Jeddah Tower Timeline: How a Stalled Saudi Megaproject Is Racing Toward 1,000 Metres

Most coverage of Jeddah Tower tells one of three stories: the original 1,000-metre ambition, the years it sat frozen at 63 floors, or the current construction sprint. Told alone, each is misleading. The ambition story alone reads as a press release. The halt story alone reads as failure. The current-progress story alone, without the other two, erases exactly what makes this project interesting: a supertall skyscraper that stalled for nearly seven years and is now rising faster than almost any comparable tower in the world.

The original ambition began in 2009, when Kingdom Holding Company and its project vehicle, Jeddah Economic Company, ran a design competition won by architect Adrian Smith and structural engineer Thornton Tomasetti — the same pairing behind Burj Khalifa. Early concepts reportedly explored a full mile-high (1,609 m) structure before soil mechanics on the coastal site ruled that out; the design that emerged instead targeted just over 1,000 metres, still enough to claim the world’s-tallest title by a comfortable margin over Dubai’s record-holder.

The long delay began in earnest around January 2018, when construction stopped at roughly the 63rd floor. The proximate trigger, documented across multiple retrospectives, was a period of upheaval following Saudi Arabia’s late-2017 anti-corruption campaign, which detained figures connected to the project’s contracting and financing chain, disrupting payment flows to the main contractor. Financial uncertainty extended the pause through 2019; COVID-19 extended it further through 2020 and 2021. The site was never formally cancelled — it was simply, for years, not moving.

The comeback didn’t happen in one announcement. Jeddah Economic Company opened a request-for-proposals process in September 2023 to find a contractor willing to finish the tower. That process produced an October 2024 completion contract with Saudi Binladin Group — the tower’s original contractor — worth SAR 7.2 billion. On 21 January 2025, Kingdom Holding’s chairman, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, stood on site as concrete was poured on the 64th floor, formally restarting construction. Eighteen months later, the tower has climbed past floor 100 and roughly 430 metres, moving at a pace — about one floor every three to four days — that outstrips much of its pre-2018 construction rate.

Ask how many floors Jeddah Tower will have and you’ll get two different answers depending on the source, and this article does not pretend one of them is simply wrong. Jeddah Economic Company’s and Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture’s project specification material cites 157 floors, with the planned sky terrace observation deck positioned at floor 157, roughly 644 metres up. Other project-adjacent and press material — including some architect-firm documentation — cites 167 to 168 floors, alongside a separate figure of 252 total levels when mechanical and service floors are included.

The most plausible explanation is a counting-methodology difference — occupied/usable floors versus a fuller level count that includes mechanical and sky-lobby floors — rather than an actual design change to the tower’s height. But that is an inference, not a confirmed reconciliation: no single Kingdom Holding or JEC disclosure reviewed for this article directly addresses why the two numbers differ. Until one does, this article reports both figures, attributed to their respective source types, rather than silently picking the one that sounds more current.

Construction halted around January 2018 amid a period of political and contractual upheaval, including the Saudi government’s anti-corruption campaign. That single sentence is accurate, but it is also, on its own, too simple — and this article separates what is documented from what is inference.

Documented: In late 2017, Saudi Arabia’s anti-corruption crackdown detained a number of prominent business and government figures, including people connected to the project’s contracting and co-financing structure. Around the same period, payment disruptions to the main contractor and broader financial uncertainty are separately documented in retrospective reporting on the project. Construction had reached approximately the 63rd floor when work stopped.

Interpretation, not fact: No single official document reviewed for this article states a formal, singular reason for the halt. Coverage since has generally described the stoppage as resulting from the combined effect of the anti-corruption disruption, contractor payment problems and financial uncertainty — compounding factors rather than one traceable order to stop work. The pause then extended through the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020–2021, by which point restarting required not just resolving the original disputes but remobilising an entire construction operation from scratch.

Jeddah Tower’s official target is “over 1,000 metres” (3,280+ feet). Kingdom Holding and Jeddah Economic Company have not published a precise final architectural height beyond that threshold figure in the material reviewed for this article — a level of imprecision that is itself notable for a project this closely watched, and this article does not fill that gap with a specific number pulled from unofficial sources.

Burj Khalifa, the current record-holder, stands at 828 metres, completed and operational since 2010. If Jeddah Tower reaches its planned 1,000+ metre target, it would surpass Burj Khalifa by more than 170 metres, becoming the tallest completed building on Earth. As of August 2026, Jeddah Tower’s constructed height is approximately 430 metres — a real, verified construction milestone, but well short of even Burj Khalifa’s completed height, let alone the tower’s own final target. Jeddah Tower is not the world’s tallest building yet. It is a building under construction that is designed to become the tallest completed building, if and when it finishes at its planned height.

Jeddah Tower is built around a buttressed-core structural system — the same structural family Adrian Smith and Thornton Tomasetti used on Burj Khalifa: a hexagonal central concrete core braced by three wings radiating outward, each wing acting as a buttress against the others. High-strength reinforced concrete is pumped from ground level through the core using pumps rated for extreme vertical lift; as the tower has climbed past 400 metres, pumping distance and concrete curing time in Jeddah’s heat are both live engineering constraints, not settled ones. Construction advances on a jump-form cycle for the core, with tower cranes climbing alongside it, while façade and MEP installation trail well behind the leading concrete pour — which is why façade cladding had reached only floor 36+ as of April 2026 even as the core was already past floor 99.

The tower sits on a hybrid piled-raft foundation: reportedly 270 piles, 1.5–1.8 metres in diameter, driven to depths of roughly 105 metres, topped by a 5-metre-thick concrete raft spanning approximately 3,200 m², engineered to keep differential settlement under 25 mm across the load given the site’s coastal, sandy soil conditions.

Above roughly 300–400 metres, wind — not gravity — becomes a supertall tower’s dominant design problem. Sustained high-altitude wind can trigger vortex shedding, where alternating low-pressure pockets peel off a tall, uniform cross-section and induce rhythmic sway. Jeddah Tower’s three-wing, Y-shaped footprint is engineered specifically to disrupt this: by varying the building’s cross-section as it tapers upward, the design prevents wind vortices from synchronising into a single resonant sway pattern — the same wind-engineering principle Adrian Smith applied on Burj Khalifa, and a documented design rationale rather than a generic architectural flourish.

Jeddah Tower is the centerpiece and first phase of Jeddah Economic City, a roughly 5.3 million square metre mixed-use masterplan on the North Obhur coastline. Kingdom Holding and Jeddah Economic Company frame the tower as the anchor investment around which the surrounding development — residential, commercial and supporting infrastructure — is built out, requiring coordinated water, electricity, sewage, drainage and connectivity infrastructure alongside the tower rather than after it. Reported figures place the full masterplan’s development value around $20 billion, a figure distinct from — and far larger than — the tower’s own construction contract values (see the cost section below).

Why North Obhur: the site sits on Jeddah’s Red Sea coastline, giving the tower and its surrounding development direct waterfront access. Jeddah itself is Saudi Arabia’s historic Red Sea trade and pilgrimage gateway, home to a major international airport and port — a commercial and tourism hub independent of this one project, which is part of why the site was chosen for a development intended to draw international investment and visitors.

Jeddah Tower’s design origin dates to 2009; Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 economic-diversification programme launched in 2016. The tower was not conceived as a Vision 2030 project, and this article does not claim Vision 2030 built it. What is accurate: the tower’s 2024–2025 restart occurred inside a period when Saudi Arabia has aggressively prioritised giga-projects and urban-development investment as part of Vision 2030, and Kingdom Holding’s own public framing situates the tower within that broader national development narrative. The relationship is contextual and financial-climate, not causal-origin — a distinction worth holding onto given how often the two get blurred in casual coverage.

None of these three figures is “the cost of Jeddah Tower.” Reporting that mixes them — treating SAR 7.2 billion as the tower’s total lifetime cost, for instance — is a common but avoidable error this article does not repeat.