Satellite images show 'hidden marina' being built for Saudia Arabia's $2 trillion megacity
Satellite images show the construction of Saudi desert megacity Neom.
Among other things, they show the "Hidden Marina" being developed.
A new Business Insider documentary examines whether Saudi Arabia can realize its project plans.
Satellite images obtained by Business Insider show the 'Hidden Marina' being billed as the first residential phase in scaled-back plans for Saudi Arabia's futuristic Neom megacity.
The marina, set to cost $140 billion, is part of The Line, a 110-mile-long "vertical skyscraper" residential and commercial complex in the northwest of the country, which is set to be a centerpiece of Neom.
The Line is the world's largest construction project, a $2 trillion megacity cutting through the Saudi desert.
The entirety of The Line was originally scheduled to open by 2030, but the 1.5-mile Hidden Harbor is the only part likely to be ready by that date, according to a new Business Insider documentary.
BI's documentary investigates controversies over Neom's design and environmental plans, as well as human rights concerns.
Denis Hickey, NEOM's Chief Development Officer, told an event in Riyadh this month that planners envisage the "Hidden Harbor" as a futuristic 500-metre-tall mirrored structure.
Hickey said the marina will stretch for 1.5 miles and contain hotels, shops, schools, and residential units for around 200,000 people.
Rendered images released to Saudi media show a large entrance running under the mirrored facade to the marina complex. It resembles plans for the rest of The Line, which is envisaged as a 200-metre-wide, 500-metre-high mirrored structure.
"We have already deployed significant resources to lay the groundwork for this ambitious urban revolution," Hickey said.
Satellite images obtained by Business Insider show that while the "Hidden Marina" is taking shape, work on other parts of The Line is less advanced, and little exists of much of the rest of the project apart from earthworks.
Neom is a key part of Saudi Arabian ruler Mohammed bin Salman's ambitious plans to transform his country's economy, pivoting it away from fossil fuels toward technology, innovation, and tourism.
But even The Line has been significantly scaled back compared to the original plans, which was to house one million people by 2030.
Bloomberg reported last year that Saudi authorities had altered their medium-term plans for The Line as they encountered obstacles in finding the money necessary for the project.
Nadhmi al-Nasr, the project's chief executive, also left his position last year for unspecified reasons.
Neom is opening in phases, with a luxury yachting island resort, Sindalha, welcoming its first visitors last October.
Saudi Arabia also has ambitious plans to host the 2029 Asian Winter Games in Neom mountain resort Trojena, as well as World Cup 2034 games in a rooftop stadium that will be part of The Line.
Read the original article on Business Insider
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Business Insider
11 hours ago
- Business Insider
The future of AI will be governed by protocols no one has agreed on yet
The tech industry, much like everything else in the world, abides by certain rules. With the boom in personal computing came USB, a standard for transferring data between devices. With the rise of the internet came IP addresses, numerical labels that identify every device online. With the advent of email came SMTP, a framework for routing email across the internet. These are protocols — the invisible scaffolding of the digital realm — and with every technological shift, new ones emerge to govern how things communicate, interact, and operate. As the world enters an era shaped by AI, it will need to draw up new ones. But AI goes beyond the usual parameters of screens and code. It forces developers to rethink fundamental questions about how technological systems interact across the virtual and physical worlds. How will humans and AI coexist? How will AI systems engage with each other? And how will we define the protocols that manage a new age of intelligent systems? Across the industry, startups and tech giants alike are busy developing protocols to answer these questions. Some govern the present in which humans still largely control AI models. Others are building for a future in which AI has taken over a significant share of human labor. "Protocols are going to be this kind of standardized way of processing non-deterministic information," Antoni Gmitruk, the chief technology officer of Golf, which helps clients deploy remote servers aligned with Anthropic's Model Context Protocol, told BI. Agents, and AI in general, are "inherently non-deterministic in terms of what they do and how they behave." When AI behavior is difficult to predict, the best response is to imagine possibilities and test them through hypothetical scenarios. Here are a few that call for clear protocols. Scenario 1: Humans and AI, a dialogue of equals Games are one way to determine which protocols strike the right balance of power between AI and humans. In late 2024, a group of young cryptography experts launched Freysa, an AI agent that invites human users to manipulate it. The rules are unconventional: Make Freysa fall in love with you or agree to concede its funds, and the prize is yours. The prize pool grows with each failed attempt in a standoff between human intuition and machine logic. Freysa has caught the attention of big names in the tech industry, from Elon Musk, who called one of its games "interesting," to veteran venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. "The core technical thing we've done is enabled her to have her own private keys inside a trusted enclave," said one of the architects of Freysa, who spoke under the condition of anonymity to BI in a January interview. Secure enclaves are not new in the tech industry. They're used by companies from AWS to Microsoft as an extra layer of security to isolate sensitive data. In Freysa's case, the architect said they represent the first step toward creating a "sovereign agent." He defined that as an agent that can control its own private keys, access money, and evolve autonomously — the type of agent that will likely become ubiquitous. "Why are we doing it at this time? We're entering a phase where AI is getting just good enough that you can see the future, which is AI basically replacing your work, my work, all our work, and becoming economically productive as autonomous entities," the architect said. In this phase, they said Freysa helps answer a core question: "What does human involvement look like? And how do you have human co-governance over agents at scale?" In May, the The Block, a crypto news site, revealed that the company behind Freysa is Eternis AI. Eternis AI describes itself as an "applied AI lab focused on enabling digital twins for everyone, multi-agent coordination, and sovereign agent systems." The company has raised $30 million from investors, including Coinbase Ventures. Its co-founders are Srikar Varadaraj, Pratyush Ranjan Tiwari, Ken Li, and Augustinas Malinauskas. Scenario 2: To the current architects of intelligence Freysa establishes protocols in anticipation of a hypothetical future when humans and AI agents interact with similar levels of autonomy. The world, however, needs also to set rules for the present, where AI still remains a product of human design and intention. AI typically runs on the web and builds on existing protocols developed long before it, explained Davi Ottenheimer, a cybersecurity strategist who studies the intersection of technology, ethics, and human behavior, and is president of security consultancy flyingpenguin. "But it adds in this new element of intelligence, which is reasoning," he said, and we don't yet have protocols for reasoning. "I'm seeing this sort of hinted at in all of the news. Oh, they scanned every book that's ever been written and never asked if they could. Well, there was no protocol that said you can't scan that, right?" he said. There might not be protocols, but there are laws. OpenAI is facing a copyright lawsuit from the Authors Guild for training its models on data from "more than 100,000 published books" and then deleting the datasets. Meta considered buying the publishing house Simon & Schuster outright to gain access to published books. Tech giants have also resorted to tapping almost all of the consumer data available online from the content of public Google Docs and the relics of social media sites like Myspace and Friendster to train their AI models. Ottenheimer compared the current dash for data to the creation of ImageNet — the visual database that propelled computer vision, built by Mechanical Turk workers who scoured the internet for content. "They did a bunch of stuff that a protocol would have eliminated," he said. Scenario 3: How to take to each other As we move closer to a future where artificial general intelligence is a reality, we'll need protocols for how intelligent systems — from foundation models to agents — communicate with each other and the broader world. The leading AI companies have already launched new ones to pave the way. Anthropic, the maker of Claude, launched the Model Context Protocol, or MCP, in November 2024. It describes it as a "universal, open standard for connecting AI systems with data sources, replacing fragmented integrations with a single protocol." In April, Google launched Agent2Agent, a protocol that will "allow AI agents to communicate with each other, securely exchange information, and coordinate actions on top of various enterprise platforms or applications." These build on existing AI protocols, but address new challenges of scaling and interoperability that have become critical to AI adoption. So, managing their behavior is the "middle step before we unleash the full power of AGI and let them run around the world freely," he said. When we arrive at that point, Gmitruk said agents will no longer communicate through APIs but in natural language. They'll have unique identities, jobs even, and need to be verified. "How do we enable agents to communicate between each other, and not just being computer programs running somewhere on the server, but actually being some sort of existing entity that has its history, that has its kind of goals," Gmitruk said. It's still early to set standards for agent-to-agent communication, Gmitruk said. Earlier this year he and his team initially launched a company focused on building an authentication protocol for agents, but pivoted. "It was too early for agent-to-agent authentication," he told BI over LinkedIn. "Our overall vision is still the same -> there needs to be agent-native access to the conventional internet, but we just doubled down on MCP as this is more relevant at the stage of agents we're at." Does everything need a protocol? Definitely not. The AI boom marks a turning point, reviving debates over how knowledge is shared and monetized. McKinsey & Company calls it an "inflection point" in the fourth industrial revolution — a wave of change that it says began in the mid-2010s and spans the current era of "connectivity, advanced analytics, automation, and advanced-manufacturing technology." Moments like this raise a key question: How much innovation belongs to the public and how much to the market? Nowhere is that clearer than in the AI world's debate between the value of open-source and closed models. "I think we will see a lot of new protocols in the age of AI," Tiago Sada, the chief product officer at Tools for Humanity, the company building the technology behind Sam Altman's World. However, "I don't think everything should be a protocol." World is a protocol designed for a future in which humans will need to verify their identity at every turn. Sada said the goal of any protocol "should be like this open thing, like this open infrastructure that anyone can use," and is free from censorship or influence. At the same time, "one of the downsides of protocols is that they're sometimes slower to move," he said. "When's the last time email got a new feature? Or the internet? Protocols are open and inclusive, but they can be harder to monetize and innovate on," he said. "So in AI, yes — we'll see some things built as protocols, but a lot will still just be products."
Yahoo
13 hours ago
- Yahoo
I'm a Gen Zer who landed a 6-figure job at Morgan Stanley before graduation. Here's what the process was like — and why you should refresh a surprisingly important part of your résumé.
Sara Thomas, a University of Chicago student, secured a role at Morgan Stanley before graduation. She said networking, campus finance clubs, and an often overlooked resumé section helped her land the role. Gen Z continues to be attracted to Wall Street careers, despite the long hours and high demands. This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Sara Thomas, 22, a 2025 graduate from the University of Chicago and incoming investment banking analyst at Morgan Stanley. Business Insider's recent "Path to Wall Street" series highlighted how finance careers continue to attract young talent, despite the industry's long hours and demanding entry-level roles. Entry-level bankers typically earn about $110,000 a year, not including bonuses. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. I had barely decided on banking as a career choice when I had to start preparing for interviews. My experience was similar to most stories I've heard about the banking world: the recruiting process starts early. Before submitting my internship applications, I spoke to about five people at each major bank — mostly recent UChicago grads and people the university's career advancement program connected me with — so they would recognize my name when they saw my résumé. Cold LinkedIn messaging didn't work very well for me. Those introductions are often necessary to get an interview. At most banks, I interviewed for multiple rounds, including calls focused on my personality and technical skills and a two-hour "super day." The whole process lasted about two weeks. Then, by the spring of my sophomore year, I was done. I landed an internship at Morgan Stanley, and I knew my full-time job would be set as long as I got a return offer. My prior internships had been at Bain Capital and the Chicago-based firm Ariel Investments. The only other career trajectory I considered in college was academia. I studied economics and considered getting involved with economics research, but I realized it wasn't for me. I just work better in a faster-paced finance environment. In my free time at school, I tried to focus on clubs and internships that would keep me close to startups and entrepreneurship, so I joined a venture capital fund on campus. I was also involved in a campus group for women and minorities interested in finance and investing. Those opportunities really helped me build my industry chops. I would tell any college student hoping to land a Wall Street or Silicon Valley job: be decisive. Even if investment banking or consulting isn't your lifelong passion, plan to commit to a career path sooner rather than later, so that you can give yourself the most amount of time to prepare, network, and do really well in the interviews. And, for the application process, students need to be careful with what they put on their résumé — recruiters pay a lot of attention to the "skills and interests" section at the bottom. Don't say that you're a mountain climber if you have never climbed a mountain, because people will ask you about your hobbies, and you need to be able to genuinely talk about them. Of course, your credentials matter, but I've found that recruiters are most interested in meeting well-rounded people. Job applications and postgrad life make me anxious sometimes. I've leaned on my friends a lot: Some aren't going into finance, others have gone through recruiting alongside me. I'm also grateful for my family — my Morgan Stanley role will be in San Francisco, and it will be the first time I've moved far from home, since I grew up in Chicago. Exercise has always been a coping strategy for me, too. I'm trying to build healthy habits and make sure I don't isolate myself. Those are the main ways I'm dealing with stress. Long, long term, my biggest goal is to be able to work for myself in some way. That could mean working at a big company that gives me a lot of autonomy to make decisions or starting my own company, if I am brave enough to do that. For now, I'm excited to keep building my career and learning from my coworkers. Having engaging conversations with people you've never met can be the most challenging part of the finance industry, but it's also the most rewarding. Do you have a story to share? Contact this reporter at allisonkelly@ or via Signal at alliekelly.10; here's our guide to sharing information securely. Read the original article on Business Insider
Yahoo
13 hours ago
- Yahoo
I'm a Gen Zer who landed a 6-figure job at Morgan Stanley before graduation. Here's what the process was like — and why you should refresh a surprisingly important part of your résumé.
Sara Thomas, a University of Chicago student, secured a role at Morgan Stanley before graduation. She said networking, campus finance clubs, and an often overlooked resumé section helped her land the role. Gen Z continues to be attracted to Wall Street careers, despite the long hours and high demands. This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Sara Thomas, 22, a 2025 graduate from the University of Chicago and incoming investment banking analyst at Morgan Stanley. Business Insider's recent "Path to Wall Street" series highlighted how finance careers continue to attract young talent, despite the industry's long hours and demanding entry-level roles. Entry-level bankers typically earn about $110,000 a year, not including bonuses. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. I had barely decided on banking as a career choice when I had to start preparing for interviews. My experience was similar to most stories I've heard about the banking world: the recruiting process starts early. Before submitting my internship applications, I spoke to about five people at each major bank — mostly recent UChicago grads and people the university's career advancement program connected me with — so they would recognize my name when they saw my résumé. Cold LinkedIn messaging didn't work very well for me. Those introductions are often necessary to get an interview. At most banks, I interviewed for multiple rounds, including calls focused on my personality and technical skills and a two-hour "super day." The whole process lasted about two weeks. Then, by the spring of my sophomore year, I was done. I landed an internship at Morgan Stanley, and I knew my full-time job would be set as long as I got a return offer. My prior internships had been at Bain Capital and the Chicago-based firm Ariel Investments. The only other career trajectory I considered in college was academia. I studied economics and considered getting involved with economics research, but I realized it wasn't for me. I just work better in a faster-paced finance environment. In my free time at school, I tried to focus on clubs and internships that would keep me close to startups and entrepreneurship, so I joined a venture capital fund on campus. I was also involved in a campus group for women and minorities interested in finance and investing. Those opportunities really helped me build my industry chops. I would tell any college student hoping to land a Wall Street or Silicon Valley job: be decisive. Even if investment banking or consulting isn't your lifelong passion, plan to commit to a career path sooner rather than later, so that you can give yourself the most amount of time to prepare, network, and do really well in the interviews. And, for the application process, students need to be careful with what they put on their résumé — recruiters pay a lot of attention to the "skills and interests" section at the bottom. Don't say that you're a mountain climber if you have never climbed a mountain, because people will ask you about your hobbies, and you need to be able to genuinely talk about them. Of course, your credentials matter, but I've found that recruiters are most interested in meeting well-rounded people. Job applications and postgrad life make me anxious sometimes. I've leaned on my friends a lot: Some aren't going into finance, others have gone through recruiting alongside me. I'm also grateful for my family — my Morgan Stanley role will be in San Francisco, and it will be the first time I've moved far from home, since I grew up in Chicago. Exercise has always been a coping strategy for me, too. I'm trying to build healthy habits and make sure I don't isolate myself. Those are the main ways I'm dealing with stress. Long, long term, my biggest goal is to be able to work for myself in some way. That could mean working at a big company that gives me a lot of autonomy to make decisions or starting my own company, if I am brave enough to do that. For now, I'm excited to keep building my career and learning from my coworkers. Having engaging conversations with people you've never met can be the most challenging part of the finance industry, but it's also the most rewarding. Do you have a story to share? Contact this reporter at allisonkelly@ or via Signal at alliekelly.10; here's our guide to sharing information securely. Read the original article on Business Insider
