Atmospheric water generators (AWGs) sound like magic: machines that can pull drinking water out of air. The idea is mentioned in the Bible, where the elders would pray for water collected as dew on plants and the catch on turning this into a machine is in the physics. To turn invisible vapor into liquid, you must remove heat, especially the latent heat of condensation. In real machines, that usually means refrigeration (cooling air below its dew point) or heating/desorbing moisture from sorbents. Either way, energy use rises fast as humidity drops. While many solutions exist on the market, the solutions aren’t magic. Too much energy needs to go into the AWG machines to make the water from thin air concept work.

Peer-reviewed assessments put many active AWGs in the rough range of ~0.35 to >1.1 kWh per liter depending on climate and design see this paper. A broader scientific review of atmospheric water harvesting thermodynamics estimates maximum yields around 0.34 to0.73 L/kWh under various assumptions, equivalent to roughly ~1.4 to 2.9 kWh per liter in the “best case” envelope. See PNIH resource. Lab and field results can be lower or higher depending on temperature, humidity, airflow, and heat exchange losses.

The core problems of AWG, water from air generators

• Low humidity = tiny water per cubic meter of air. The drier the air, the more air you must process to get a liter, which means bigger fans, larger heat exchangers, and more power.
• Cooling penalty. Condensation-based AWGs must cool air below dew point; that’s energy-intensive, especially in hot-dry regions where dew point can be very low.
• Heat management. You must dump heat to the environment (or recover it). Poor heat rejection and frosting risks can crater performance.
• Water quality isn’t “free.” Collected water still needs filtration/UV/mineralization and safe storage, adding energy and maintenance.

So how can AWGs be solved?

The most promising pathways don’t “beat physics” — they change the system boundary:

• Use low-grade heat or solar thermal to regenerate sorbents instead of running compressors. MOF-based devices have shown solar-driven harvesting in arid climates (Kim et al., in this 2018 Nature article).
• Hybridize with HVAC/dehumidification you already pay for to run. If a building must remove humidity anyway, capturing and polishing that water can be “incremental” rather than “extra.” While it might not run showers, the water can be used to water gardens or flush toilets. See our article on top uses for AC water.
• Raise efficiency via better sorbents + heat recovery. New cycling strategies and materials aim to cut regeneration energy and speed cycles (Kang et al., 2024).
• Target the right use cases. Emergency backup, remote sites, islands, and places where trucking water is expensive can justify higher kWh/L.

10 promising companies in the AWG space

1. SOURCE Global (solar “hydropanels”) — promising for off-grid drinking water where sunlight is abundant (SOURCE how it works).
2. Watergen — large deployments and claimed efficiency improvements; best fit in warm/humid conditions. See our past article on Watergen.
3. Genesis Systems — containerized systems positioned for disaster resilience and humid climates.
4. Aquaria — scaling “water from the sky” for housing developments; success depends on cost per liter vs local supply (Time on Aquaria).
5. Skysource / Skywater Alliance (WEDEW) — notable for renewable-energy framing and resilience applications (XPRIZE profile).
6. AirJoule — one to watch if real-world data confirms lower energy via novel separation/recovery approaches (AirJoule investor deck).

   

7. Uravu Labs — interesting liquid-desiccant path tied to renewables and local bottling models (Mongabay India).
8. Kara Water — consumer appliances; compelling product story, but energy economics must be transparent (Kara Water).
9. EcoloBlue — long-running commercial/home units; performance varies heavily with climate (EcoloBlue specs).
10. WaHa from Saudi Arabia is positioning around “water + dry air” and grid-independent operation; worth watching for verified field performance (WaHa). Professor Omar Yaghi, a distinguished chemist from the University of California, Berkeley, and pioneer of reticular chemistry (inventor of Metal-Organic Frameworks/MOFs). Born in Jordan and working in California, he was awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, shared with Richard Robson and Susumu Kitagawa, for this work. Waha is active in Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

    

    

AWGs are rarely the cheapest way to make water where pipelines, wells, or desalination are available. They are commonly used by armies to create water in remote locations where energy isn’t an issue. Diesel or solar does the heavy lifting. But as materials improve, and as systems tap waste heat, solar thermal, or existing dehumidification loads, AWGs can become a practical niche tool, especially for resilient, point-of-use drinking water in the places that need it most in off-grid sites and in emergency settings.

Let’s aim for the day when fusion energy is real, and we can all pull water from the air to drink. Just add some Mayu minerals to make the water work well for your body.

The post What are AWG air-water generators, and why they aren’t a golden-bullet solution (yet) appeared first on Green Prophet.

Jordan, which has long received a lion’s share of USAID for survival, and which receives $1.5 billion USD every year to help with water and basic needs, is one of the poorest countries and most water-scarce countries on Earth. In parts of Amman, the most unwalkable city on the planet, households still receive municipal water only once a week. You order a truck and a you pay $50 or so for the company to fill up your water tank. If you are lucky, you build 2 or 3 tanks so you can be sure about your next shower.

National renewable freshwater availability stands at well under 100 cubic meters per person annually, which is far below the international benchmark for “absolute scarcity.” And Jordan has started building itself as a greenhouse and agriculture center of the region.

Now Jordan is advancing one of the the largest infrastructure project in its history: the Aqaba–Amman Water Desalination and Conveyance Project. The plan links a massive Red Sea desalination plant to a 450-kilometer pipeline that will transport water north to the capital. An original plan over the years was the Red Dead Canal, a partnership with Israel. But after decades of inaction from both sides, they want to do it alone if they can pull off the billions in financing needed.

In 2025, the Jordanian government signed agreements with a consortium led by Meridiam and SUEZ, alongside VINCI Construction and Orascom Construction. Under a 30-year concession agreement, the consortium will design, build, finance, operate, and maintain the system before transferring it back to the Jordanian government. The total investment is estimated at approximately $6 billion USD.

What the Desalination Project Will Deliver

At full capacity, the system is expected to supply 300 million cubic meters of desalinated water per year, covering roughly one-third to 40% of Jordan’s drinking water demand.

The system includes:

• A large reverse osmosis desalination plant near Aqaba on the Red Sea
• A 300-mile conveyance pipeline to Amman
• High-capacity pumping stations lifting water more than 1,000 meters in elevation
• Expanded storage infrastructure in the Amman region

The plant’s projected output — about 800,000 to 850,000 cubic meters per day — would make it one of the largest seawater reverse osmosis facilities in the world. Saudi Arabia, which borders Jordan, currently runs the largest desalination plant in the world, a title taken from Israel not long ago. Israel has long been a pioneer of membrane technology, which is the technology needed to separate salt and brine from the water.

According to SUEZ, the project “will significantly strengthen Jordan’s long-term water security while integrating environmental best practices in desalination.”

Who Will Profit from Jordan’s Water?

The financing structure is a public-private partnership. The consortium will raise a significant portion of the capital through a mix of private equity and project debt. Multilateral development banks are expected to participate, including institutions such as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the International Finance Corporation, alongside export credit agencies and commercial lenders.

Jordan’s government will ultimately purchase the water under long-term offtake agreements, creating predictable revenue streams for the concession holders over three decades.

That means: Infrastructure investors like Meridiam earn a stable, long-term return. SUEZ generates operating revenue from managing one of the region’s most strategic water assets. Construction giants VINCI Construction and Orascom Construction secure multi-billion-dollar engineering contracts. Lenders collect interest over the concession period. Jordan gains water security.

The question now is whether the financial model keeps water affordable for citizens while delivering returns to international investors? Locals I have spoke with found the cost of water to be negligible in their montly expenses, but will the costs increase going forward? In some countries the cost of water is free, and in others water is difficult to obtain, like on islands in Thailand where you can’t think of drinking tap water. Desalinated water is drinkable, as long as added minerals are put in place. Can Jordan do this?

Another option is for Jordan to strengthen trade with Saudi Arabia, which operates extensive desalination infrastructure along the Red Sea, producing over 3 billion cubic meters of water daily and accounting for nearly 50% of global desalination capacity. If the Vision 2030 ever comes to be, this is probably what will happen in reality.

The post Jordan’s $6 Billion Aqaba–Amman Desalination Project from the Red Sea Moves Forward appeared first on Green Prophet.

Neom, a bombastic collection of futuristic cities and resorts, has flopped as Saudi oil prices roll back reality. The Saudi plan of hosting the 2029 Asian games to be held at Trojena, a ski report in the desert, has been cancelled.

The 2029 Asian Winter Games were supposed to be Saudi Arabia’s big moment for tourism and Vision 2030, hosted at Trojena, the ambitious mountain ski resort being built inside the $500 billion Neom megaproject in the northwest desert. It would have been the first winter sporting event ever held in an Arab-speaking country, a remarkable geopolitical flex for a nation with essentially no winter sports tradition and barely any snow. (Read here about Snowmax and the dangers of artificial snow).

The Olympic Council of Asia announced the games would be postponed last month, and within days announced they would instead move to Almaty, Kazakhstan. Al Arabiya Gulf News gave no reason for the change, but the context is hard to ignore.

With oil prices down, Saudi Arabia is in fiscal trouble, and oil is the core of the problem. The kingdom’s budget deficit widened in the fourth quarter of 2025 to its highest level in five years, as lower oil prices squeezed government finances, according to Arab News.

Saudi Arabia needs crude at around $91 a barrel to balance its budget, but prices have been stuck in the low $60s for months Securities Finance Times, a gap of nearly 30% between the dream and reality.

That gap is starting to show in the kingdom’s grand ambitions of building The Mile, a 15-minute city on the Red Sea.

Saudi officials have signaled a pivot to “wiser” spending, and the government has made clear it will not hesitate to walk away from costly projects that no longer fit its priorities.

Trojena, which was already facing significant construction delays and had missed its original 2026 completion target, appears to be one casualty of that reckoning along with The Line.

Saudi officials have been quietly reviewing some of the biggest Vision 2030 projects and though they are not canceling them outright, they are stretching timelines and trimming scope.

Almaty, by contrast mades sense. Kazakhstan previously hosted the 2011 Asian Winter Games and the 2017 Winter Universiade, so the infrastructure is already there.

For Saudi Arabia, losing the games is more than a sporting embarrassment. It’s a signal that Vision 2030’s most spectacular promises: a ski resort in the desert, a linear city in the wilderness, a new Las Vegas on the Red Sea were always contingent on oil staying expensive. And one by one, reality is doing the editing that ambition refused to do. If Americans pull through on fusion (see Xcimer), OPEC oil will be over.

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In a nondescript facility in Denver, a small team of physicist-engineers is attempting something that sounds like science fiction: igniting a miniature star on Earth. (See how China came close to making an artificial sun).

If they pull it off, the consequences would ripple across every corner of the global economy, and nowhere more dramatically than Saudi Arabia and the oil-rich kingdoms of the Middle East.

Xcimer Energy, founded in 2022 by Conner Galloway and Alexander Valys, is betting that powerful ultraviolet lasers can crack the fusion puzzle that have eluded scientists for 70 years. Green Prophet’s scientist Brian explains fusion and what makes it so hard here.

The premise behind Xcimer is simple even if the physics is anything but: fuse light atoms together the way the sun does, release enormous amounts of energy, and do it without carbon emissions, without meltdown risk, and without the mountains of radioactive waste that plague conventional nuclear power. Clean, dense, effectively limitless energy which is the holy grail of human civilization. With fusion we could run air conditioners all day and all night. We could live well on the equator or run our heaters in the arctic and enjoy limitless travels to space.

What makes Xcimer genuinely different from the fusion experiments that have come before is its choice of laser technology. Rather than the expensive solid-state systems used at the US National Ignition Facility, which achieved a landmark ignition milestone in 2022 but at staggering cost, Xcimer uses krypton-fluoride excimer lasers, borrowed from semiconductor manufacturing.

These deliver high-efficiency ultraviolet pulses at a fraction of the price, and in 2025 the company completed the first privately funded excimer fusion laser of its kind built in over two decades. That’s not a press release milestone. That’s real hardware.

“We’ve already begun using Xcimer’s LPK experimental testbed to validate laser models and inform the design of our future systems,” said Conner Galloway, CEO and Chief Science Officer of Xcimer. “This milestone also sends the strongest signal yet that the private sector can build on decades of public investment to turn transformative research into commercially viable systems. We’ve seen this transition before in industries like space—and we’re beginning to see it happen in fusion.”

The roadmap is ambitious but structured. A Phoenix laser system in 2026 will validate the core physics. A Vulcan facility around 2030 aims to cross the holy grail of breakeven, which is producing more energy from fusion than was put in.

Xcimer is already taking proposals on prospective new sites nationwide to house Vulcan, which would directly employ hundreds of people in a large variety of jobs, including physicists, technicians, and support staff.

Vulcan’s location could pave the way for a future regional source of zero-carbon energy expertise, making the location attractive to more emerging businesses such as artificial intelligence and software companies, robotics manufacturers, and medical research facilities. 

By the mid-2030s, Xcimer envisions a prototype power plant delivering electricity to the grid at roughly $40 per megawatt-hour, competitive with natural gas and cheaper than most new coal. That’s when things start to get fun. Just like in solar. Every year the cost for producing solar goes down.

The US Department of Energy has already selected Xcimer as one of eight companies in its fusion commercialization program, lending the venture both credibility and critical public-private backing.

Now consider what this means for Saudi Arabia, and by extension the entire OPEC architecture that has shaped global geopolitics and which has supported a whole lot of evil and terrorism for half a century. The Muslim Brotherhood was born in Saudi Arabia and Iran-mullahs run on oil feeding terror operatives money in Lebanon, Gaza and Yemen. Unlike the UAE which has diversified, the Saudi economy runs on one thing: the world’s insatiable need for oil.

Renewable energy has already begun chipping at that foundation, and oil prices are dowb, but OPEC countries know that solar and wind have an Achilles heel because they are intermittent energy sources.

“We use the same approach as America’s National Ignition Facility – the only system in the world to demonstrate fusion ignition. We don’t need to spend time and money to demonstrate unproven plasma confinement physics; we combine NIF’s proven inertial confinement fusion approach with breakthrough laser technology. We’re driving down cost and complexity so we can deliver electricity on a pragmatic timeline and business model.”

Batteries help, but not enough. Fusion has no such weakness. It runs continuously, day and night, in any weather, in any country. A fusion-powered world wouldn’t just reduce demand for oil; it would collapse it entirely.

The leverage that petrostates have wielded for decades, over energy prices, over foreign policy, over global inflation, over terrorism, evaporates the moment civilization has access to a cheaper, cleaner, inexhaustible alternative.

Xcimer has raised just over $111 million from leading energy investors since its founding in 2022. It’s part of the DOE Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program, a highly competitive public-private partnership program designed to accelerate the development of fusion energy on the power grid. Xcimer was awarded $9 million, one of the most significant awards under the program’s first budget period.

Xcimer also collaborates with Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Savannah River National Laboratory, Naval Research Laboratory, Laboratory for Laser Energetics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, General Atomics and Westinghouse. 

::Xcimer

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Every day, the Middle East’s desalination industry produces more brine than freshwater. Aquifers are drying up and becoming full of brine. Companies like Iyris claim to be able to farm on brackish water, solving part of the problem of access to freshwater. But a a small Saudi startup has found a solution to the problem inside the problem itself.

The math of desalination has long been troubling. Its energy-intensive and polluting. For every gallon of water pulled from the sea, a typical reverse osmosis plant discharges roughly 1.5 times the among of concentrated, chemically laden brine back into the ocean. Multiply that across the Middle East and North Africa, which is the region responsible for more than half of the world’s desalination output, and the scale of brine becomes alarming.

Global brine discharge now exceeds 140 million cubic meters per day, according to a 2019 UN-backed study, with Saudi Arabia alone accounting for 22 percent of the world’s total, according to a UN University Institute for Water study. The Arabian Gulf, already naturally one of the saltiest bodies of water on earth at 45 grams of salt per liter compared to a global ocean average nearer 35, is absorbing the consequences.

Into this problem has stepped Qalzam, a Saudi startup with a counterintuitive proposition: the brine is not the problem. It is the raw material.

Founded in Riyadh and incubated at the Saudi Water Innovation Center (SWIC), Qalzam has developed a process to extract sodium hypochlorite (the active compound in chlorine disinfectant) directly from the waste brine produced by reverse osmosis plants. That sodium hypochlorite is then fed straight back into the same plant to disinfect the freshwater it has just produced, closing what Qalzam describes as a circular loop within the desalination process itself. In conventional plants, sodium hypochlorite must be manufactured separately, transported to site, and purchased as a chemical input.

Qalzam eliminates all three steps simultaneously.

The chemistry is not new. Sodium hypochlorite can be generated electrochemically from saline solutions, which is a process long understood in laboratory settings and applied at small scales in wastewater treatment. What Qalzam is engineering is the industrial translation of that process specifically for the high-salinity, high-volume conditions of Gulf desalination, where brine concentrations are substantially higher than those seen elsewhere in the world, and where the scale of operations can make even marginal improvements in cost or chemistry enormously significant.

“The chemicals should be all neutralized,” said Noreddine Ghaffour, a research professor at the Water Desalination and Reuse Center at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), speaking about brine management at Saudi desalination plants more broadly. His comment reflects a growing scientific and regulatory consensus: the era of dumping chemically complex brine into already-stressed marine environments is approaching its limits.

The timing is propitious. Saudi Arabia has positioned itself as a global leader in desalination capacity, doubling its output in recent years and announcing $9.33 billion across 60 new projects in its latest expansion.

The Saudi Water Partnership Company is targeting a near-tripling of national desalination capacity to 7.5 million cubic meters per day by 2027. Each new plant that comes online represents both a new source of brine and a potential customer for Qalzam’s on-sitewater

disinfectant solution. The startup has also graduated from Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Industry and Mineral Resources’ “Numuw” industrial incubator and accelerator program, giving it institutional credibility at a formative stage.

The wider scientific case for brine valorization is strengthening rapidly. Research published in the journal Water in November 2025 modeled a 100,000-cubic-meter-per-day reverse osmosis facility and found that a sequential brine recovery process could achieve over 90 percent total salt recovery while producing marketable materials including sodium chloride, magnesium hydroxide, and bromine.

The estimated revenue from recovered materials in such scenarios ranges between $4.5 million and $6.8 million per year, potentially offsetting 65 to 90 percent of annual desalination operating costs, with a payback period of three to five years.

Qalzam’s narrower focus on sodium hypochlorite extraction and reuse sits within this broader economic logic but is considerably simpler to implement, requiring no complex mineral separation trains or crystallization equipment. This matters because complexity has consistently been the enemy of adoption in industrial water treatment. The technologies that scale are typically those that integrate cleanly into existing infrastructure rather than requiring its wholesale redesign. A bolt-on electrochemical unit that converts waste brine into a disinfectant that the plant already needs is, in engineering terms, a much easier sell than a full brine-mining operation requiring downstream chemical processing and commodity markets for the outputs.

Beyond the economics, the environmental calculus is straightforward. Saudi Arabia’s Gulf coastline is already under documented ecological stress from brine discharge, with dense, oxygen-depleted plumes affecting benthic marine life near major outfalls. Over in the Red Sea, dolphins, coral reef and at-risk species cannot tolerate more stress on the already noisy and polluted shipping areas.

Any technology that reduces both the volume and chemical load of that discharge addresses a concern that regulators, ecologists, and increasingly the operators themselves recognize as unsustainable at the scale to which the region is building.

Qalzam is still early-stage, with its team small and its first commercial deployments ahead of it. But the company sits at the intersection of three converging forces: a region building desalination capacity at a pace unmatched anywhere on earth (despite the scaling back of Saudis’ Vision 2030 with lowering prices of oil), a scientific community that has spent a decade documenting the harms of brine disposal, and a policy environment.

Saudi Vision 2030 and the UAE’s Net Zero 2050 strategy incentivize circular economy approaches to industrial water management.

The Middle East did not choose to become the world’s desalination laboratory. Geography and hydrology made that decision for it. But the region’s sheer scale of operations means that solutions proven here, including whatever Qalzam refines on the shores of the Gulf, will be exportable to every water-stressed coast on the planet.

Red Sea Farms (now Iyris) who we interviewed here, is a separate but thematically related KAUST spinout worth contextualizing alongside Qalzam, not as partners, but as parallel examples of Saudi water innovation coming out of the same university ecosystem.

Not far away, with Jordan between them, Israel’s IDE Technologies, founded in 1965 and headquartered in Kadima-Zoran, built the Sorek desalination plant south of Tel Aviv, which for years was the largest seawater reverse osmosis desalination facility on earth, producing 624,000 cubic meters of drinking water per day and supplying roughly 20 percent of Israel’s municipal water demand.

Today, desalination supplies over 70 percent of Israel’s domestic water consumption, a figure that has effectively drought-proofed a country that receives less than 200 millimeters of rainfall annually across much of its territory.

::Qalzam

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Between 1840 and 1907, tens of thousands of one-humped dromedary camels (Camelus dromedarius) were imported into Australia to help with inland transport and exploration. Estimates range from about 10,000 to 20,000 animals brought into the country in that period.

The very first camel brought into Australia arrived in 1840, shipped from the Canary Islands; only one of that small group survived the voyage. This camel was named Harry.

But over the years the camel population grew to a point where they have become a nuisance. Australia is home to the world’s biggest feral camel population to the point they are considered a pest. There about one million roaming in the outback, damaging ecosystems.

To ease the burden, some countries are happy to take camels, as in this flight of camels headed on a plane to Saudi Arabia.

Quick facts about camels:

Camels are choking and dying from plastics in Dubai

Camel milk is considered superior to cow milk for many reasons. Here are 6.

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Fashion’s next material revolution may not come from a lab in Paris or Milan — but from the tides of the Red Sea. Along Saudi Arabia’s coastline, scientists, designers, and textile innovators are transforming Sargassum seaweed into a wearable fabric, turning a fast-growing marine biomass into a new generation of sustainable textile. The initiative, led by KAUST Beacon Development in collaboration with the Saudi Fashion Commission and PYRATEX, is part of a broader effort to rethink how fashion sources its raw materials.

The project was recently presented as the Red Sea Seaweed Textile, demonstrating how locally sourced algae can be converted into blended yarns and finished garments. Stella McCartney does it. So why not Saudis?

“This material represents a milestone in our mission to build a future-focused, sustainable fashion ecosystem in Saudi Arabia. It demonstrates how local resources, scientific excellence, and creative talent can come together to deliver solutions for the global fashion industry,” said Burak Çakmak, CEO of the Saudi Fashion Commission.

KAUST’s role has been central. Its marine scientists studied the biochemical structure of Red Sea seaweed and developed responsible harvesting methods that preserve both the ecosystem and the algae’s functional properties.

An abaya made from seaweed?

“By researching the biochemical properties of Red Sea seaweed, we were able to integrate local algae species into an innovative blended yarn,” said Fiona Symes, COO of KAUST Beacon Development.

PYRATEX  then translated that biomass into textile form, blending the algae with Lyocell and organic cotton to produce a fabric that is breathable, traceable, and suitable for garment production. The Saudi Fashion Commission’s development studio produced complete garments from the material — not as conceptual pieces, but as real clothing.

Saudi Arabia’s fashion scene has been showing dynamic evolution. Recent runway shows in the Kingdom featured bathing suits in a historically very modest country.

These shows reflect a larger shift in how fashion in the Middle East engages global trends while honoring local sensibilities — moving beyond traditional expectations to embrace broader stylistic expressions that include functional, climate-appropriate swimwear alongside couture and everyday wear.

The seaweed fabric project reflects a growing shift across the fashion world. Designers such as Stella McCartney have long argued that sustainability cannot rely only on recycled synthetics or reduced harm. McCartney has repeatedly called for materials that are regenerative, ethical, and transparent — fibers that restore ecosystems rather than merely slow damage.

Luxury and performance brands alike are now experimenting with algae, mycelium, pineapple fiber, cactus leather, and agricultural waste. But what makes the Red Sea initiative distinctive is its regional grounding: a local marine resource transformed locally, with scientific validation and design integration.

Fashion is one of the most environmentally demanding industries on Earth, responsible for heavy water use, chemical pollution, and carbon emissions. Changing fabrics may seem small, but materials determine supply chains, farming practices, and waste streams.

Seaweed offers a radically different model. It grows without freshwater irrigation, fertilizers, or farmland. It absorbs carbon and regenerates rapidly. It does not compete with food systems. And it invites coastal stewardship rather than land exploitation.

For Saudi Arabia, this project also signals a broader narrative shift. The Kingdom is increasingly positioning itself not only as an energy producer, but as a knowledge and innovation economy — where science, sustainability, and culture intersect.

For fashion, the message is equally clear: the future of luxury will not be defined only by design houses, but by material intelligence. Garments made from seaweed may not replace cotton or polyester tomorrow. But they challenge designers, investors, and consumers to imagine clothing that begins in ecosystems rather than factories.

As Stella McCartney and other sustainability leaders have shown, fashion does not change when trends shift. It changes when materials do.

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Dreaming big is good. It gives us something to strive for. But calling failed projects sustainable from the outset is pitfall that architects should avoid. For years, Saudi Arabia’s vision for The Line — a 120-mile mirrored city slicing through the desert — was marketed as the future of sustainable urban living. No cars. No emissions. Everything within five minutes. A climate-friendly city built from scratch.

But as a sweeping investigation by the Financial Times now documents, The Line has collided head-on with something no amount of ambition can override: physics, finance, and ecological reality.

According to the FT’s reporting, based on interviews with more than 20 former architects, engineers, and executives, the project unravelled under the weight of its own contradictions. They spoke anonymously for fears of lawsuits. A quick digging into PR and you can find which ones readily took the money and tried to make the idiotic project come to life. Costs for the “eco” city ballooned into the trillions, engineering assumptions failed the most basic stress tests, and foreign investment never arrived at the scale Saudi planners expected.

One former architect recalled warning leadership that suspending a 30-storey structure upside-down above a marina could turn it into a “pendulum” — swaying, accelerating, and eventually failing by dropping into the marina. Another described sewage systems that required hundreds of shuttle cars to move waste uphill because gravity no longer worked in a vertical fantasy city. Even flushing a toilet became a design problem. That’s what happens at Burj in the UAE where poop trucks need to unload the sewage daily.

At the center of The Line and the Neom project stood Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whose vision for Neom was intended to catapult the kingdom beyond oil and into a post-carbon future. Yet the investigation shows how dissent was discouraged, timelines were politically fixed, and feasibility studies were often replaced by renderings.

Green on the Surface, Fragile Underneath

From a climate perspective, the cracks run deeper. The FT reports that building just the first 20 modules of The Line would have required more cement annually than France produces, and up to 60% of global green steel capacity — a sobering reminder that “green” materials are not infinite. Cement is definitely not a sustainable building material. When a single project distorts global supply chains, sustainability claims begin to ring hollow.

Urban planners have long warned that megaprojects often fail not because of lack of technology, but because they ignore human behavior and ecological limits. The late urbanist Jane Jacobs famously argued that cities thrive through incremental complexity, not total control. The Line attempted the opposite: a sealed, pre-engineered world with no room for organic growth.

Ecologists raised additional alarms. Bird migration experts cited by BirdLife International flagged the mirrored wall as a potential mass-collision hazard for millions of birds moving along the East Africa–West Asia flyway — an issue that design tweaks like dotted glass could not realistically solve.

A Pattern We’ve Seen Before

This is not the first time a futuristic desert city promised sustainability and delivered disruption instead. From Egypt’s stalled administrative capital to past “eco-cities” in China that never filled with people, the lesson repeats: cities are living systems, not machines.

It’s a useful contrast to projects like Masdar’s eco-city experiment in Abu Dhabi, which has evolved in fits and starts over time—more incremental, less totalizing than a single, 120 mile gesture. Green Prophet covered Masdar early on, including its first 500 homes. We’ve been there, we’ve seen the spectacle.

The world needs more sustainable architects like Ronak Roshan who sees the location, the land, and the people.

The FT notes that Saudi Arabia has already spent over $50 billion, with much of the construction now slowed or paused. People already living in villages nearby have been killed, arrested for life, with a few on death row. What remains are colossal foundations, excavated deserts, displaced communities, and a scaled-down ambition that bears little resemblance to the original vision.

The failure of The Line is not a failure of imagination. It is a failure of restraint by western architects and planners who go along with the charade. Who is holding these firms accountable? This is actually a reasonable kind of project for the UN to take on and challenge.

Climate-resilient futures will not be built by single, monumental gestures, but by repairing existing cities, restoring ecosystems, and working with land rather than against it. The most sustainable city is rarely the one that looks most radical in a rendering.

As one urban expert quoted by the FT put it bluntly: “As a thought experiment, great. But don’t build thought experiments.

Related reading on Green Prophet:
• Saudi Arabia’s energy-water nexus meets Vision 2030 (NEOM and giga-project context)
• NEOM’s Aquellum and the weekly “fantasy” cycle of desert futurism
• A Middle East biodiversity corridor: birds helping Israel, Jordan, and Palestine cooperate

The post The Line’s 15 minute city failure and the limits of green futurism appeared first on Green Prophet.

Elon Musk has never been shy about grand declarations and funding Iranian dissidents, but his latest announcement landed with particular force in Washington last week. Standing beside Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Saudi Arabia’s communications minister Abdullah Alswaha, Musk revealed plans for a 500-megawatt xAI data center to be built in the Kingdom — a facility nearly twice the size of xAI’s Colossus 1 in Memphis.

Saudi Arabia is investing a trillion USD in the US economy and pulling companies over to Riyadh is part of the plan. This rivals Dubai which for the last 15 years has been the Middle East investment capital. Saudi Arabia normalizing with Israel and the New Middle East is taking the UAE example to diversify its economy when oil is no longer a viable business. It’s not a question if, it’s a question of when.

“It’s going to be one of the most powerful clusters ever built,” Musk said, adding that the project, developed with HUMAIN AI, represents “a massive leap forward for global computation.” HUMAIN AI, a newcomer created with backing from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, fueled by ARAMCO, Saudi’s oil company will anchor the joint venture.

As with most of the world’s current AI arms race, the beating heart of the center will be Nvidia chips, which have become the gold standard for training frontier models.

Huang, who has spent the year bouncing between Silicon Valley, Singapore, and the Gulf, announced a separate 100-megawatt data center for Amazon Web Services powered by Nvidia hardware. “This is just the beginning,” he said. “We’re aiming for gigawatt scale. The demand for accelerated computing is rising faster than any of us predicted.”

These kinds of deals can be run on solar power and possibly green hydrogen which Saudi Arabia is pioneering.

“Humanoid robots will be the biggest product ever,” Musk said: “Perhaps in the four or five-year time frame, the lowest-cost way to do AI compute will be with solar-powered AI satellites.”

All this unfolded one day after the U.S. and Saudi Arabia unveiled a Memorandum of Understanding on AI, designed to give the Kingdom access to advanced American systems while “protecting U.S. technology from foreign influence,” according to the White House. In diplomatic speak, that means Washington wants to ensure Riyadh remains on the Western tech grid rather than drifting toward Beijing’s orbit.

Related: Is your company investing in Riyadh or Dubai? 

Yet behind the spectacle lies a more grounded story: Saudi Arabia is betting its post-oil future on computation. The Kingdom has land, capital and political will — and it wants to become indispensable to the world’s AI supply chain.

Environmental analysts, however, are asking harder questions. A 500-megawatt data center is effectively a new industrial city. “Where is the clean power coming from?” “If this is fueled by oil or gas, it simply shifts the carbon problem upstream.”

Saudi officials insist renewable capacity is accelerating. The Kingdom has sunlight in abundance, and giga-scale construction and solar projects are rising across the desert and into the sea.

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Over the last month Saudi Arabia’s government-owned ACWA Power has signed roughly $10 billion in clean-energy and water-infrastructure agreements, stretching from the Gulf to Central Asia and Africa. On paper, it’s a renewables story as they erect gigawatt-scale solar farms, grid-scale batteries, and desalination plants powered by clean electricity. Development finance is flowing into emerging economies.  The deals were signed at the Future Investment Initiative (FII9) in Riyadh known as Davos of the Middle East.

But strip away the slick branding and this feels uncomfortably like a new-era greenwash: the same wealth built on hydrocarbons now deciding the fate of clean power. One truth remains — oil money is now one of the biggest buyers of renewable infrastructure on the planet.

Should we cheer or flinch? It’s a moral knot: the petro-economies that fueled climate breakdown are now financing the transition — selling the sickness and then the cure. If this is the price of decarbonization, it forces a reckoning. Who gets to build the future? And why do we trust the arsonists to run the fire brigade?

ACWA’s largest shareholder is the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia which is owned by Saudi Aramco. PIF’s finances come largely from oil revenue and Aramco dividends. Those petrodollars are now underwriting solar and wind farms abroad such as Uzbekistan’s vast steppe, North Africa’s desert grids, along with water-stressed coastlines from the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean.

For Africa, ACWA Power deepened its long-standing partnership with the International Finance Corporation (IFC) through two strategic agreements aimed at accelerating clean energy and water infrastructure deployment on the continent. The first Framework Agreement, valued at up to USD 1 billion, will provide project and corporate financing as well as capacity building and advisory support for ACWA Power’s growing portfolio across Africa.

This includes participation in the OPEC Fund for project financing, equity bridge loans, as well as equity investments support with USD 450 million as the initial target. “The agreement reflects the parties shared commitment to advancing utility-scale clean energy and water projects that drive inclusive, low-carbon growth across the developing world,” says ACWA, signaling its virtuousness as saving the world it is helping us destroy.

Saudi Arabia is modernizing, however, and this may open the monarchy up for criticism. Saudi Arabia let women drive in 2018, and this year users on social media showed how a Halloween party, considered haram by Muslims, was allowed to take place in Riyadh.

 

The country is scaling up for tourism and a culture shift by building megacity projects under the name of NEOM. Celebrities in favor of a great paycheck are already lining up to visit places like Shebara, a pristine island in the Red Sea built with no sustainability impact report.

This is not philanthropy but strategy. While Saudi Arabia can announce the “discovery” of a new oil reserve as a PR drill, consumers and oil importers will change loyalties the minute a university invents a way to create practical, unlimited, non-pollution energy.  Saudis, whose wealth knows no limits, are building stakes in a post-oil world, and they’re doing it faster and more decisively than many Western democracies whose politics have stalled climate spending.

In Washington, clean-energy capital flows through regulatory funnels and election cycles. In Riyadh, it’s sovereign mandate and execution, but it’s complex because Saudis do not have convention ambitions in size and scale of anything they create, with little concern for the environment except “on paper”. See The Line.

ACWA’s $10 billion announcement is about procurement, equipment orders, power-purchase frameworks, project finance. Meanwhile, the West is still arguing over heat pumps and carbon taxes. (Luckily Torus, connected to Warren Buffet’s company Berkshire Hathaway is putting practical energy in motion with a flywheel invention to stabilize the grid.)

There is a paradox here in every move ACWA and Aramco makes. Some call it green hypocrisy or hedging. But the more honest description is energy geopolitics moving into its next phase. Whoever builds and finances tomorrow’s grids will shape tomorrow’s trade routes, alliances, and dependencies — just as oil once did. So if you enjoy the west and your freedoms, fight for renewable energy independence by raising up and influencing projects and companies locally.

China understood this early through batteries, solar manufacturing, and Belt-and-Road transmission lines. Now the Gulf sovereigns have joined the board. They don’t want to be buyers of technology, but as builders and exporters of clean-power megaprojects.

The uncomfortable question is not whether oil money should fund renewables but maybe if anyone else can move this fast.

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