Satellite Images Reveal The Reality Of Saudi Arabia's $2 Trillion Megacity In The Desert

0:00 [Music] the world's largest construction project known simply as the line has already started to leave its mark on the Arabian Desert Saudi Arabia's billionaire Crown Prince wants see 170 km long Mega City to be visible with the naked eye from space satellite images show how the landscape is transforming where there was once sand and rock you can make out deep trenches thousands of trucks and excavators and entire New Towns workers and their families are already promoting their new lives here on social media but satellite pictures also show us Villages that have been wiped from

0:45 the map new is being built on Saudi blood and the controversial project appears to be struggling with media reports of cancelled contracts scaled back construction and spiraling costs plans to welcome the first residents to the line back in 2024 never materialized so is building what Architects told us is essentially a giant Greenhouse in one of the hottest and driest places on Earth really a good idea we're talking about some of the hottest temperatures ever recorded in this part of the world we analyzed the very latest satellite views from above and spoke to experts would I want to live in the line no I absolutely

1:30 wouldn't to find out if Saudi Arabia's desert dream stands a chance of being anything more than just a [Music] mirage the line is the brainchild of Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman or MBS for short in 2023 he told the Discovery Channel that he will build his extraordinary Mega City Against All Odds they say in a lot of projects that happen in Saudi Arabia can be done this is very ambitious they can't keep saying that and we can keep proving them the multi-billionaire prince is no stranger to Lavish spending and futuristic construction projects it's all part of his vision

2:17 2030 plan to diversify saudi's economy away from fossil fuels and into sports entertainment technology and tourism in fact this whole region dubbed neom in 2017 is going to be home to an array of Fantastical projects like syala a once baren Island just off the coast that has already been transformed into a luxury Beach destination with hotels a golf course Beach Club and Marina and workers started in the mountains on what MBS hopes will one day be a desert ski resort called trena and here the clock is ticking the resort needs to be ready by 2029 when it will host the Asian winter games the mountains don't get much rain and even

3:03 less snow so it will need to rely almost entirely on the artificial [Applause] kind of course MBS already has his own Palace complex in neom with private beaches lush green Gardens a golf course and 10 helipads construction on the line began in October 2021 what we can see on satellite imagery today is a giant scar cutting Inland from the Red Sea through the mountains and out the other side but beyond the Epic Earthworks there's little sign of the mega City presented in glossy promotional videos just think a skyscraper city that runs uninterrupted for 170

3:48 km that's the distance between Philadelphia and Washington DC or Naples to Rome so the line is designed to be a city like no other city that's ever been built thinks the lines are building it's not it's a frame it's a city and it has a framework and a grid structure to it the glass clad monster is also supposed to be 500 M high and 200 M wide to give you an idea of what a mirrored glass wool in the desert might look like take a look at this the Mariah concert venue built by the Saudis in 2019 this is the largest mirrored building in the world for now but it is only three stories or 26 6 M high if built the line will be one of the top 10 tallest buildings in

4:34 the world and by far the longest animations produced by neom promise suspended Gardens waterfalls cascading down buildings and all your daily needs within a 5-minute walk a high-speed train is planned take citizens from one end to the other in just 20 minutes there are even flying taxis in fact prototypes recently took to the air at this facility Just 4 kmet from the line one consultant who worked on the mega project told Business Insider that the city is designed with a wealthy minority in mind yet the line promises to eventually house 9 million people within a footprint of just 34 Square km that's more than 5 times the population of

5:21 Manhattan in just over half the space and according to Neil this is what Manhattan would look like if it was squashed into the same footprint as the line it might seem crazy but urban planners say we do need to rethink how cities grow in the last 75 years city populations have rapidly expanded more than half the world 4.4 billion people now live in cities and the UN predicts it will be nearly 7 billion by 2050 but this expansion is not sustainable look at the rapid growth of Las Vegas Vegas in this time lapse of NASA satellite imagery or Lagos Nigeria over a period of 40 years

6:07 and Paris has expanded 200 times in size since 1800 even though its population today is only 22 times bigger the team at neon believe that cities need a reset the cities are falling into the Trap of the traffic jams the pollution a social disconnect if humanity is not ambitious in this person moment when are we going to be ambitious the line is designed as a solution to both urban sprawl and population explosion as MBS told the Discovery Channel in 2023 the population going to jump in Saudi Arabia from today 33 million in 2030 something between 50 to 55 million that's raised very important question that we need to create new city

6:54 supporters of the line have praised MBS for being bold and Innovative the energy Within Saudi Arabia at the moment is incredible I think neom is you know the Pinnacle of that change and it's really exciting to be part of that but not everyone is convinced by the design the greatest architects and environmentalists were with Visionary they pushed the boundaries you know we need to build globally you know why would you do a l for thousands of years we've mostly built cities that have dense walkable centers expanding outwards over time in a Circle walkable interaction is the basis of cities businesses happen historically and now where you get easy interaction

7:41 between people and if a city the size of the line were instead built in a circle more people would be in walking distance of each other and what many people love about City living is the buzz of unpredictability London New York Bangkok they are big they are messy and you find all these fascinating places the thing with the line it lacks imagination actually at the level of experience shape aside will anyone actually want to live in an enclosed linear City in the desert there's no precedent a city where millions of people live in a building and and may not go outside something like the line would be a massive social

8:30 psychological experiment this is not the first grand plan for a linear City but history shows us that they rarely make it off the drawing board toward the end of the 19th century urban planner uro Soria proposed a 55 km long Central tram line in Madrid with houses on either side but only around 5 km were ever built and it's now absorbed into the sprawl of Madrid around 30 years later Edgar chambles designed roadtown a linear city with a monoral below ground and a walkway at the top in the 1960s two Princeton University professors devised the Jersey Corridor a 32 km linear City featuring two parallel buildings running between

9:16 New Brunswick and Trenton they hoped the city could one day stretch from Boston to Washington DC but neither of these American Dreams ever made it to Brick and Mortar perhaps the closest example we have to something like the line is corviale a 1 km long social housing Block in Rome for 8,000 people never fully completed it fell on hard times and this is what it looks like today it seems MBs is undeterred by history according to the Wall Street Journal when urban planners suggested alternative designs the crown prints brushed them aside you know Mega projects and mega cities

10:01 have always you know they often include a desire by a government to portray power or Equity or some of ideology to a national or Global audience but there is evidence that nbs's ambition may be stalling satellite images from May 2023 show Earth Works in full swing across the length of the line almost a year later Bloomberg reported that the line was being scaled back and workers dismissed recent satellite imagery does appear to show less activity on the ground the focus for now is a section of the line called The Hidden Marina where residents will be able to sail under the

10:47 city and then straight out to sea neom Executives call it the largest excavation project in the world moving over 90 million cubic M of material but it is now understood that only this 2.4 km section of the line is expected to be built by 2030 instead of the full 170 km it wouldn't be the first Saudi Mega project to hit the brakes ambitious plans to build the world's tallest building the Burge jeda have been on hold since 2018 following a number of arrests of senior figures involved in the project as part of an anti-corruption Crackdown construction on the 1 km High structure only restarted in January 2025 while Saudi authorities claim it

11:32 was always the plan to build the line in modules others suspect funding challenges over the last year reports of experts have indicated that the country might be starting to feel some strain of the financial pressure of the project with some's PL scaled back oil price and resulting revenues also been lower in the last year or so Saudi Arabia also HED foreign investment would prop up a lot of the spiraling costs but experts have said that this may not have reached the Kingdom's desired levels analysts estimate that it could cost more than $2 trillion to build the full line four times the original budget but already progress on the line has come at a human cost this region has been home to the haart tribe for centuries aedin people

12:18 known for their horse riding skills Satellite photographs from 20120 show The huart Villages of Al kurba sha and gal located close to the path of the line but in these images from 2024 they're gone in January 2020 residents of these Villages were served eviction notices they protested on social media posting videos with the hash haart against displacement Human Rights group alest has been monitoring the evictions closely and say the majority of the 20,000 haart tribe members have been displaced many videos show that security forces were violent with the the the locals um to force them

13:04 out and many people fled their houses but not everyone fled Abdul rahee a government employee at the Ministry of Finance decided to take a stand [Music] according to alest on April the 13th he was shot and killed by Saudi Special Forces Saudi authorities claimed that he fired first and labeled him a terrorist

13:52 there is no evidence whatsoever of him shooting first since mamad bin Salman came to power everyone that is deemed or seen as a Potential Threat or um a dissident will be charged under terrorism charges and all trials are held behind closed doors the question is why this lack of transparency so anyone who mourned him online was arrested alest say 47 tribe members have been arrested including many of Abdul rahim's relatives they say three have received severe prison sentences and three others are sentenced to death reports of intimidation and inhumane evictions have not gone unnoticed the UN sent an open letter to the Saudi

14:39 government concerned about the harsh treatment of the huat including reports of torture campaign groups like alest have applied pressure to International companies contracted by neom most are staying put not uk-based solar water which pulled out of a contract to build a solar power desalination plant in 2022 the founder and chief technology officer told us he was appalled by the treatment of the huat you cannot move people away from the Homeland I was very upset all the villages fishing villages along the coast they're no longer there human rights groups and trade unions have also drawn attention to thousands of cases of exploitation of workers on Saudi Mega

15:26 projects including neom a documentary by ITV reports that as many as 21,000 migrant workers from Nepal Bangladesh and India may have died in Saudi since the launch of the 2030 Vision in 2016 if Saudi Arabia's pledged to uphold human rights as part of this vision is under scrutiny so too are its Promises of sustainability the world's number two oil producing country has pledged to generate half its energy with Renewables by 2030 but in 2023 it was still less than 1% and in the neon region they're looking to meet 100% of their energy needs with Renewable Power solar Farms can already be seen in satellite images here close to the workers's camps and a

16:13 new Wind Farm can be seen emerging from the desert here further north the energy needs now and for a future Mega City are off the charts according to Neon the whole region including the line will need over 100 tatt hourss of power a year by 2030 that's similar to the annual electricity consumption of the Philippines you going to build the most efficient City hel a a grided city that's 6 to 10 stories tall with lots of shade and lots of solar panels and parts but even if the running of the line can one day be as promised emissions free the construction is far from it every Square meet to we build whether it's a line or a detached house any anything has a environmental impact

17:00 it took around 8 years to build one World Trade Center in New York the line would be the equivalent of building thousands of them and the taller a building the higher its carbon footprint requiring stronger materials such as steel and concrete to withstand the force of the wind concrete is incredibly carbon intensive steel is incredibly carbon intense Professor Oldfield has estimated that building the line would generate more than 1 .8 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent to 4 years worth of the UK's total emissions even if you were to build um a normal uh city of six to eight storage to it would have a very big carbon footprint I think it's just

17:45 going to be double or even treble with the line because of its height because of its structural gymnastics because of its kind of hedonistic design is going to have a material require requirement which contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and then once built this giant glass steel and concrete structure that designers say will blend into the landscape will need to be kept cool enough for people to live inside it one of the biggest problems is that it's essentially a big Greenhouse now you don't need to have a PhD in physics to understand what happens when

18:31 sunlight hits glass it heats up compare that to traditional Saudi buildings which are made of mud Stone and clay and designed to be naturally cool the irony of neon is that although it's presented as being this futuristic city it's a lazy city the architectures are lazy before the fossil fuel fuel boom architectures were generally a lot harder working they were they were built to keep heat in or keep it out if they can't keep the heat out the consequences could be deadly in June 2024 Saudi Arabia was hit by an extreme heat wave over 1300 people died on the Harge pilgrimage in Mecca where temperatures reached over 50°

19:17 C 2024 was the hottest year on record and scientists predict that average temperatures in Saudi are likely to go up by 2° C by the middle of the century perhaps the most precious resource in a desert Mega city is water the region gets around 6 cm of rainfall a year and it's estimated that 4 fths of saudi's ancient underground aquafer have been sucked dry by desert farming in the last three decades alone currently more than half of saudi's water is supplied by energy hungry desalination plants which spew out an estimated 60 million tons of CO2

20:03 per year salty waste brine is then often discharg back into the sea harming marine life neom has said renewable energy will power 100% of the desalination plants something that has never been achieved before with ambitious plans for regreening the desert and growing crops finding sustainable water is still a crucial issue facing the line conservation s also see the line as a death trap for wildlife take a look at this map of bird migrations through the region around 2.1 billion birds from over a 100 different species including endangered ones pass through the area bird collisions with glass is an enormous problem you know the figures in the states are in the many hundreds of

20:49 millions a year and that's just one nation back on the construction site little by little progress is being made made the latest satellite images of the Hidden Marina show a new excavation in progress and hundreds of trucks busy shifting dirt neom Executives have admitted it may take a 100 years to complete and fill the line but now there is a more concrete date in the diary a stadium suspended 350 M high up on the skyscraper is to be one of the official venues of the 2034 World Cup