Infrastructure work has begun on the Kingdom’s revolutionary zero carbon city “THE LINE” and it is expected to be ready for inhabitants and tourists as early as the first quarter of 2024, said Nadhmi Al-Nasr, CEO of NEOM in an interview with Bloomberg.
THE LINE, a 170-km-long strip, will form the backbone of the NEOM development, driving a pathway of modern development from the Red Sea to the desert valleys at the eastern end of the NEOM development zone. NEOM also “faced some challenges in the beginning” as employees worked to design a city around technologies that don’t exist yet, Al-Nasr said.
Last week, officials announced that they were spinning off the first of several subsidiaries of NEOM: a company dedicated to its tech sector, to be headed by American chief executive Joseph Bradley, who previously held leadership roles at Cisco Corp. and Uptake.
It is important to realize that NEOM will be much more than THE LINE. The total development, at a total of 27,000 sq. km, is the equivalent of a small country, and will have within it all the essentials for a self-sustaining economy such as industry, agriculture, energy generation and utilities provision.
