Jeddah Tower and Saudi Arabia’s 1,000‑metre skyscraper race

At first the horizon looks like nothing more than a blurred seam where pale desert meets a washed-out sky. Then your focus sharpens and you notice what you’re actually looking at: the base of a colossal concrete structure still taking shape. Cranes hover in the heat like oversized metal insects, and a thicket of steel reinforcement bars reaches upwards.

Hard-hatted crews work in short, frantic bursts before stopping to mop sweat from their brows. Nearby, a supervisor gestures towards a central core that already makes most city towers feel small. “One kilometre,” he murmurs, almost as if he’s saying it for his own benefit. The figure seems to linger longer than the dust.

Set aside Burj Khalifa. Put Shanghai Tower out of mind. Saudi Arabia is preparing to bring the sky a little nearer.

The race to touch the clouds is back on

For a while, the worldwide contest for the tallest skyline seemed to ease off. Burj Khalifa remained a solitary, needle-like benchmark above Dubai, while Shanghai Tower’s green-tinted glass spiral settled into its place among the giants. Now Saudi Arabia is effectively restarting the competition with a more defiant, more audacious proposal: climb past what was considered sensible and push towards 1,000 metres.

This is not a marginal increase in height. It is a bid to alter how the world reads a skyline. The one‑kilometre mark is as much a mental barrier as it is a technical one. Break through it and many other “supertalls” suddenly appear unexpectedly restrained.

In plans and construction timetables, the scheme still often shows up under its earlier label: Jeddah Tower. First announced in the early 2010s before being paused for years, it is now moving again, propelled by the country’s sweeping Vision 2030 agenda. The stated ambition is to top 1,000 metres and, with that, take back the “world’s tallest building” crown from Dubai in emphatic fashion. To put the scale in perspective, it’s about three Eiffel Towers stacked one above another, or roughly double the height of the Empire State Building.

Initial renderings showed a smooth, tapering spire wrapped in shimmering glass near the Red Sea coastline. Work advanced to around 250 metres before the project stalled, leaving behind a strange, truncated stump that came to represent ambitions put on hold. The revival turns that partly built core into something very different: a test site for extreme construction. The goal is not only to secure a record. Saudi decision-makers are chasing a vertical emblem-an unmistakable signal of a new chapter in tourism, commerce, and soft power-visible for miles through the desert haze.

Planners will privately concede that very tall towers often fail a traditional business case. They cost vast sums, they carry outsized risk, and they demand extraordinary coordination. Still, nations keep building them. The reason is simple: height tells a story. A one‑kilometre skyscraper broadcasts a message to investors, visitors, and competing cities-this place is confident, wealthy, and willing to stake big bets. Much as Burj Khalifa helped reposition Dubai, this tower is designed to pull attention towards Saudi Arabia’s west coast and to extend the kingdom’s reinvention beyond oil infrastructure and pilgrimage corridors. In an age captivated by digital spaces, there remains something almost instinctive about creating a physical giant you can actually see and touch.

Engineering a one‑kilometre leap into the future

Hitting 1,000 metres is not a matter of simply adding more storeys. With every extra metre, the forces acting on the structure compound. At those heights, wind behaves less like a breeze and more like a shifting, restless sea. Designers must shape the tower so gusts split and slide around it, rather than striking broad surfaces head-on. The current approach uses a slim, tri‑petal geometry that narrows as it rises, steering airflow to the sides instead of taking the full impact.

Below the desert surface, the foundations extend outward like an underground root system. Enormous piles are drilled deep, packed with steel and concrete, and then locked together with a foundation mat that is several metres thick. This buried platform stabilises the building as it moves-and it will move. Not violently, but enough that people in apartments or hotel rooms high up may notice a gentle, slow sway when conditions are windy.

At one kilometre, even the ordinary becomes complicated-starting with lifts. Conventional elevator systems cannot be extended indefinitely; cables become too heavy and journeys take too long. That means the building’s vertical transport must operate like a city network, complete with sky lobbies, transfer levels, and next-generation lift systems using lighter components or potentially rope‑less technologies. Getting people smoothly from street level to an observation area above 900 metres becomes as much a traffic-management puzzle as a mechanical one.

The proposal is not limited to a scenic viewpoint. The intention is a mixed-use “vertical neighbourhood”: a luxury hotel, premium flats, office space, leisure and entertainment floors, plus an observation deck likely to stop even frequent travellers in their tracks. If the full vision is delivered, the tower would underpin a broader Red Sea coastal development, with shopping, waterfront promenades, and residential areas spreading outwards in rings from the base.

The figures reveal a harsher reality. Early projections put the tower alone at more than US$1.2 billion, excluding surrounding infrastructure and the wider district. The repeated pauses and restarts have already lengthened schedules and increased costs. Even so, the Public Investment Fund has formidable resources, and the country often plans on decade-long horizons rather than quarterly results. The wager is that a single, spectacular landmark can draw in overseas money, encourage new airline routes, and entice global brands eager to display themselves on the highest billboard on Earth.

Opponents and sceptics push back with pointed concerns. Who, in practice, will choose to live and work at such heights? How much power will it require in a region already wrestling with intense heat? And what does it say to invest billions in a mega‑tower while many Saudis deal with everyday pressures such as housing costs and secure employment? Skyscrapers are never truly isolated from what surrounds them. They reflect the priorities-and the oversights-of the societies that pay for them. The one‑kilometre ambition forces the kingdom, and everyone observing it, to face the pull between spectacle and substance.

What this 1km tower really means for the rest of us

You might never travel to Saudi Arabia, and you may certainly never step into a lift bound for the 160th floor. Yet ventures like this influence how cities develop far beyond their borders. Designers across Europe, Asia, and the Americas are already analysing the Jeddah plans and applying what they learn to smaller, more workable towers. High-strength concrete formulations, aerodynamic exterior skins, advanced damping systems-innovations tested at the extremes often reappear later in ordinary offices and homes worldwide.

There is also the question of imagination. A one‑kilometre tower alters our shared sense of what is achievable. Once images and TikTok videos circulate from an observation deck so high it feels unreal, our mental definition of “tall” will shift. Travellers who grew up with Burj Khalifa as the default background will have a new destination to chase. Meanwhile, city promoters-from Jakarta to Lagos-will be watching closely, deciding whether to compete on height or to find a different way to stand out.

At street level, it also nudges global debate about climate resilience. A gigantic tower in a hot, coastal setting has to address heat control, water demand, and storm durability. Smart façades that cut solar gain, sophisticated glazing, and integrated shading solutions will not remain exclusive to Saudi Arabia. They are likely to influence building regulations and green-rating schemes internationally, including for mid-rise housing. Let’s be honest: nobody reads technical standards for pleasure, but the materials and systems trialled here may quietly appear in your next workplace, a future hotel room, or even your own block of flats.

Urban psychologists add a more human dimension. A city dominated by a one‑kilometre landmark can feel different to live in. For some, extreme height and density can provoke unease; for others, it creates excitement-a sense of being connected to something bigger. When visitors step onto the viewing deck and look down across the Red Sea coast, they will see expressways, mega‑malls, and clustered neighbourhoods laid out like circuitry on a motherboard. The image reinforces a fast, tech‑driven idea of modern life. Most people have felt a version of it: looking down from an aircraft window at tiny streets and moving headlights, then wondering what all those days are really for.

Behind the spectacle sits a quiet competition. Dubai has enjoyed tourism bragging rights for more than a decade thanks to Burj Khalifa. Shanghai Tower gave China a potent urban symbol. Saudi Arabia is now pursuing its own vertical flag, aligned with Neom, The Line, and other headline-friendly schemes. Across the region it is part partnership and part rivalry. Airlines fight for routes and stopovers. Property and investment funds weigh returns. Young people throughout the Gulf scroll past these skylines on Instagram and decide where they might want to study or build a career.

For all its drama, the project also throws inequality into relief. A penthouse near the clouds is likely to cost more than many people will earn in their entire lives. Yet the service staff, maintenance workers, and construction teams who make that view possible may live in far more modest conditions, largely out of sight. The one‑kilometre milestone does not close that divide; it makes it more visible. Some Saudi commentators are already calling for a more balanced approach-public transport, affordable homes, and green public spaces-rather than concentrating so much prestige in one slim line of glass and steel.

“Super-tall towers are less about floor space and more about storytelling,” notes one Middle East-based urban economist. “When a country builds one, it’s really writing a message to the world – and to its own people – about who it wants to be.”

For anyone following from outside the region, three recurring questions tend to surface:

• How will this reshape the global list of must‑visit cities over the next 10–15 years?
• Will the height race accelerate genuinely sustainable materials-or just produce more vanity builds?
• What kind of day-to-day life are we creating when more of it happens 300, 600, 900 metres above ground?

A new skyline, a new story – but whose future is it?

Imagine the opening day: helicopters droning overhead, drones capturing sweeping shots, VIPs filing along a red carpet that looks insignificant against the tower’s sheer face. Social platforms fill with the same image-people leaning on glass, phones raised to the view, the Red Sea bending in the distance like a strip of metal. For weeks, perhaps months, the world points in the same direction and reaches for the same reaction: “Wow.” Then routine returns.

Long after the initial buzz disappears, someone will start a dawn shift in a café on the 40th floor, grinding coffee as the city stirs below. A cleaner will polish fingerprints from a railing on a viewing platform at 850 metres. A security guard will watch tourists stream past in a steady flow, their expressions blending into one long river of brief astonishment. What feels extraordinary to visitors eventually becomes normal to the people keeping it running.

That is where the one‑kilometre ambition stops being a headline statistic and turns into a more demanding question: what future are we creating when national pride, engineering brilliance, and vast wealth converge on a single vertical stroke against the sky? To some, it will stand for possibility and momentum. To others, it will read as a monument to excess at a time of climate pressure and social strain.

Skyscrapers have always polarised opinion. New York’s Empire State Building was once derided in the 1930s as the “Empty State”, only to become an adored landmark. Kuala Lumpur’s Petronas Towers shifted from corporate showmanship to a national emblem. Burj Khalifa began as a daring gamble and ended up on billions of smartphone lock screens. This Saudi tower is likely to follow a comparable path: disputed, then accepted; doubted, then photographed; debated, then familiar.

Whether you celebrate it or challenge it, a one‑kilometre skyscraper refuses to fade into the background. It cuts into the sky-and it cuts through public opinion too. Perhaps that is the deeper force of such projects: they compel arguments about progress, identity, and what we choose to honour as a species. Not everyone gets to influence where the next record-holder is built. Everyone, however, can decide what that height represents to them.

Key point	Detail	Why it matters to readers
Record-breaking height	Target of 1,000+ metres, surpassing Burj Khalifa and Shanghai Tower	Helps you understand how this project could reorder the global skyline hierarchy
Engineering experiment	New solutions for wind, foundations, elevators, and heat management	Shows how leading-edge technology from this tower may influence future buildings near you
Symbolic power	Key piece of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 and urban brand strategy	Adds context to arguments about ambition, inequality, and what “progress” looks like today

FAQ:

• Will this Saudi tower really be taller than Burj Khalifa? Yes. The revived Jeddah Tower project is intended to exceed 1,000 metres, which would put it well above Burj Khalifa’s 828 metres and give it the “world’s tallest building” title if it is completed as planned.
• When is the one‑kilometre tower expected to be finished? There is still no confirmed public completion date. After a long pause, contracts and on-site work are restarting, but the schedule will depend on funding, logistics, and any updates to the design.
• What will be inside the skyscraper? Plans describe a mix of luxury hotel accommodation, high-end apartments, office space, observation decks, and leisure areas-more of a vertical mini‑city than a single-purpose office tower.
• Is the project environmentally sustainable? The design is said to include energy‑efficient façades and systems, but any one‑kilometre tower in a hot climate prompts serious concerns about energy demand, cooling requirements, and long-term sustainability.
• Why should someone outside Saudi Arabia care about this tower? Because ultra-tall construction often drives breakthroughs in materials, design, and building standards that later filter into everyday buildings worldwide, from commercial towers to residential high-rises.

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