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For years, The Line was presented as the future of city-living. A radical 170-kilometre mirrored city rising from the desert in NEOM, designed to house nine million residents without cars, streets or carbon emissions. The project promised a radical way of living: two parallel mirrored structures 500 metres tall enclosing a narrow urban corridor powered by renewable energy and controlled by artificial intelligence.
Rising 500 metres high and just 200 metres wide, the structure aimed to stack neighbourhoods vertically, creating a dense urban environment without traditional streets. The concept eliminated cars and roads entirely, replacing them with pedestrian neighbourhoods and a high-speed underground transit system capable of crossing the entire city in around 20 minutes. Planners also claimed the development would operate on 100 percent renewable energy.
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According to project figures, The Line was intended to house around 9 million residents within just 34 square kilometres, while 95 percent of the surrounding land would remain preserved for nature. However, recent reviews have suggested that this original vision may have been overly ambitious, leading to discussions about scaling back and whether the site might instead become one of the world’s largest AI infrastructure hubs.
Reports by the Financial Times in early 2026 said that "People briefed on the matter said Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, NEOM's chair, now envisages something “far smaller.” In the same report, the project is set to be “significantly downscaled and redesigned,” following a review of the development after it faced delays and overspending. More importantly, the Financial Times reports that the site “could now become a hub for data centres as part of Prince Mohammed’s aggressive push for the kingdom to become a leading AI player,” citing people briefed on the matter.
The reasons are both economic and technological. The global AI boom has created enormous demand for computing power. According to a recent analysis in Forbes Middle East, the surge in artificial intelligence has triggered a trillion-dollar infrastructure race centred on data centres capable of training and running large models. These facilities require vast amounts of electricity, specialised cooling and sophisticated real estate.
Paradoxically, the companies that own the buildings are not necessarily the biggest winners. The Forbes report notes that AI profits are concentrating among chip manufacturers and cloud providers rather than traditional data-centre landlords, signalling a change in how infrastructure is financed and designed.
This dynamic has architectural implications. If AI infrastructure becomes the true economic engine, entire developments may evolve around machines rather than humans. “What happened to revolutionising the way people live?” One disheartened Facebook user posted in February 2026. Instagram comments about the rumoured news have called the planners, fearful, expressing cynicism saying that The Line was always meant to be cancelled and suggesting that the project may have been a PR stunt.
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Does NEOM make sense for AI servers?
Contrary to being in a very hot, humid desert, NEOM site is unusually suited to AI infrastructure. First there is scale. The wider NEOM region covers around 26,500 square kilometres, offering enormous tracts of land for industrial facilities. Second is energy. The project was conceived to run on large renewable energy networks, including solar, wind and hydrogen production. This kind of energy ecosystem aligns closely with the needs of data centres, which require massive and stable power supply.
Third is geography. The coastal location near the Red Sea could enable seawater cooling systems, a technique increasingly explored for high-density server installations in hot climates. Analysts note that water-based cooling would help offset the intense heat that normally makes data centres inefficient in desert environments. And finally there is geopolitics. Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 strategy aims to diversify the economy beyond oil and position the kingdom as a global technology hub. Large AI facilities are important for that transition and for long-term planning.
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What does this mean about the way we live?
If The Line were to evolve into an AI infrastructure zone, it would represent a fascinating shift in architectural priorities. Traditional cities are organised around human movement, public space and social interaction. Data centres invert that logic. Their primary concerns are cooling, electrical resilience and network latency. This produces a very different architecture. Server halls resemble industrial cathedrals filled with racks of processors. Buildings are designed around airflow, thermal separation and energy distribution rather than windows or streets.
Weirdly, there is an unexpected connection between The Line’s original concept and this potential future. The project was always conceived as a “cognitive city,” a place where AI systems would monitor and optimise city life. Turning the development into a physical engine for artificial intelligence simply pushes that idea further. Instead of housing a population served by algorithms, the city itself could become the machine.
The possibility also raises broader design questions about the future of mega projects in the Gulf. For decades, architectural ambition in the region has been expressed through impossibly high skylines, cultural landmarks and luxury developments. AI infrastructure introduces a different typology altogether: vast, anonymous facilities that are economically crucial but visually invisible.
If NEOM becomes a centre for AI rather than citizens, the project may introduce a new kind of Middle Eastern urbanism. And, in the age of artificial intelligence, where we rely on vast computer-systems to live, the most important architecture might not be where people live but where machines can thrive.
