In 2017, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud (MBS) announced audacious plans to build an extraordinarily ambitious 10,200-square-mile (26,500-sq-km) urban area called Neom at the northern tip of the Red Sea with a US$1.5-trillion budget. Different regions of this sprawling urban area would include a floating industrial complex, an island tourist resort, a ski resort, and probably the most famous of all: – a 105-mile-long (170-km), 660-ft-wide (200-m), 1,600-ft-tall (500-m) city.
Yes, a 105-mile-long, 100-story skyscraper that will be home to nine million people in one of the most barren lands in the world. More on that later. For reference, the in New York City – the seventh tallest building in the world – stands at 1,776 feet (541 m) tall.
The intention is that Neom will be completed by 2039. Many experts are skeptical of the plan, and more recently, there have been many media outlets reporting that the project has been scaled back considerably. There's so much conflicting information going around on the internet that there's no agreed-upon amount of scaling back that we could find.
That being said, MBS is looking to assure the public and the project's investors that it hasn't back-tracked and everything is still going according to plan. That assurance takes the form of an initiative called "Ground X", which has been launched to prove that everything is still on track through photos and live webcams of progress on Neom. Ground X reportedly has two million photos a.