Jeddah Tower 2026 is not a concept anymore. It is not a render on a developer’s website or a promise made at a groundbreaking ceremony. As of June 2026, it has passed its 103rd floor and is rising at roughly four metres per week along the Red Sea coast of Saudi Arabia. The world’s first one-kilometre-tall building is being built right now, and what is happening on that construction site in Jeddah is the most consequential moment in skyscraper history since the 20th century.
I have studied supertall buildings my entire career. I have read the engineering reports, walked the observation decks, and analyzed the structural systems of the buildings that defined vertical construction over the last fifty years. None of them prepared me for what Jeddah Tower actually represents as a construction achievement. This is not an incremental step forward. This is a different category entirely.
Here is everything you need to understand about Jeddah Tower in 2026, from the engineering decisions made in the desert to the materials holding up a structure that will eventually stand 180 metres taller than anything ever built.
Table of Contents
- What Is Jeddah Tower and Why Does It Matter in 2026
- The Construction Timeline: From Desert Plot to 103 Floors
- The Architecture: A Building Inspired by Desert Plants
- The Structural Engineering: How You Build to One Kilometre
- The Foundation: 270 Piles Driven 105 Metres into Red Sea Coastal Ground
- The Materials: Why Concrete Is King at 1,000 Metres
- The Elevators: A Technology Problem Nobody Had Solved Before
- What Jeddah Tower Means for Architecture and Construction
- Frequently Asked Questions
What Is Jeddah Tower and Why Does It Matter in 2026
Jeddah Tower, also known as the JEC Tower, is a megatall skyscraper under construction in the north of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. It is the centrepiece of the Jeddah Economic City, a 5.3 million square metre urban development project along the Red Sea waterfront. When complete, Jeddah Tower will stand at least 1,008 metres tall, making it the first building in human history to reach a full kilometre in height. Its 5.7 million square feet of interior space will contain a Four Seasons luxury hotel, high-end residences, premium office floors, and the world’s highest observation deck positioned at approximately the 157th floor with views across the Red Sea.
The project is led by Saudi Arabian prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, chairman of Kingdom Holding Company, and is being developed by the Jeddah Economic Company. The primary architect is Chicago-based Adrian Smith of Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill Architecture, and Thornton Tomasetti is the structural engineering firm. Wikipedia
The project matters in 2026 for reasons that go well beyond national pride or record-breaking for its own sake. Jeddah Tower is a live engineering laboratory solving problems that have never been solved before at this scale. Every technical decision made on this project, from wind load management at 1,000 metres to concrete pumping at record heights, is producing knowledge that will shape how supertall buildings are designed and built globally for the next fifty years.
The Construction Timeline: From Desert Plot to 103 Floors
The story of Jeddah Tower is as much about human stubbornness as it is about engineering. This building nearly did not happen.
Foundation work began in 2013 and construction progressed steadily through the initial years. By 2018, the tower had reached approximately 63 floors and 250 metres before construction was halted entirely due to labour disputes following the 2017 Saudi Arabian anti-corruption purge, which resulted in the arrest of the tower’s owner and its primary contractor’s chairman. The structure sat frozen on the Jeddah skyline for nearly five years, one third complete, a monument to interrupted ambition. Wikipedia
Construction officially restarted in January 2025 after a new request for proposals was issued in September 2023 and the project team was rebuilt. What happened next is the part that genuinely surprised the construction industry. Wikipedia
Since resuming, construction crews have been adding a new floor approximately every three to four days, a pace that engineers at Thornton Tomasetti described as blistering. By January 2026, work had reached the 80th floor. On 26 April 2026, the tower reached its 100th floor and 400 metres in height. As of June 2026, construction has surpassed the 103rd floor. Construction DigitalWikipedia
John Peronto, managing principal at Thornton Tomasetti and project manager for Jeddah Tower, told Newsweek that progress is now moving much faster than it ever did during the original construction phase, with the team advancing at roughly four metres per week and pushing very aggressively toward the sky terrace at around the 160th floor. The projected completion date is August 2028. Newsweek
This is a project that was abandoned, restarted, and is now accelerating. That trajectory alone tells you something important about the determination behind it.
The Architecture: A Building Inspired by Desert Plants
The design of Jeddah Tower did not start with a height. It started with a plant.
Architect Adrian Smith drew on a three-petal footprint inspired by the folded fronds of a desert palm tree. The tapering, three-sided silhouette sheds wind vortices as the structure rises, reducing structural sway at extreme altitudes. This is not an aesthetic decision dressed up as engineering. At one kilometre, wind is not a weather condition. Wind is a structural force that will determine whether the building stands or oscillates to the point of failure. The shape of the building is its primary defence against the thing that most wants to destroy it. LA
The Y-shaped configuration reduces wind loads by disrupting vortex formation, a critical issue in supertall buildings. This geometry also enables efficient floor layouts and improved load distribution throughout the structural system. OpDez Architecture
As the tower rises, the three wings taper progressively inward, with inclined perimeter walls that contribute to aerodynamic stability at every level. Near the top, the structure transitions into a closed wall spire. The result is a building whose silhouette is in constant conversation with the wind, narrowing and reshaping itself as the forces acting on it increase with altitude.
The tower will feature the world’s highest human-made viewing platform on the 157th floor and will include a sky terrace, a luxury hotel, serviced apartments, high-end condominiums, and prestigious office spaces across 5.7 million square feet of floor area. New Atlas
From the outside, Jeddah Tower will look like nothing built before it. From the inside, it will function as a vertical city. The design makes both possible simultaneously.
The Structural Engineering: How You Build to One Kilometre
The structural system of Jeddah Tower is, in the words of Thornton Tomasetti, simplicity itself. That description is doing an enormous amount of work.
The system contains no columns, no outriggers, no floor beams, no spandrel beams, and no vertical transfers. All walls are interconnected, and each structural element resists both wind and gravity loads simultaneously. In conventional tall building design, these functions are separated across different structural components. Jeddah Tower’s engineers integrated them into a single unified system that is both stronger and faster to build. Thornton Tomasetti
At the centre is a hexagonal core made of high-performance concrete with a strength of 85 MPa. Three extending wings provide stability and distribute forces evenly, allowing the structure to withstand both seismic activity and strong desert winds without complex add-on structural elements. Jetsbrick
Unlike traditional skyscrapers that rely on outriggers and belt walls for lateral stability, Jeddah Tower employs a buttressed core system with three wings flanking a tight hexagonal central core. This innovative design eliminates the need for complex structural elements using only 85 MPa concrete strength. Interesting Engineering
This matters because simplicity at structural scale means speed, cost efficiency, and reduced risk of construction error. The more complex a structural system, the more things can go wrong during execution. Thornton Tomasetti’s decision to design out the complexity rather than engineer around it is one of the most important structural decisions made on any skyscraper project in the last two decades.
Advanced computational modelling has been used to ensure the structure withstands the unique wind forces at 1,000 metres, with the structural core performing exactly as modelled in wind tunnel tests. The digital model and the physical structure are behaving as one. That alignment, at this scale, is a genuine engineering achievement. Construction Digital
The Foundation: 270 Piles Driven into Red Sea Coastal Ground
Building a one-kilometre tower on coastal ground next to the Red Sea presents a foundation challenge that has no precedent. The subsurface at the Jeddah site includes reef limestone with cavities, weakly consolidated sandstone, and gravel layers extending to significant depths. Salt water from the Red Sea threatened to corrode conventional concrete. The weight of the completed tower will exceed 900,000 tonnes.
The foundation system is a 5-metre thick concrete raft supported on 270 bored piles, each 1.8 metres in diameter, driven to depths of up to 105 metres below ground level. Thornton Tomasetti
The foundation comprises 270 bored reinforced concrete piles ranging from 1.5 to 1.8 metres in diameter and from 45 to 105 metres in length, with the deepest piles located beneath the central core. The works involved approximately 38,000 cubic metres of concrete in the piles and about 18,260 cubic metres in the raft, with roughly 4,400 tonnes of reinforcement steel in the piles and 3,650 tonnes in the raft. Interesting Engineering
The differential settlement across the entire foundation must not exceed 25 millimetres, approximately the thickness of a coin, regardless of how unevenly the tower’s structural loads are distributed. Achieving that tolerance across a foundation of this scale, on coastal geology of this complexity, required geotechnical engineering that pushed the limits of what had been attempted before.
The foundation of Jeddah Tower is invisible once the building is complete. It will never appear in architectural photographs or feature in tourist guides. But without those 270 piles driven 105 metres into Red Sea coastal ground, none of the rest of it exists.
The Materials: Why Concrete Is King at 1,000 Metres
One of the most deliberate decisions made on Jeddah Tower was the choice to build almost entirely in reinforced concrete rather than steel.
Thornton Tomasetti explained the decision directly: concrete is king in the Middle East, and the design team chose to take advantage of Saudi Arabia’s local construction techniques and concrete strengths rather than importing a structural system from elsewhere. Thornton Tomasetti
This is a lesson that gets lost in the global architecture conversation, where structural steel solutions from American and European engineering firms often dominate supertall building design by default. The best structural material for a building is the one that the local construction industry knows how to work with at the highest level of precision. In Jeddah, that material is reinforced concrete. Building to that reality rather than against it produced a structural system that is both more efficient and more buildable than a steel-primary alternative would have been in this context.
The full structure will require 500,000 cubic metres of concrete and 80,000 tonnes of steel. Advanced vertical pumping systems have been developed specifically for this project to deliver high-strength concrete at record heights, solving a logistics problem that no previous construction project had needed to solve at 1,000 metres. Wikipedia
The concrete used throughout the structural system is designed for extreme pressure resistance and environmental durability in coastal desert conditions, where heat, salt air, and high winds create a material environment far more aggressive than most construction sites anywhere in the world.
The Elevators: A Technology Problem Nobody Had Solved Before
At one kilometre of height, the elevator system is not a building service. It is a structural and engineering challenge in its own right.
KONE describes Jeddah Tower as the ultimate proving ground for their UltraRope technology. The elevators will travel at speeds exceeding 10 metres per second using carbon-fibre cores to eliminate the weight issues associated with traditional steel cables in supertall buildings. Construction Digital
Traditional steel elevator cables become impractical above a certain height because the cable itself becomes so heavy that the system cannot function efficiently. Carbon-fibre UltraRope eliminates this weight problem entirely, making kilometre-scale vertical transportation physically possible for the first time. The tower will require 59 elevators in total, including double-decker lift systems for high-volume passenger movement across the building’s multiple use zones. New Atlas
The elevator engineering at Jeddah Tower is directly advancing technology that will be applied to every supertall building constructed globally over the next thirty years. The problems being solved on this project are not proprietary to this one building. They are the problems that the entire industry will need to solve as more cities seek to build higher.
What Jeddah Tower Means for Architecture and Construction in 2026
Jeddah Tower is not being built to break a record. It is being built to prove that Saudi Arabia’s economy and engineering capability have arrived at the highest level on the global stage. Architect Adrian Smith described the project as a symbol of Saudi Arabia’s economic ambitions and technological capabilities, while the Jeddah Economic Company’s CEO called it a beacon of innovation and a catalyst for growth. Wikipedia
But the implications for architecture and construction extend well beyond Saudi Arabia.
Every technical breakthrough achieved on Jeddah Tower, the buttressed core structural system, the carbon-fibre elevator cables, the high-performance concrete pumped at record heights, the aerodynamic three-petal form developed through advanced wind tunnel testing, produces a body of engineering knowledge that raises the capability ceiling for the entire global construction industry.
Architect Gordon Gill noted that Jeddah Tower is achieving greater heights with greater efficiency, and that sustainability is the next architectural benchmark that matters most going forward. A building that reaches one kilometre while using less structural material per floor than previous supertall buildings is not just taller. It is smarter. Newsweek
In 2026, as the construction industry debates how to build more sustainably, more efficiently, and at greater scale, Jeddah Tower is providing answers in real time. Not in a research paper. Not in a computer simulation. In reinforced concrete rising four metres per week above the Red Sea.
That is the most convincing argument any building can make.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the current height of Jeddah Tower in 2026?
As of June 2026, Jeddah Tower has surpassed its 103rd floor and stands at just over 400 metres. Construction is advancing at approximately four metres per week and is on track for completion in August 2028.
How tall will Jeddah Tower be when complete?
Jeddah Tower is planned to reach at least 1,008 metres, making it the first building in history to exceed one kilometre in height. It will stand at least 180 metres taller than any previously completed building.
Who designed Jeddah Tower?
Jeddah Tower was designed by architect Adrian Smith of Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill Architecture, based in Chicago. The structural engineering is led by Thornton Tomasetti.
What structural system does Jeddah Tower use?
Jeddah Tower uses a buttressed core structural system built entirely in high-performance reinforced concrete. The system has no outriggers, no columns, and no floor beams. All walls are interconnected and each structural element resists both wind and gravity loads simultaneously.
Why does Jeddah Tower have a three-petal shape?
The three-petal Y-shaped footprint is an aerodynamic engineering decision. At extreme heights, wind vortices become a primary structural threat. The three-petal form sheds these vortices as the structure rises, reducing sway and structural stress at altitudes where wind forces are most severe.
When will Jeddah Tower be completed?
The projected completion date for Jeddah Tower is August 2028, at which point it will become the world’s tallest building and the first human-made structure to reach one kilometre in height.
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