In a major reset, Saudi Arabia is quietly shrinking its desert city of the future. NEOM and its signature linear city THE LINE are being redesigned as a much smaller project built around data centers instead of a 170 kilometer strip of housing.

In its original form, THE LINE was marketed as a single mirrored structure that would run roughly 170 kilometers through the desert, with no private cars and services stacked vertically. Promotional videos showed a wall of glass, high-speed trains, and parks suspended between towers.

Behind the redesign is a simple question; do the numbers still add up? An internal audit reported by The Wall Street Journal found that NEOM’s projected price tag had ballooned from an initial $500 billion to as much as $8.8 trillion by 2080, more than 25 times Saudi Arabia’s annual budget.

The rethink stretches beyond THE LINE. The TROJENA mountain resort, once chosen to host the 2029 Asian Winter Games, will not stage the event after organizers postponed the games and later awarded them to Almaty in Kazakhstan, while the Sindalah luxury island has faced delays and is being handed to another state-backed developer.

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