From one of the world's most luxurious casinos nestled along the Singaporean coast, and Elon Musk's dream for a world full of sustainable gigafactories, to a 110-mile-long linear city in the middle of the Saudi desert, and the largest water park ever built, home to the planet's soon-to-be tallest water slide, here are 10 of the biggest megaprojects in the world. Between 1998 and 2004, the Patronus Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, were the tallest buildings in the world. At 1,483 feet, the Malaysian twins were only 33 feet taller than the Sears Tower in Chicago, which then became the second tallest building in the world, or maybe the third. The Patronus Towers held that title until the construction of Taipei 101 in Taiwan, But then, the Burj Khalifa dwarfed everyone in 2010, standing 2,717 feet tall. Still, the Petronas Towers are the tallest twin skyscrapers on Earth and home to National Petroleum Limited, a Malaysian oil and gas company commonly referred to as Petronas.
The $1.6 billion towers also feature the world's highest two-story bridge between the 41st and 42nd floors. You can head up to the observation deck on the 86th floor for an even better view of the Malaysian skyline. Argentinian-American architect Cesar Pelli went with a distinctive post-modern style, aiming to build a 21st century icon for Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Seeing how the official Malaysian religion is Islam, Pelli combined principles of Muslim architecture and design to create a structure that oozed with Malaysian culture.
Like most megaprojects, construction didn't come without a ticker. A bad batch of concrete brought construction to a grinding halt. They were worried the weak concrete had infected everything they had built so far.
Luckily, builders only used it on one floor. They tore that floor down, rebuilt, and kept moving. Still, the delay cost the project about $700,000 per day.
In the mid-2000s, Singapore decided it wanted in on the casino game. They'd just lifted a 40-year ban on gambling, hoping to bolster tourism and boost their economy. Many world-famous names competed for one of two spots, names like MGM Mirage and Wynn Resorts. In the end, Las Vegas Sands, which owns the Venetian Casino Resort in Vegas, won the first of two spots. Thanks to their vision of a $3.2 billion gambling and entertainment district called the Marina Bay Sands, they put up nearly $4 billion to invest in the project.
That's on top of the $1.2 billion paid for the 6 million square foot site. But thanks to labor shortages and rising material prices, the total development cost was estimated at 8 billion Singaporean dollars as of 2009, or about 6.8 billion US dollars. They called it the most expensive standalone resort property ever built.
But unlike some mega-project ideas, they actually pulled it off. Today, the Marina Bay Sands sports a 2,500-room hotel, a 1.3 million-square-foot convention center, a mall, a museum, and several celebrity chef restaurants, including two Wolfgang Pucks. Meanwhile, the casino floor is a gambler's paradise with 500 tables and 1,600 slot machines. The coup de grace, if you will, is the Sands Skypark, a 1,100-foot skyway connecting all three towers.
You can dive into the infinity swimming pool while enjoying a gorgeous view of the Singapore skyline. It was billed as a 100- billion-dollar luxury city, a living paradise on earth. But as of today, Forest City, Malaysia, is a ghost town full of empty roads and deserted high-rises.
In 2006, a Chinese development firm called Country Garden announced their plans to build the massive city. It was a 20-year project set in Johor Bahru, a Malaysian city north of Singapore. According to Bloomberg, the Malay government saw how successful Singapore was with tourism and wanted to cash in. The original idea, pitched by Malaysia, was to build a new metropolis near the causeway connecting Singapore to Malaysia.
Then, Country Garden stepped in with their $100 billion forest city idea, which involved building artificial islands a few hundred yards from off the Singaporean coast. Country Garden sold the dream of luxury apartments, hotels, offices, golf courses, and tech parks to eager Chinese investors who sank thousands of dollars into the soon-to-be-built apartments. Developers anticipated that 700,000 people would quickly move into the new city.
As of 2019, only 500 call it home. According to Business Insider, the population has supposedly grown to a few thousand. but it's still less than 5% of the expected residents.
So, if you wanted to, how much would it cost to move to Forest City? Unfortunately, prices have skyrocketed in recent years. In 2017, a Forest City apartment only cost about $170,000. Today, they cost about $1.14 million. You're better off buying in Johor Bahru, where the average sale price is about $141,000.
And there are actual signs of life. Picture this. You're sailing down the Red Sea between Saudi Arabia and Egypt when you suddenly see your reflection along a 110-mile mirror.
But wait a minute. That's not a mirror. Instead, it's a 1,600-foot-tall, 660-foot-wide, 110-mile-long building.
And there's another running parallel on the other side. What you're currently looking at is Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's Neo-M project, better known as The Line. Some may call it the sustainable city of the future.
Others think it sounds a little dystopian. The $725 billion city will run on nothing but sustainable energy. There won't be any cars, Instead, the MBS imagines a high-speed underground train that can get you from end to end in 20 minutes flat. Residents will enjoy a lush outdoor landscape between the two mirrored buildings. Those buildings, ideally, will house and employ about 9 million people.
The line will also remain under the watchful gaze of AI. MBS says it's to use data models to find ways to improve the city. But it sounds a little Matrix-y to us. It's all part of something called Vision 2030, which aims to make the oil-rich country the world leader in sustainable innovation. Work began on the line in late 2022, with drone footage coming out in October showing what looks like the initial groundwork.
According to Saudi officials, you could be living in the line as soon as 2023. Or is it on the line? What about at the line? According to Elon Musk, when the Gigafactory in Reno, Nevada is complete, it will have the largest footprint of any structure in the world.
Bigger than the Great Pyramid, the Empire State Building, and the Burj Khalifa. Counting multiple levels, we're talking about 15 million square feet. However, every inch will run on renewable energy.
You've probably seen Elon talking with Leonardo DiCaprio about the Gigafactory and its environmental impact. According to the Tesla CEO's calculations, it would take 100 gigafactories worldwide to power the entire planet with sustainable energy. Unfortunately, the current gigafactory in Nevada is about 30% complete.
Tesla finally announced plans to expand the factory in 2022, but the full-scale building is still a distant dream. Elon has been thinking about the gigafactory his whole life. but official plans didn't kick off until 2014 when Panasonic agreed to invest in the $5 billion project. With the how figured out, it was time to determine the where.
Tesla toured several locations, never once thinking about northern Nevada. But after a little convincing and several private trips, Tesla finally settled on the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center, or TRIC. Now, while the Nevada factory is the biggest, it's not the only gigafactory Tesla owns. Giga New York, located in Buffalo, focuses on power pack batteries and solar panels. Giga Texas, the company's newest factory in Austin, serves as Tesla HQ and acts as an assembly site for Model Ys, Model 3s, Cybertrucks, and Cybersemis.
Two more Giga factories exist outside the U.S., one in Shanghai, China, and the other in Berlin, Germany. Jubail, Saudi Arabia used to be an ancient fishing village on the Persian Gulf. It was full of deserted suburbs until the mid-1970s, when an American engineering company called the Bechtel Corporation broke ground on the largest industrial city in the world.
spanning more than 687 square miles. Upon its completion, the new site contributed to about 7% of Saudi Arabia's total GDP. At the turn of the millennia, the Saudi royal family decided to expand operations in Jubail, and Jubail 2 was born.
Considered by many to be the world's largest civil engineering project, Jubail 2 sought to double the city's original size. The project provided housing for 120,000 new residents and built a brand new 18,000 student university. Today, Jubail is a major player in the global energy market, attracting the best and brightest tech and business minds across dozens of countries. When it's done, Jubail 2 could make them the major player. During peak working seasons, the Jubail 2 project employs 20,000 workers per month.
About $4 billion has been invested in infrastructure, which includes hundreds of miles of roads, water and waste facilities, and utilities. Another $18 billion will go toward building the expansion itself. In fact, the project is so big that they broke it into four phases over 22 years. The current timetable has Jubail 2 completed by 2024, but we'll see if any pandemic-related setbacks push that completion date off a bit.
Lusail is the second largest city in Qatar. If you watched the 2022 World Cup finals, you might recognize Lusail Stadium, the largest of its kind in the Middle East. The Qatari government built the Lusail and seven other stadiums specifically for the World Cup, costing about $6.5 billion. Some experts estimate Qatar spent some $200 billion over 12 years to make the World Cup happen in the first place. not to mention the countless human rights violations.
According to Bloomberg, a chunk of that change went toward building Lusail City itself, a mega-project that cost some $45 billion. The area was still a desert when Qatar won the World Cup bid in 2010. They wanted to have it finished before the event, but according to ESPN writer Mark Ogden, the city feels more like a dystopian scene straight out of a Christopher Nolan movie. When it's done, Lusail is expected to house about 450,000 people, including 250,000 residents, 190,000 office workers, and 60,000 retail staff members. One day, all of them will get to enjoy Aquatar, the world's largest water park.
Considered to be the crown jewel of this artificial city, Aquatar will feature 36 water slides and attractions alongside a 279-foot tower. Home to the world's highest waterslide. When it's done, the park will cover about 300,000 square feet.
They expected it to attract 50,000 visitors per day during the World Cup, but you can't ride a half-built waterslide, can you? The Blue Nile River, one of the two primary Nile tributaries, is a lifeline for northeastern Africa. It flows north from Lake Tanna in Ethiopia, through Sudan, and into Egypt, some 1,600 miles downstream. In the early 2010s, Ethiopia announced plans to build a $5 billion dam on the Blue Nile. The project underwent several name changes, at one time called the Millennium Dam, but the builders finally settled on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, or GERD.
In a nutshell, the point of the GERD was to supply ample electricity to Ethiopia, a country that, before GERD, saw 60% of its people living in darkness. Ideally, the GERD will produce so much power that Ethiopia can sell electricity to the surrounding counties, like Sudan and Egypt. The dam was supposed to be opened in 2017, but feuds between Ethiopia, Sudan, and Egypt kept stalling the project.
Egypt relies heavily on the Nile River and believes the GERD will significantly limit the amount of water available by the time it reaches Cairo. Ethiopia says otherwise, while Sudan has been stuck in the middle. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali cut the grand opening ribbon that summer. The GERD is officially the largest hydropower dam in Africa and ranks among the top 20 worldwide, right up there with the Three Gorges Dam in China. In January of 2008, the UK decided it was time to expand its nuclear energy capabilities.
After some negotiations and budgetary conversations, the idea for Hinkley Point C was born, joining the ranks of Hinkley Points A and B. At the time, Hinkley B was the UK's most productive nuclear power plant, but it closed in August of 2022 due to old age. Thankfully, plans for Hinkley Point C were already underway, plans that now have a £25 billion price tag.
But it wasn't always that expensive. EDF is the French energy company spearheading the project. They wanted to have the plant open and operational by 2025, but several setbacks and a global pandemic kept pushing the completion date. According to the BBC, the limited number of workers allowed on site during COVID cost the project more than half a million days of critical work between 2020 and 2021. When it's done and paid for, Hinkley Point C's twin-unit reactor will be able to produce 3,260 megawatts of low-carbon energy for the next 60 years. By comparison, a typical coal plant only produces 600 megawatts of energy.
According to EDF, Hinkley Point C will provide enough clean energy to power 6 million homes until the 2080s. The Yangtze River is the heart and soul of China. Nearly one-third of China's population, about 400 million people, live along the river basin or its tributaries and rely on it every day. But, as it stands, northern China's more industrialized and arid regions struggle with dry rivers and restricted access to water. It's been that way for, well, forever.
Then, in the 1950s, Mao Zedong floated the idea of a massive engineering project that could solve China's water problem in a few short years. The idea was to build three canal systems, one in the east, one in the west, and one in the middle. Of course, politics and controversy kept the project in the planning phase for about 50 years. Construction began in 2003, and it's expected to take another 50 years to finish, not to mention the $62 billion price tag. Fun fact that is more than twice the cost of the Three Gorges Dam.
When it's done, the South-North Water Transfer Project will divert 44.8 billion cubic meters of water annually to drier areas in northern China. It will also link China's four main rivers, the Yangtze, the River, the Huaihe, and the Haihe. If all goes according to plan, water diverted from the Yangtze River near Yangzhou City will travel east along existing channels to the Weishan Mountains of Shandong. From there, it will cross the Yellow River via a tunnel and flow into Tianjin. The central route will divert water from the Han River to flow up to Beijing.
They wanted this leg finished in time for the 2008 Olympic Games, but only about a fourth of the route was built. Finally, the Western Route will divert 4 billion cubic meters of water from three tributaries along the Yangtze and send it about 300 miles across the Baian Kala Mountains and into northwestern China. If you enjoyed this video and want to see another just like it, be sure to click the link on screen now. With that, thanks for watching and be sure to tune in next time.