The Line is paused, and the pause now runs to 2030

Construction on The Line, the linear city that became NEOM's public identity, was suspended in September 2025 pending a strategic review by the Public Investment Fund. Reporting in June 2026 indicated the work stoppage would hold until at least 2030. The project had already been revised well before that. A 2024 revision set the first phase at roughly 2.4 kilometres and targeted 100,000 residents by 2030, against an original vision of 1.5 million. The revision is the more informative event of the two. A pause can be lifted; a change in specification defines what actually gets built. A 170-kilometre linear city for nine million people is a proposition about urban form: it argues that a line can outperform a circle, that a high-speed spine can substitute for a road network, and that vertical density at that scale is buildable. A 2.4-kilometre segment for 100,000 people is a large mixed-use development. Those are different projects, and only the first required the technology programme that was assembled around it. For technology suppliers that matters commercially. NEOM was, for several years, one of the largest single procurement opportunities in the world for smart city technology — sensing, autonomous mobility, building management, digital twins, identity infrastructure. A great deal of vendor roadmap and regional headcount was pointed at it. A development for 100,000 people has a technology budget in the ordinary range for a large development rather than a category of its own, and companies that built Gulf teams around the earlier scale have been adjusting for two years. NEOM as a programme is not stopped. The green hydrogen plant at Oxagon , a joint venture between NEOM, ACWA Power and Air Products, was reported at around 90% complete across all sites in late 2025, with 257 wind turbines and a very large solar installation. That is real industrial infrastructure and it is nearly finished. Oxagon itself has been reframed from a floating octagonal city to a conventional coastal industrial zone with port facilities, and reporting through 2026 pointed to a focus on AI data centres. On the site's properties that is a strong fit: abundant land, coastal cooling, dedicated renewable generation and port access are the inputs a compute campus needs. What the programme has done, in effect, is concentrate on energy and compute infrastructure — a category with established cost curves and identifiable customers — while the urban-form work is held for review. The hydrogen plant and the data centre siting are where the near-term output sits.