Saudi Arabia quietly abandons its 100 mile desert megacity dream after burning billions and angry citizens demand to know who will answer for this colossal national embarrassment

The wind still howls across the empty plateau where it was all supposed to begin. Under a sky the color of faded steel, survey markers lean at odd angles, half-buried by shifting sand. A few lonely concrete slabs lie exposed like broken bones. This was once the most audacious promise on Earth: a 100-mile straight-line city in the Saudi desert, a place with no cars, no streets, only mirrored walls and utopian renderings. Now, with budgets quietly slashed, contractors dismissed, and timelines pushed into a blurry “someday,” a different question rides the hot wind: what happens after a dream this big dies in public?

A Mirage in High Definition

When the project—known simply as “the Line”—was unveiled, it didn’t sound like architecture. It sounded like prophecy. A perfect, linear city slicing across the northwest of Saudi Arabia, framed by two colossal mirrored facades reflecting desert, sea, and sky. It would be 170 kilometers long, officials repeated, with the conviction of a sermon. No cars, no roads, powered entirely by renewable energy, guided by artificial intelligence. People would live within a five-minute walk of everything they needed, stacked in vertical neighborhoods like books on a shelf.

On screens, it looked breathtaking. Slender, gleaming, impossible. A kind of eco-futurist necklace draped across the Arabian Peninsula. In glossy videos and cinematic reveals, a scroll of promises floated by: zero emissions, floating industrial ports, snow-capped ski resorts in the desert, flying taxis, robot maids, bioluminescent gardens. The Line was sold as the crown jewel of Vision 2030, the national transformation plan intended to move the kingdom beyond oil.

Billions were poured into early phases: paying international consultants, buying up land, laying utilities, housing construction crews in stark temporary camps. The numbers always felt elastic—softly shifting, drifting upwards—but estimates quickly crept beyond $500 billion for the total NEOM region, of which the Line was its shimmering spine. For a while, the sheer scale was a kind of narcotic. If anyone wondered how a single linear city could sustain millions of residents in a fragile desert ecosystem, those questions were drowned out by drone footage, theatrical press conferences, and the hypnotic repetition of phrases like “the future of urban living.”

Whispers Along the Wind: The Pullback Begins

Out in the dusty staging grounds, though, the mirage started warping much earlier than officials were willing to admit. Workers noticed that site activity sputtered—waves of frenetic construction followed by sudden lulls. Contracts rumoured one number in the headlines and another in practice. Equipment sat idle under the sun for weeks, then months. The grand, uninterrupted 100-mile ambition quietly shrank into something more hesitant: a starter segment here, a pilot district there.

Reports began to leak of cost-cutting, of a drastically reduced initial build-out, of scaled-back housing targets. The once-infamous promise of accommodating nine million residents in a desert line—a figure that made urban planners worldwide twitch—started disappearing from official talking points. Instead, euphemisms surfaced: “phased development,” “strategic recalibration,” “adaptive scaling.”

Locals in nearby towns, who had long been asked to believe that this megastructure would transform their fortunes, saw a different reality unfold. Flights bringing foreign consultants became less frequent. Survey teams stopped showing up. The off-the-record jokes among engineers turned darker: “We’re building the world’s most expensive foundation for a marketing campaign.”

Billions in the Sand: Counting the Cost

There is a special kind of silence that follows the collapse of a grand vision—the pause where everyone waits to see who will dare say the obvious. In living rooms and cafes from Jeddah to Riyadh, that silence has now cracked. People have started counting. How many billions vanished into this linear mirage? How many other projects—schools, hospitals, renewable grids for existing cities—could have been built instead?

The answers are murky, because the accounting has never been straightforward. What is known, however, is that the financial footprint of the project sprawled across everything from sovereign wealth funds to ministry budgets; a dense tangle of loans, land acquisitions, feasibility studies, construction contracts, and technology deals. What makes it painful for many Saudis is not just the number of zeros—but the sense that nobody is clearly, publicly, accountable.

For a long time, objection itself felt risky. You did not question the Line; you marveled at it. But the mood has shifted. Anger now surfaces in carefully worded social media posts, in private gatherings, in the weary jokes of overworked civil servants. The refrain is common: “Who will answer for this?” Not just for the money, but for the lost credibility—the sense that national pride was hitched to an experiment that was always more spectacle than strategy.

Desert Dreams vs. Real Lives

Behind the slick renderings were real landscapes and real communities. The chosen site lies in a part of the country where Bedouin tribes have moved with the seasons for generations, where wadis pulse with ephemeral life after rare rains, where ibex leave sharp tracks in the dust near mountain shadows. Nature here is not empty; it is simply quiet, and subtle, and easy to overlook from the window of a private jet.

For environmentalists, both inside and outside the kingdom, the Line always felt like an ecological contradiction: a city advertised as sustainable, yet carved into one of the most fragile and water-stressed ecosystems on Earth. The mirrored facades alone raised questions about bird collisions, thermal effects, and the eerie act of turning landscape into a kind of architectural selfie. If sustainability was the desire, why not start with retrofitting Riyadh, Jeddah, Dammam—places where millions already live, drive, and struggle?

For many Saudi citizens, the contradiction was more intimate. While megaprojects bloomed in promotional videos, day-to-day frustrations remained stubborn: housing affordability, public transport gaps, education quality, job security. The Line’s marketing spoke to a future generation of hyper-connected global citizens; its fallout lands squarely on today’s taxpayers and workers. In that clash between symbolic grandeur and tangible reality, a wound has opened.

The Sound of People Asking “Why?”

In a café in Riyadh, you might hear it in the way voices drop slightly when the project is mentioned, like someone talking about a relative who made a spectacular, public mistake. “They told us it would change everything,” a young engineer might say, stirring cooled coffee. “I left a stable job to work on it. Now my whole team has been reassigned, and nobody can tell us what happens next.”

In smaller cities, the feelings are more blunt. Shopkeepers ask why their neighborhoods lost funding for basic improvements while billions were spent designing a city where they could never afford to live. Parents wonder why national energy went into marketing to foreign investors instead of building better local universities or hospitals. On late-night talk shows and around family tables, people repeat a quiet accusation: “We became extras in someone else’s movie.”

The project was always framed as an invitation into a glittering future. But as it unravels, it has turned a harsher spotlight back onto systems of power and decision-making. Who was in the room when this was approved? Who raised concerns? Who was ignored? The anger is not only about the project’s failure; it is about the feeling that a whole country was drafted into an experiment without being allowed to say no.

Lessons Written in Dust

It is tempting to look at the vanishing megacity and say, “Of course it was never going to work.” Yet that hindsight smooths over the pressures that birthed it: the anxiety of a world shifting away from oil, the desire to leapfrog into global influence, the seduction of being seen as visionary in a planet crowded with cautious, incremental planners. Saudi Arabia is far from alone in this impulse. Many countries have their graveyards of megaprojects—ghost airports, unused stadiums, half-built smart cities.

What makes this story different is its sheer theatricality, and the speed with which doubt caught up. It has become a cautionary tale about futurism detached from humility; about building for the cameras first, and the residents second. Urbanists and ecologists now cite the Line as Exhibit A in what happens when masterplans disregard complexity: of climate, of culture, of politics, of human behavior.

There is another lesson, more intimate and harder to quantify. A nation’s imagination is a finite resource. When you ask people to believe in something outrageous, and then it fails without honest explanation, belief itself becomes scarcer. The next time a leader says, “Trust us, we know what we’re doing,” there will be more folded arms, more narrowed eyes, more people remembering a shimmering city that was supposed to erase roads and rewrite history—and instead left behind dust, debt, and awkward silences.

After the Mirage: What Comes Next?

Back on the plateau, the sun slides down, painting the concrete relics in bruised gold. A lone truck rattles along a service road that was meant to run parallel to a new kind of civilization. The desert, indifferent as ever, begins reclaiming what has been left behind, grains of sand accumulating patiently along the edges of abandoned footings.

Somewhere in a cooled conference room, new plans are already being drafted. They may not be as grand or as cinematic. They might focus on retrofitting existing cities, on more modest eco-districts, on public transport that feels less like science fiction and more like utility. Perhaps in those quieter blueprints lies a chance for redemption: to trade spectacle for substance, megaproj­ects for many small, human-scale improvements that actually touch daily life.

But the question will not go away. In the minds of citizens who watched the Line rise in glossy videos and then dissolve into an embarrassed retreat, a final scene plays on repeat: leaders gripping microphones, insisting this was the future, while bulldozers traced the first marks in the sand. Now that the dream has cracked, the country waits for someone—anyone—to stand up and say clearly what went wrong, and what will be done differently.

Until that happens, the abandoned skeleton of the 100-mile dream will remain more than an expensive relic. It will be a monument to a deeper demand echoing through the kingdom’s homes and streets: not for another vision, not for a shinier mirage, but for accountability, for honesty, and for a future built carefully on the ground, instead of carelessly in the sky.

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Saudi Arabia officially cancel the 100-mile desert megacity?

Official language avoids the word “cancel.” Instead, authorities talk about “phased development” and “revised scopes.” In practice, the original vision of a continuous 100-mile city has been dramatically reduced, delayed, and quietly abandoned in favor of smaller, uncertain segments.

How much money has been spent so far?

Exact figures are not publicly transparent, but estimates suggest many billions of dollars have already been committed to planning, land preparation, infrastructure, and early construction. Much of that spending will be difficult or impossible to recover.

Why are many citizens angry about the project?

Anger stems from several sources: the perception of vast waste, the lack of clear accountability, the contrast between extravagant promises and modest everyday services, and a growing feeling that public wealth was used to chase spectacle rather than improve real lives.

What will happen to the construction that already exists?

Some built elements may be repurposed into smaller developments, research hubs, or pilot districts. Others may remain as underused infrastructure, a kind of physical reminder of an overreaching dream. Official plans for these remnants are still shifting.

Could any good still come from this failed megaproject?

Potentially yes—if the failure is openly acknowledged and studied. Lessons about realistic planning, environmental limits, financial transparency, and public engagement could guide more grounded, human-scale projects that deliver genuine benefits instead of cinematic illusions.