Saudi Arabia has quietly scrapped its NEOM megaproject after sinking more than $50 billion into Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's vision of a sci-fi metropolis, and is now spending billions of dollars more to wind down contracts, leaving mammoth partially built structures abandoned in the desert, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.

After sinking more than $50 billion into Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's dreams of a sci-fi metropolis, the kingdom is now spending billions of dollars more to wind down contracts, leaving mammoth-sized partially built structures to gather sand in the desert, the Wall Street Journal confirmed in a video report published this week.

The Public Investment Fund formally suspended all construction on THE LINE, NEOM's central component, on September 16, 2025, pending a strategic review, as Abhishek Gautam confirmed in detailed reporting on the project's collapse. Around $50 billion, approximately 10 percent of the project's total budget, had already been spent without the project coming to life. A handful of concrete structures stood in the Saudi desert. Nine million people had not arrived.

In February 2026, NEOM announced a $5 billion partnership with DataVolt, a sustainable data center operator, to build an AI data center campus in NEOM's OXAGON district, converting what was meant to be the world's most futuristic city into an artificial intelligence industrial zone cooled by Red Sea seawater. The pivot from sci-fi metropolis to AI data center campus reflects Saudi Arabia's broader strategic reorientation, which a Saudi source told Reuters in October 2025, involves redirecting investments toward artificial intelligence and hydrocarbon-dependent data centers rather than the speculative real estate and tourism plays that NEOM represented.

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