Neom, Saudi Arabia’s urban development project that’s building the city of the future in the middle of the desert, has lost its leader. Nadhmi al-Nasr, a Saudi chemical engineer, has led the project since 2018. According to reporting from The Wall Street Journal, he’s left the project and no one is quite sure why.
Neom is the wild dream of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The pitch is that the area will be transformed into an urban paradise with robot dinosaurs, flying cars, and a giant artificial moon. It’s set to cost $500 billion.
Nasr was in charge of this grand project until today. According to people who spoke with Reuters and the Wall Street Journal, Nasr is out because he wasn’t meeting deadlines for construction. Now, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund (PIF) is taking over.
Things have been going wrong at Neom for a long time. The grand scope of the project would be too much for any country to bear. Central to the project is The Line, a linear super-city originally conceived to house 9 million residents. It would extend from The Red Sea to the city of Tabuk and be flanked on either end by enormous mirrored skyscrapers. It’s been hard to build and planners have repeatedly scaled down the ambition of the project.
Around 100,000 workers currently live in make-work cities in Neom, many of them building The Line. Nasr was a cruel taskmaster, according to reports. “I drive everybody like a slave,” he said in a leaked recording of a meeting. “When they drop down dead, I celebrate. That’s how I do my projects.”
Around 21,000 people have, indeed, dropped dead while working in Neom. Recent reports from the British TV network ITV described how migrant workers from India, Bangladesh, and Nepal have come to Saudi Arabia to live and work on The Line. It said that tens of thousands have died there. The Hindustan Times estimated that around 100,000 more have gone missing.
It turns out that building a shining city in the desert is hard, so hard that it’s killing its workers. Costs are also reported to have skyrocketed. Construction costs for any project—from building a shed in your backyard to raising a skyscraper in NYC—always come in above their initial pitch. Costs fluctuate over time. But trying to build an advanced city run by AI in an inhospitable climate is proving to be more expensive than first thought possible. Critics have set the cost at $2 trillion, four times the initial $500 billion pitch.
Saudi Arabia’s PIF only has $1 trillion to play with.
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