NEOM's hydrogen plant is nearly finished

The NEOM Green Hydrogen Company — an equal joint venture between NEOM, ACWA Power and Air Products — was reported at around 90% complete across all sites in late 2025. The development includes 257 wind turbines and a solar farm of a scale usually described by comparison to Manhattan. It is being built at Oxagon , on the same coastline where The Line 's construction has been suspended since September 2025. The contrast between the two is instructive about what large programmes deliver first. The hydrogen plant is a very large but conventional piece of industrial engineering. Electrolysers, renewables, ammonia synthesis and a port are technologies with decades of operating history and known cost curves. The difficulty is scale and integration, and those are problems that respond to capital and project management. The Line proposed a form of city that has not been built before, which is a longer and less predictable programme by nature. Both were committed to at once, and the one with established precedents is the one now near completion — which is the ordinary sequencing for a portfolio containing both known and novel engineering. Being 90% built is not the same as being commercially proven. Green hydrogen's economics depend on the delivered cost of hydrogen or ammonia at the destination port relative to alternatives — grey and blue hydrogen, and in some applications direct electrification. The project's advantage is input cost. Wind and solar resources on that coast are among the best available anywhere, and the two together produce a capacity factor that makes continuous electrolyser operation more achievable than at most sites. Its challenge is distance: the output ships a long way to reach the European and Asian buyers whose decarbonisation mandates create the demand, and shipping hydrogen derivatives is expensive. Air Products' involvement as offtaker matters more than the turbine count, because an industrial gas company with existing customers converts a construction project into a business with contracted demand. It belongs in a technology story because it is the power supply for what the region is building next. The Gulf's AI buildout is openly a power problem: HUMAIN is targeting 1.9GW of data centre capacity by 2030 and six by 2034, and Abu Dhabi is planning a five-gigawatt campus at Masdar City. Renewable generation at NEOM scale is what makes those numbers compatible with the region's emissions commitments. Whether particular electrons go into electrolysers or into accelerators is, from the grid's point of view, a commercial allocation that can be revisited.