Monitoring Saudi Arabia’s gigaprojects
9 April 2025
Saudi Arabia’s $850bn-plus series of giga- projects represent the world’s largest civil infrastructure engineering programme, covering the development of residential, industrial and tourism projects in the kingdom.
It includes Neom, which at $500bn is the world’s largest single project, as well as the Red Sea tourism project, residential and mixed-use developments Jeddah Central and Roshn, and entertainment schemes such as Qiddiya and The Rig.
The programme is the centrepiece of Vision 2030, aimed at transforming the kingdom into a tourism and entertainment hub while creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs.
Spending levels
There were $25bn of contract awards across the gigaprojects programme in 2024, a decline of about 24% when compared to the $33bn of awards recorded during 2023. The decline also meant that the 2024 total was about the same as the total value of awards achieved in 2022.
Despite the slowdown, there are still gigaprojects that have not yet been announced. This means the true total of the gigaprojects programme may be well in excess of a staggering $1tn.
While the pace of activity last year fell short of the strong growth that was expected as the gigaprojects move into the delivery phase, the growth in awards on these schemes in 2024 was still positive.
There were $25bn of contract awards across Saudi Arabia’s gigaprojects programme in 2024
The highlights for 2024 were a $4.7bn contract to build dams at the Trojena mountain resort that was won by Italy’s WeBuild, a $2bn contract won by a joint venture (JV) of local firm Albawani and Qatar’s Urbacon Trading & Contracting for the construction of assets in the Wadi Safar development of the Diriyah project in Riyadh, and a $1bn contract secured by a JV of Spanish firm FCC Construction and local firm Nesma & Partners to build the Prince Mohammed Bin Salman Stadium at the Qiddiya City project on the outskirts of Riyadh.
These awards appear to confirm the consensus in Saudi Arabia that the focus for development is on projects underpinned by events. These are Trojena, which will host the Asian Winter Games in 2029; stadiums for the Asian Cup in 2027 and the Fifa World Cup in 2034; along with Expo 2030 Riyadh and the Asian Games in 2034.
For more information and sample pages from MEED’s Saudi Gigaprojects – Q1 2025 updated premium intelligence report, please click here
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