Saudi Arabia’s high-profile gigaproject Neom is considering laying off more than 1,000 staff and moving another 1,000 from the site’s headquarters in the remote northwest of the country to Riyadh, news website Semafor reports, citing three unnamed people familiar with the matter.
No final decisions have been made and plans could change, the website’s sources added.
Neom project staff moved from Riyadh to the site, located 170km from Tabuk, in October 2020 under the direction of Neom’s then-chief executive Nadhmi Al Nasr, who stepped down in November last year after taking on the role in August 2018.
Launched in 2017 by Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman to diversify the country’s economy away from oil, Neom was conceived as a cluster of megaprojects establishing new high-tech business and tourism destinations from scratch.
Its flagship was to be “The Line”, a 170km-long, 500m-tall, 200m-wide skyscraper housing 9 million people, first announced in January 2021.
Since then, reports have repeatedly raised questions about Neom’s and the Line’s feasibility.
Bloomberg reported in April last year that the Line, set to cost $1.5trn, had been scaled back to 2.4km in length, and was now set to house 300,000 people by 2030.
In March this year, The Wall Street Journal reported that a Neom internal audit compiled in 2024 – and which it had reviewed – had found that Neom “faced significant challenges, including soaring costs, delays, and unrealistic assumptions in its business plan”.
Out of Neom’s multiple projects, currently only the first phase of the 840,000-sq-m island destination of Sindalah has been completed.
Last month, it was reported that consultants had been brought in to review the feasibility of the Line and to determine if the 170km-long linear city can realistically be built.
The Middle East Eye website suggests a factor in the kingdom’s ongoing calculations may be the falling price of oil, which accounts for 61% percent of revenue.
In January 2025, state-owned Italian financier SACE announced it would invest $3bn in Neom, which would pave the way for Italian businesses, suppliers and SMEs to work on the programme’s many individual projects.
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