Late one night this spring, satellite images over Saudi Arabia’s northwest desert began to tell a very different story. Where glossy renderings had once promised a glowing 100-mile glass wall slicing through the dunes, the reality looked smaller, patchier, almost shy. The long line of lights that was supposed to stretch straight to the horizon just… stopped. Construction equipment stood idle, like abandoned toys in a sandbox that someone suddenly lost interest in. Workers whispered to journalists off the record. Local firms complained about unpaid bills.
Foreign consultants quietly flew home. No official press conference. No mea culpa. Just a slow, quiet shrinking of the world’s boldest urban fantasy.
And now the question lingers in the dust-filled air: who answers for a vanishing dream that burned through billions?
From 100-mile miracle to 1.5-mile reality
At the height of the hype, The Line was sold like a science-fiction miracle dropped into the real world. A city with no cars, no streets, no sprawl. Just a single, razor-straight mirrored corridor, 170 kilometers long, housing nine million people in a desert where summer temperatures often hit 45°C. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman appeared in videos, gesturing over stark animations of flying elevators and layered public parks. The message was simple: this wasn’t just a project, it was the future of civilization.
Now, officials quietly admit the first phase might cover barely 2.4 kilometers.
On the ground, that change of scale is brutal. Contractors who signed on to help build a 100-mile megastructure are now being told that only a tiny fragment will move forward, at least for the coming years. International reports suggest that instead of nine million residents by 2030, projections are closer to under 300,000, and even that looks optimistic. Some workers describe being abruptly reassigned away from The Line to more modest projects within the NEOM region. Others just left. One engineer who spent two years shuttling between London and the desert told colleagues the site felt “like a movie set after the director walked away.”
The silence from Riyadh feels louder than any announcement.The logic behind the retreat is painfully simple: money and time. Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 hinges on oil cash funding a rapid pivot into tourism, tech and futuristic urbanism. But oil revenues dipped, budgets tightened, and global investors became more cautious about pouring capital into a project many urban planners saw as unworkable from day one. Even inside the kingdom, some quietly warned that running high-speed services in a 100-mile linear skyscraper, in extreme heat and sandstorms, would be a maintenance nightmare. *Dreams can stretch across the desert; steel, glass and budgets rarely do.*
So the grand line is being shortened, but the bill for the original fantasy is still coming due.
Billions spent, and a growing demand for answers
One of the strangest parts of this story is how fast the narrative flipped. Just two years ago, official media celebrated every drone shot of desert excavation, every new contract signed with Western architects, every slick promo clip. Today, the tone is cautious. The government has not publicly said, “We’re cutting The Line down.” It simply revised NEOM targets, trimmed timetables and stopped repeating the 100-mile promise. Behind the rebranding lies a staggering expense. Analysts estimate tens of billions of dollars have already been poured into NEOM, with The Line as its glittering centerpiece.
And still, nobody in power is stepping up to say where the money went – and why the dream shrank.
For Saudis watching from the sidelines, the story is personal. Many remember the forced resettlement of the Huwaitat tribe to clear land for NEOM, families pulled away from ancestral homes for a project that now might never resemble the original vision. Young graduates were told The Line would be their ticket into high-tech jobs, global careers, a life beyond oil. Some left stable roles in other cities to chase that promise. Now they scroll through social media threads where leaked memos and blurry site photos hint at a slow-motion rollback.
We’ve all been there, that moment when you realize the thing you believed in most might have been more show than substance.
Internationally, critics are sharpening their questions. Human rights groups point at arrests tied to NEOM-area protests. Economists look at the widening Saudi budget deficit and the growing list of delayed or scaled-back projects: not just The Line, but entertainment complexes, resorts, even other planned futuristic hubs. Urbanists say the warning signs were obvious from the start: linear cities defy how people naturally move and live, and the environmental cost of building a 100-mile wall in the desert was always going to be enormous. Let’s be honest: nobody really thought nine million people would happily stack themselves in a mirrored canyon with no backyards or side streets.
What stings now is that no one seems willing to publicly own that miscalculation.
Behind the glass wall: what this saga really teaches
Strip away the glossy renderings and The Line exposes a pattern we’ve seen before: leaders falling in love with symbols instead of systems. The Line was the ultimate symbol – straight, shiny, cinematic – a single gesture meant to prove that Saudi Arabia was no longer the land of only oil fields and pilgrimage, but of tomorrow’s megacities. A calmer, less photogenic plan might have spread investment across existing towns, coastal hubs and public transport, building resilience instead of spectacle. That doesn’t grab headlines.
Yet this quiet scaling-back is a reminder that the physics of budgets, logistics and human behavior always win in the end.
There’s also a more universal lesson in the eerie silence surrounding the retreat. When huge promises are made from the top down, accountability tends to evaporate when those promises crack. Ordinary Saudis are left asking each other on WhatsApp and X: Who decided to stretch the dream to 170 kilometers? Who signed off on the displacement of local communities? Who ran the numbers and said this was actually doable? The state’s formal answer, so far, is to simply move on and talk more about “flexible timelines” and “adaptive vision.”
That evasiveness is exactly what breeds cynicism, not just at home, but with every investor watching from abroad.
“Mega-projects are easy to launch and hard to walk back,” one Gulf-based infrastructure consultant told me. “The bigger the promise, the more people get hurt when no one is willing to say: we overreached.”
- Billions in sunk costs – from excavation to design fees, much of that money is gone forever.
- Communities displaced – locals pushed aside for a megastructure that may never truly exist as sold.
- Shaken investor trust – global partners now question timelines, governance and risk.
- Lessons in overreach – a case study in what happens when branding outruns basic reality checks.
- Space for a reset – the quiet retreat also opens the door to more grounded, human-scale development.
A shrinking line, and a larger conversation
The Line may be getting shorter on the map, but its shadow is stretching into a much wider debate. Can a country truly reinvent its economy on the back of spectacles, or does real change come from the slower work of reform, education and infrastructure that never makes it into viral drone footage? For Saudis, the story is tangled up with national pride, hope and fear. For the rest of the world, it’s a rare glimpse behind the curtain of how twenty-first-century mega-visions rise – and quietly fall.
Something about this feels like a turning point, even if no one in Riyadh wants to call it that out loud.
| Key point | Detail | Value for the reader |
|---|---|---|
| Scale-back of The Line | From an announced 170 km city for 9 million people to a tiny initial segment | Helps you cut through the hype and understand what’s really happening on the ground |
| Financial and social cost | Tens of billions spent, local communities displaced, budgets under pressure | Shows the hidden price of grand urban fantasies sold as progress |
| Accountability question | No clear public admission of overreach, critics demanding transparency | Invites you to think about who should answer when mega-projects quietly fail |
