Neom skyscrapers spanning 105 miles may have hit a brickwall

Neom, the new ultra-rich city of Saudi Arabia, may be facing a shaky future as costs increase and sloppy construction setbacks climb up, as per reports by The Wall Street Journal.

Construction of its centrepiece, "The Line" was not going to be less difficult. The uber-ambitious pair of skyscrapers is expected to span 105 miles of the desert and is taller than the Empire State Building. The desert is also its western end terminating on the coast of the Red Sea.

Due to the astonishing costs, the staggering scale appears. According to WSJ, officially, Neom was budgeted at $500 billion, which is more than 50% of Saudi Arabia's federal budget.

However, those assumptions may have been too optimistic. Just the first 1.5 miles of the Line will be priced more than $100 billion, as per the employees working on the project and people known with the plans.

Moreover, the entire project is expected to easily clear $2 trillion, which is more than the GDP of Brazil.

"It's battling against the entire history of the way cities are founded and grow," John E Fernandez, professor in the department of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the WSJ.