Inside the worksite outside Jeddah, the scale of the structure is hard to take in at street level. Steel, concrete, and vertical ambition now mark a project that has spent years moving in fits and starts. For the team behind it, the latest milestone is more than a construction update: it is a signal that the world’s tallest buildings race may soon have a new name at the top.
What does crossing 100 floors mean for Jeddah Tower?
Jeddah Tower reached its 100th floor this week, a threshold that gives the project fresh momentum after long periods of delay. The tower, rising just outside the port city of Jeddah, is designed by Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill of Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, with Robert Forest also a co-founder of the firm. Bob Forest, managing partner at the studio, called the 100-floor mark “a great milestone” and said the project is moving beyond it.
The building is expected to surpass the 830-metre Burj Khalifa in Dubai and become the world’s tallest building once completed. Its targeted height is more than 1, 000 meters. The project first broke ground in 2013, but progress stopped and restarted several times because of financial issues, the Covid-19 pandemic, and technical challenges. One major interruption came when the contractor, Binladin Group, was removed from the project after the company owner was arrested during the 2017 corruption purges in Saudi Arabia, which also saw the project’s developer, Prince Al Waleed bin Talal Al Saud, detained.
Why is the project moving forward now?
After construction officially restarted in early 2025, Gill said the tower is now on track for completion in 2028. He described it as a project with “clarity and reality” because it was built around known conditions: constructability, economy, and time. That distinction matters in a country where several headline-grabbing schemes have faced delays, pauses, or uncertainty.
Gill also said the tower stands apart because it is not speculative. In his view, it had already been established as a known entity and simply needed the push to finish. For architects, he said, there is a lesson in common sense: projects should be turned down if they are unrealistic. That is the kind of judgment, he suggested, that can separate a visible structure from a promise still trapped on paper.
How does Jeddah Tower fit into Saudi Arabia’s wider project landscape?
The tower’s progress comes against the backdrop of other ambitious Saudi developments, including Neom. Some contracts linked to that broader effort have been described as canceled or delayed, while Yasir Al-Rumayyan, governor of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, said that no project in Neom has been canceled and that some have simply been delayed because they are not on the critical path. The contrast has helped make Jeddah Tower look unusually grounded among megaprojects.
That is one reason the tower continues to attract attention beyond its height. It is also a test of whether a structure conceived more than a decade ago can still become the defining vertical symbol of the country’s next phase of development. For people following the project, the latest milestone shows that the climb is no longer theoretical.
What does the 2028 target tell us about the building’s future?
Gill said the tower is expected to be finished in August 2028, and that construction is “moving very well. ” He also said that heights well beyond a kilometre are already technically feasible with today’s construction knowledge and technology. In his view, the future of tall buildings is no longer limited by imagination alone.
For now, the most visible sign of progress is the one that rises floor by floor above Jeddah. The world’s tallest buildings competition will not be settled by rhetoric, but by concrete reaching higher than before. At 100 stories, Jeddah Tower is still unfinished, yet it has already changed the tone of the conversation: from whether it can rise, to when it will finally arrive.
