Inside Saudi Arabia's Plans For Futuristic Smart City

The WSJ got its hands on 2,300 pages of confidential documents about Neom, Saudi Arabia's $500 billion plan to build a smart city-state on stilts.

Two years ago, Saudi Arabia laid out the Neom vision to diversify its oil revenue-dependent economy and enlisted a gaggle of BCG, McKinsey, and Oliver Wyman consultants to help. The desert megacity's wish list is plenty futuristic: flying taxis, robot maids, facial recognition, robot dinosaurs, AI-powered surveillance systems, and robot martial arts. Did I mention robots?

The bigger (and darker) picture

The Gulf states are early adopters, deploying new tech to juice up economies, lure foreign investment, and dazzle tourists. They're also eyeing AI and smart city technologies as a tool for surveillance and internal control. But those concerns and Saudi Arabia's poor human rights record haven't scared off Western investors, consultants, and SoftBank (the Saudis sank $45 billion into Vision Fund 1).

Neom's biggest roadblock: Cost overruns and funding drying up. Also, some of the requested technologies don't exist.