Saudi wealth fund to hit $1tn, NEOM still priority: chief

AFP | Riyadh

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Saudi Arabia’s futuristic new city NEOM remains a priority for the Gulf kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund under its new five-year plan, its chief said yesterday, following speculation about the project’s future.

NEOM, the $500 billion flagship for oil-reliant Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 diversification programme, has reportedly been plagued by delays, personnel changes and design rethinks.

Yasir Al-Rumayyan, governor of the Public Investment Fund (PIF), said there would be six areas of focus, or “ecosystems”, from 2026 to 2030, including tourism, urban development, innovation, clean energy and industry.

NEOM will be “its own ecosystem”, Rumayyan told business and political leaders at the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh.

“This (plan) would help us in prioritising our capital deployment with the timelines,” he said. “We don’t want to go to every investment with the same priority.”

He added that PIF should hit $1 trillion in assets under management by the end of this year. “We’re very, very close to getting there,” Rumayyan said.

NEOM was the only one of the Saudi “gigaprojects” -- major lifestyle developments, which also include a Red Sea tourism project and Qiddiya, an entertainment city near Riyadh -- named in the plan.

Reported problems at NEOM include a scaling-back of The Line, originally intended to be a mirrored pair of parallel skyscrapers as tall as New York’s Empire State Building and originally designed to stretch for tens of kilometres through the desert.

Difficulties have also been reported at Trojena, the ski resort being built nearby whose scheduled hosting of the 2029 Asian Winter Games drew protests from environmentalists.

PIF’s new, more streamlined plan came after it spent billions in recent years funding around 100 companies dealing in everything from AI to camel-milk products, Rumayyan said.

The fund is a main driver of attempts by the world’s biggest oil exporter to diversify its economy into areas such as tourism, business and finance.