Exactly a year ago, in March 2024, the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund, the sovereign investment fund that manages state hydrocarbon deposits and is led by the kingdom's strongman, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, announced that the British architect Norman Foster's studio had been commissioned to design a 2,000-meter skyscraper. The information provided only included some incomplete details: the site was located in an unspecified area in the north of the capital, Riyadh, near King Salman Airport, which is also being built by the same London-based studio and will be the world's largest. Foster had been selected in a design competition where other architectural firms had competed, and the winner was announced in January 2024 without much publicity. The information from that year did not explain the tower's intended use (residential, commercial, tourism, etc.), nor did it specify the size of the plot. What truly mattered was the 2,000-meter height, more than double the 800 meters of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and the 1,000 meters of the still incomplete Jeddah Tower in Jeddah, also in Saudi Arabia.
The announcement was met with skepticism. Is there enough demand for housing or office space in Riyadh to justify such a building? It is unlikely. In Dubai, there are entire floors in the Burj Khalifa that have never been occupied after 18 years. Is there enough technology in the world to build and maintain a 2,000-meter tower? Yes, but at an inconceivable cost. Nevertheless, a year after the announcement, the Public Investment Fund has launched a new invitation-only competition for the two-kilometer tower. Six construction companies, including the American firms Aecom, Bechtel, Jacobs, Parsons, and Turner, and the British company Mace, will compete to take on the project, of which everything is still unknown, from the design and technical solutions to be applied, to the location and timelines. The only additional detail that has emerged in the Saudi media is that a year ago, the estimated investment for the two-kilometer tower was $4.6 billion. In 2025, it is already being discussed as $5 billion (4.6 billion euros).
What drives progress on a project that seemed implausible then and now? First, the economic and geopolitical context. After two years of stagnation (2022 and 2023), Saudi Arabia's GDP grew by 3.3% last year. The forecast is for similar performance in 2025 and 2026, with acceleration expected at least until 2029. The price of crude oil seems stable in the medium term, and although political fragility is a global uncertainty, Saudi Arabia does not appear to be the country most exposed to upcoming changes. Additionally, construction and real estate sectors are growing above the Saudi economy's average, driven by investments in housing (a historical deficit for the kingdom), tourism (with the 2034 World Cup on the horizon), and the sovereign fund's five mega-projects: Neom, Roshn, Qiddiyah, Diriyah, and Red Sea Global. New cities, tourist colonies, amusement parks larger than Disney World, public housing programs...
The two-kilometer tower is not included in the list of mega-projects because its timeline extends beyond 2030. In that symbolic year, Saudi Arabia hopes to present itself to the world with its new and contradictory image of an authoritarian yet decarbonized regime, religious yet focused on science and technology, statist yet welcoming to global millionaires.
However, there is a connection between the kingdom's modernization and Foster's tower, evident in the names of the companies competing for its construction: Texan firm Bechter built Riyadh's metro. Parsons, based in Virginia, is working on The Line, the linear city in the northwest desert of Saudi Arabia. And New York-based Turner was awarded the construction of Jeddah Tower, the one-kilometer tower, which restarted in January from the 317-meter mark after a decade of bankruptcy, abandonment, and political disgrace.
The wealth and investment capacity of the Public Investment Fund will not be exhausted in the coming years, and construction companies must support this preferred client, even in their most dubious projects. The Line, for example. The futuristic 170-kilometer, 500-meter-wide city that made headlines in 2022 is a major problem for the Public Investment Fund. There have been audits on fund mismanagement, scale reductions in the project, delays in timelines, and reports of murders of local tribe representatives opposing the construction. The project, it has been said, only continues due to Mohammed bin Salman's personal commitment.