nothing. NEOM’s own architectural megaproject peer, the Jeddah Tower, offers a closer regional comparison: another Saudi vertical-scale project that has faced its own multi-year construction pauses, illustrating that funding and logistics — not just novelty of design — are the recurring constraint on the kingdom’s most ambitious builds.