No one is surprised that Neom — Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s $1.5 trillion-with-a-t plan to build a futuristic megacity smack dab in the middle of the desert — has turned out to be a disaster. Its centerpiece was supposed to be a towering skyscraper called The Line, over 100 miles in length, that could accommodate millions of people, something that the laws of reality always suggested would be impossible to pull off.
But, according to new reporting from the Financial Times, the saga may yet have a twist in store for us. The Saudi government is now considering drastically downsizing the linear city-skyscraper so it can instead turn Neom into a hub for — we swear we are not kidding — data centers.
It’s a proposal that reeks of a Saudi leadership desperate to find a way out of the multibillion dollar hole it’s dug for itself, as the dysfunctional monarchy rushes to follow what everyone else is doing and cash in on the AI race. But royal insiders briefed on the matter insist that, actually, it’s a testament to how flexible the Saudi government is.
“It shows that the system has a capacity to adjust its goals,” one of the people told the FT.
The pivot was proposed as Riyadh wraps up its year-long review of Neom’s progress, and continues a pattern of belt-tightening across the government’s myriad, exorbitantly expensive investments — which include everything from buying up entire sports leagues and teams to competitive video games. Ostensibly to diversify the country’s oil-dependent economy, they’re now becoming more burdensome as oil prices have been in steady decline, leaving the kingdom’s purportedly trillion dollar Public Investment Fund low on cash.
Jumping on the AI bandwagon, low hanging fruit as it is, could be lucrative for the Saudis. And according to the FT‘s source, Neom’s proximity to the Gulf of Aqaba makes it well suited for hosting data centers, even though seawater cooling is not the norm. “Data centers need water cooling and this is right on the coast so it will have seawater cooling,” the source said. “So it will be a major center for data centers.”
The extent that The Line will be downscaled remains unclear, but it apparently isn’t going away completely. The FT’s source said that architects were already working on redesigning the megastructure into a more “modest” — and radically changed — project.
“The Line will be a totally different concept. It will use the existing infrastructure in a totally different manner,” the person told the FT.
The linear city has been controversial since its conception due to its outrageous scale, exorbitant costs, and the human right abuses suffered by construction workers, with thousands believed to have died while working on the project. Now it could be facing its biggest reality check yet, though Neom has repeatedly denied previous reports suggesting it could be downsized.
As it stands, its fate hinges on the ongoing review, which is slated to finish by or near the end of the first quarter of this year.
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