NEOM has paused The Line. Stopping is the hardest thing a giga-project ever does.

“If we announce something and we need to adjust it … we will without blinking.” — Mohammed Al-Jadaan, Saudi minister of finance, Riyadh, 3 December 2025

NEOM has stopped work on The Line. Almost everyone I know in this industry read that as a defeat. It is the most useful thing a giga-project has done in a decade.

What actually changed at NEOM

In May, NEOM confirmed that work on The Line is paused until at least after 2030. The 170-kilometre linear city — mirrored walls, half a kilometre high, once costed at more than a trillion dollars — is no longer the thing being built.

The numbers around it moved too. NEOM now expects up to 100,000 residents by 2030. Two years ago that figure was 300,000. At announcement it was 1.5 million. Trojena, the mountain resort in NEOM’s north, will not host the 2029 Asian Winter Games after all — the games were postponed in January and Almaty signed the host city contract in February. Sindalah, the island resort that held a grand opening in October 2024 attended by a fleet of superyachts and a guest list of celebrities, has still not opened to the general public.

The priority and the money have moved to Oxagon: the port, the utilities, the connectivity, the data centres.

This follows a strategic review under NEOM’s chief executive, Aiman Al-Mudaifer, and an internal audit reported by the Wall Street Journal in March 2025 that put the cost of finishing The Line as drawn at 8.8 trillion dollars, with a completion date around 2080.

So, not a cancellation. A re-pricing.

Nobody in this business ever stops

Here is what makes it unusual.

I have almost never seen a large project stopped properly. I have seen plenty deferred, quietly, in language that lets everybody keep their story intact — phase two, future consideration, subject to funding. That is not stopping. That is a project dying with the lights left on.

Stopping properly is expensive in a way that has nothing to do with money. Somebody has to stand up and say the plan was wrong. In a market where the render is the product — where the flythrough raises the capital, hires the team and sets the expectation — saying the plan was wrong costs more than finishing badly.

Saudi Arabia’s finance minister said in Riyadh in December that the kingdom would adjust, defer or cancel projects without blinking. It sounded like positioning at the time. It turned out to be a schedule.

The question a render cannot answer

Some years ago I stood in a room with a scale model of a development that has since been built. It was beautiful. Lit from below, tiny trees, tiny people, a tiny ferry frozen mid-crossing.

I asked what a Tuesday there would feel like. Not the opening. Not the photograph. A Tuesday in year three, in August, at four in the afternoon.

The room went quiet in the specific way rooms do when the question is fair. Somebody eventually said the operator would work that out.

The operator always works it out. That is the problem. By then the shade is fixed, the walking distances are fixed, the entrances are fixed, and the operator is left arranging furniture inside decisions taken years earlier by people optimising for a drawing.

100,000 is a better number than 1.5 million

A million and a half residents by 2030 was never a plan. It was a spreadsheet in a good font.

A hundred thousand is something else. It is small enough to watch. You can find out what people actually do in that heat, on that site, at that hour. You can learn which of your assumptions about how Saudis want to live were quietly imported from somewhere else. You can be wrong at a survivable scale, and then be less wrong next time.

That is how good places have always been made. One correction at a time, in public, with real people in the frame.

Qiddiya is doing a version of this almost by accident, opening something every quarter and learning as it goes. Diriyah is doing it deliberately, phase by phase. Same pattern: build a piece, watch people use it, change the next piece. Four years without a construction deadline is a very long time to get good at that.

And yet

Here is what worries me about the correction.

The money is moving from a city to a port, and from a ski resort to data centres. Those are defensible investments. On the balance sheet they may well be the right ones.

But nobody has ever needed to feel anything about a data centre. It has no arrival, no threshold, no first ten seconds, no queue, no reason to come back. It is the purest form of infrastructure: enormously valuable, and completely silent.

Underneath all the noise, the thing NEOM was building was capability — a generation of people in the kingdom learning how to make places that visitors actually experience. That skill lives in the last mile. In wayfinding, in service, in how long the walk is, in what a handrail is made of. It is far harder to acquire than a port, and much easier to lose.

If the correction becomes a retreat into things that do not require a welcome, Saudi Arabia will have saved a great deal of money and mislaid the harder competence.

The part that is still true

Ambition was never NEOM’s mistake. Ambition is why the region is interesting, and why anyone in my line of work pays attention to it at all.

The mistake was believing that the size of the plan could stand in for the experience of the place. It cannot, at any scale, in any market, and what is happening now is the cost of finding that out in public.

A pause is only worth something if somebody uses it. Four years is enough time to learn what a Tuesday in NEOM should feel like.

It is also enough time to draw another render.

NEOM and The Line … in brief

Has NEOM’s The Line been cancelled?

No. Work is paused until at least after 2030. The 170-kilometre scheme has been deferred rather than cancelled, with priority and investment redirected to Oxagon.

Why has NEOM paused The Line?

A strategic review led by chief executive Aiman Al-Mudaifer, following an internal audit reported by the Wall Street Journal in March 2025 which put the cost of completing The Line as designed at 8.8 trillion dollars and the finish date at around 2080.

How many people will live in NEOM by 2030?

Up to 100,000. That is down from 300,000 two years ago, and from 1.5 million in the original announcement.

Is Trojena still hosting the 2029 Asian Winter Games?

No. The games were postponed in January 2026, and Almaty in Kazakhstan was confirmed as the replacement host in February 2026.

What is NEOM building instead?

Oxagon, the port and industrial city, with a focus on port infrastructure, utilities, connectivity and AI data centres.

What does the NEOM pause mean for brand and experience work in the Gulf?

Smaller phases are easier to learn from. The advantage shifts to teams that test real visitor behaviour early and feed what they find into the next phase, rather than leaving the experience to be resolved at the end of construction.