PIF took an $8 billion writedown on its gigaproject portfolio in August 2025, that accounting entry tells you more about NEOM than any press release has.

The project was announced at $500 billion in October 2017.

Construction on the Line, a 170-kilometer mirrored corridor intended to house nine million people, was suspended in September 2025.

As of March 2026, 2.4 kilometers of foundation have been laid. Nothing stands above ground.

The rest of the portfolio looks similar. Trojena’s Asian Winter Games were postponed indefinitely in January. Sinadalah opened for a VIP event in October 2024 and has been closed to the general public since. PIF has spent more than $50 billion and taken and taken a formal accounting loss on the assets before a single resident arrived.

What NEOM does have: an operational airport, a deep-water port on the Red Sea, a high-capacity dedicated power supply, and fiber backbone connected to sub-sea cables. Built to serve a city. Serviceable for a data center.

In February 2025, NEOM signed a $5 billion agreement with DataVolt to develop a 1.5-gigawatt AI data center at Oxagon, the project’s industrial port component, powered by renewable energy, with operations targeting 2028, per Bloomberg and NEOM’s official newsroom. The question is whether DataVolt is a one-off or the first in a series.

HUMAIN makes a case for more. Saudi Arabia’s national AI firm (a PIF subsidiary created in 2025) has signed over $29 billion in compute deals since May: AMD at $10 billion for 500 megawatts of infrastructure; AWS at $5 billion for a dedicated AI zone; Oracle at $14 billion over ten years. Nvidia’s deal covers hundreds of thousands of next-generation GPU’s, with 18,000 GB300 units ordered upfront; the dollar value has not been disclosed

The volume of compute needs somewhere to go. Data centers require reliable power, low-latency fiber, and, increasingly, access to renewable energy for corporate sustainability commitments. Oxagon has all three. Whether HUMAIN’s facilities end up at NEOM specifically or elsewhere in Saudi Arabia remains open. The infrastructure argument for Oxagon is real. The commercial decision has not been confirmed.

The skeptical reading deserves space. DataVolt is one signed deal. The PIF review of NEOM’s revised scope is expected to conclude in Q2 2026; until that announcement, “data center hub” is reported direction not an approved strategy. NEOM’s gap between announced vision and delivered reality is wide enough that a second thesis requires more than one contract to establish.c

Watch for one signal: Whether a hyperscaler (Microsoft, Google, or AWS operating under its own name rather than through HUMAIN) commits to a facility at NEOM. That confirms the pivot. Absent that, the DataVolt deal is a promising data point, not a proof.

Sandline
@readsandline
Tracking how Gulf money moves, what it builds, and the technologies shaping its future.