The ambitious 170 km-long Saudi megacity 'The Line' has…

(Image credit: Neom)

A new unconfirmed report claims that Saudi Arabia is planning to drastically reduce the size and scale of its Neom Megaproject, dubbed 'The Line,' a futuristic vision of a linear city that would have held 9 million people if realised. According to FT, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is now planning something "far smaller," possibly an AI data center hub.

The Line was previously touted as a "cognitive city" that would stretch 170 kilometers from the Red Sea across Saudi Arabia's desert landscape. Measuring 500 meters in height but just 200 meters in width, it would have purportedly featured no cars or roads and 100 percent renewable energy production. According to its own website, The Line could have housed 9 million people in a space just 34 square kilometers in size (13.1 square miles) while leaving 95% of its land preserved for nature. That vision now appears to have been flagged as overambitious.

According to the report, the project is set to be "significantly downscaled and redesigned," prompted by a review of the development, which has faced delays and overspending. Perhaps more interestingly, FT reports the site "could now become a hub for data centres as part of Prince Mohammed’s aggressive push for the kingdom to become a leading AI player," citing people briefed on the matter.

The report cites that the Kingdom is wrestling with "tightening liquidity after a decade of massive spending," and "subdued" oil prices, as well as other hefty projects like the Expo trade fair and 2034 World Cup. In a statement given to FT, Neom didn't deny the report, rather stating that it was "always looking at how to phase and prioritise our initiatives so that they align with national objectives and create long-term value," adding it is "advancing projects in line with strategic priorities, market readiness and sustainable economic impact."

According to a person cited in the report, The Line will be a "totally different concept" moving forward, with a focus on industry and as a hub for AI data centers. They say the coastal city will use seawater for cooling and be "a major center" for AI. Saudi Arabia is attempting to become a player in the ongoing AI buildout race. In May of 2025, it received 18,000 AI GPUs for its state-sponsored data centers from Nvidia.

The nation has a significant problem to overcome, however, in its very hot and dry climate. In a recent report revealing that nearly 7,000 of the world's 8,808 operational data centers are built in the wrong climate, Saudi Arabia was one of only a handful of nations where nearly all of its data centers are built in zones considered too hot for efficient operation. Unfettered access to the Red Sea, where The Line ends, could be a novel solution to this issue.

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56 Comments Comment from the forums

Faiakes

When you have more money than common sense (and no accountability)...
Reply
bit_user

The article said:
The Line was previously touted as a "cognitive city" that would stretch 170 kilometers from the Red Sea across Saudi Arabia's desert landscape. Measuring 500 meters in height but just 200 meters in width,
Because a single, linear 0.2 x 170 km strip is obviously the most efficient city plan!
🤣
I think somebody should've played more Sim City, and maybe they'd have known a bit better.

Of course, the reason it's been scaled back isn't because it's a bad layout, but really pretty much everything else about the project.
Reply
ivan_vy

that absurd design you made in college to impress your fellow architech students
Reply
AB53

So, hot computer centers shouldn't be placed in a desert. But no fear, they can move that heat into the Red Sea??? What impact will this warming of the Red Sea have on its beautiful sea life? I sense a simmering catastrophe.
Reply
Tanakoi

bit_user said:
Because a single, linear 0.2 x 170 km strip is obviously the most efficient city plan!
🤣
Linear cities were first proposed well over a century ago, and while bin Salman's proposal is an extreme example, there are many cities and development zones in the US and around the world that are oriented largely upon a single axis. It vastly increases transportation efficiency, at the cost of also increasing transit times. Suum cuique.
Reply
Tanakoi

AB53 said:
So, hot computer centers shouldn't be placed in a desert. But no fear, they can move that heat into the Red Sea??? What impact will this warming of the Red Sea have on its beautiful sea life? I sense a simmering catastrophe.
There are 230,000,000,000,000 cubic meters of water in the Red Sea, each and every one of which requires more than 4 million joules of energy to raise a single degree in temperature, even excluding radiative losses while dumping that heat. You do the math.
Reply
LordVile

Tanakoi said:
Linear cities were first proposed well over a century ago, and while bin Salman's proposal is an extreme example, there are many cities and development zones in the US and around the world that are oriented largely upon a single axis. It vastly increases transportation efficiency, at the cost of also increasing transit times. Suum cuique.
If you supplement it with good transportation it’s not that bad. Put a monorail down the main axis and it’s solved
Reply
bit_user

Tanakoi said:
proposal is an extreme example,
Yeah, that's the point. To get from anywhere to anywhere else, everyone has to choke into the same narrow transportation corridor. From a systems perspective, it exhibits horrible scaling properties.

Tanakoi said:
there are many cities and development zones in the US and around the world that are oriented largely upon a single axis.
It's a very different proposition to have a 2D city with a dominant axis vs. Something that's just 200m wide. At least with a real 2D city, you'd have parallel streets in the main direction of travel.

If you want to know what it's like to have all traffic choked through a single conduit, I knew a guy who commuted 2 hours each way over the Bosporus. Not fun.
Reply
bit_user

Tanakoi said:
There are 230,000,000,000,000 cubic meters of water in the Red Sea,
The overwhelming majority of which are irrelevant, due to obvious constraints on circulation. You need only look to existing examples of coastal power plants to see that thermal pollution is a legitimate issue.
Https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_pollution
While the are of impact will be near the coast, that's also where it can cause the most damage to ecosystems and fisheries.
Reply
bit_user

LordVile said:
If you supplement it with good transportation it’s not that bad. Put a monorail down the main axis and it’s solved
Coincidentally, London also has a population about 9M. Now, what do you suppose would happen if the only way for the entire population of London to get almost anywhere was on a single transit line??

The London Underground has 11 lines, totaling 400 km of track. Its daily ridership is only about 3.23M (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground ). So, roughly triple that, then multiply it by another 2.3x, for condensing the amount of traffic into just 170 km. That works out to about 7x the crowding currently experienced in "the Tube".

Does that sound like a city you'd willingly move into?
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