Saudi Reimagines The Line: From Hundred-Mile Megastructure to Data Center Hub

What began as an audacious plan to stitch a city across the desert is being recast as a pragmatic infrastructure play. Saudi leaders are reassessing the colossal linear-city proposal and reportedly shifting emphasis toward hosting concentrated data center capacity along the Gulf of Aqaba coastline. The pivot follows a year-long evaluation of progress and cost exposure, and it is being framed internally as a course correction rather than an abandonment. Technically, the site’s coastal location makes seawater-assisted cooling a plausible engineering pathway for dense compute clusters, and planners are said to be redesigning existing foundations and utilities to support compute loads instead of continuous residential development. Financial signals are driving the rethink: the original project was tied to an eye-catching multitrillion-scale ambition and has contributed to pressure on state investment vehicles. The review’s findings are to be delivered around the end of the first quarter, and architects are already sketching a condensed version of the linear concept that would repurpose built infrastructure. That transition would shrink the urban footprint, shift capital expenditure profiles toward modular power and fiber deployments, and replace long-term real-estate revenue assumptions with demand forecasts for cloud and AI infrastructure. Human-rights and labor-cost controversies that have shadowed construction add political urgency to any course correction, and the reputational liabilities will shape partner selection and contractor oversight for whatever replaces the original vision. For regional power dynamics, the move signals Saudi Arabia’s intent to buy capacity in the AI economy quickly rather than persist with speculative urban megaprojecting. Yet the change also concedes that the initial scale was unmoored from practical financing and delivery realities, raising questions about oversight and the Public Investment Fund’s liquidity priorities. In short, the campaign is being recast from a showpiece urban ambition into an industrialized compute corridor — a shift that reduces some technological risk while converting political risk into operational and market execution risk.