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The Jeddah Tower, poised to be the world’s tallest building upon completion, is expected to hit its record-setting biggest milestone yet in just over a year-and-a-half, but faces the unpredictable challenge of a "Super El Niño" before getting there, the team behind the project told Newsweek.
Designed by architects Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill, co-founders of Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture (AS+GG), and constructed by the Saudi Binladin Group (SBG), the Jeddah Tower will climb to 1,000 meters (around 3,281 feet) high once completed. Smith also designed the current world’s tallest building–Dubai's Burj Khalifa, which stands 828 meters (around 2,717 feet) high–while he was at the SOM (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill) architectural firm, before he co-founded AS+GG.
The Jeddah Tower is projected to surpass the Burj Khalifa sometime around the third quarter of 2028, SBG’s senior executive project director Ian Norman Miller, the general contractor who is on the tower’s construction site daily, told Newsweek. Miller and others from the team behind the project presented a panel on the tower’s development at the Vertical Urbanism (VU) Summit of the Council on Vertical Urbanism (CVU) in London last week.
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Miller said he's "completely confident" that the tower will be finished by 2028, but was cautious about committing to exact dates, given the team has another year of “the Super El Niño wind to deal with,” which could force the construction team to “pause for a week or two for next year.”
El Niño is the warm phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, a recurring Pacific climate pattern that can affect weather worldwide. Last month, the Climate Prediction Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said that “El Niño continues to strengthen, with a strong-to-very strong El Niño likely through January-March 2027, remaining greater than an 83 percent chance.”
Miller noted: “This summer we did have a long period where we had to go quite slowly.” But once the wind died down in the middle of August, “we really sped up, we caught up. So, as soon as the wind was cooperative, we were going like crazy.”
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Speaking to Newsweek at the VU Summit, structural engineer John Peronto, managing principal at Thornton Tomasetti and project manager for the Jeddah Tower, told Newsweek that it’s “a little tricky” to know exactly when the tower will dethrone the Burj Khalifa, “because there's a lot of interface work that now happens for around the next 200 meters [around 656 feet],” where they will start to install the steel for the “sky terrace,” the tower’s viewing platform level.
“I actually don't know the exact time for that, but it's coming," Peronto said. "It's probably like a year out. I think like a year-ish out before we get the ‘sky terrace’ done and then probably a few months after that before we can get up to the 800-ish meter mark.”
Other Major Milestones to Come Before Dethroning the Burj Khalifa
The tower’s next major milestone will happen later this month, when it reaches its halfway mark at 500 meters high (about 1,640 feet), the 125th floor level, which is projected to occur around Thanksgiving, the team told Newsweek last week.
The building will then keep soaring towards its “sky terrace” level at the 630-meter mark (about 2,066 feet), before reaching the sky raft level, which is essentially a slab of concrete that “marks the beginning of the pure spire” portion of the tower, Miller said, sharing new images of the Jeddah Tower with Newsweek, taken just a few days after it reached the 121st floor recently.
Speaking to Newsweek at the VU Summit ahead of the team’s panel discussion, architect Peter Weismantle, director of supertall building technology at AS+GG, noted that as the core of the tower reaches the sky raft point, “which is another 45 floors or so…the building gets narrower, so there's actually less [concrete] to pour.”
Weismantle said the quantity to pour keeps dropping as you go higher, “but sometimes it gets more difficult. So, it's going to be very interesting when they transition.”
The start of the sky raft portion will be at around the 700-meter level (around 2,296 feet high) Weismantle told Newsweek, noting “the structure of the building significantly changes” at this point, transitioning “from a core with sheer walls” to what he calls “the silo…a structural tube…that's going to be a big monster for the contractor because he basically changes his construction methodology.”
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**‘**A Whole Lot More Than the Tower to Be Built’
The Burj Khalifa “can be the world's tallest building for two more years and then they've got to move over,” Miller said, adding that in reality, “we have time because the big show is Expo 2030,” referring to the 2030 World Expo, which will be held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
However, Miller clarified that the construction team is certainly “not waiting around,” noting “we're going as fast as we can, but there's a lot of other things to be built apart from Jeddah Tower…the idea is to deliver more than just the tower, as a completed offering in conjunction with the big opening of Expo 2030.”
The upcoming new world’s tallest building will form the centerpiece of the wider Jeddah Economic City, a sprawling mixed-use development spanning over five million square meters.
Speaking on the panel for the VU Summit last week, Fouad Makhlouf, the chief development officer of the Jeddah Economic Company, said the Jeddah Tower is “the identity for a wider city.” Describing Jeddah Economic City as a high density “city of towers,” Makhlouf said, “we have almost more than 112 towers in phase one alone.”
Miller said that in the master plan of the city, “there’s a whole lot more than the tower to be built,” from water fountains to shops and attractions, noting that “it all ties in to make a total tourism offering."
"To stay in a fine hotel is one thing, but you've got to have a place to walk to and enjoy it…so, we’re working on getting some other things started,” he said.
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Miller says the Jeddah Tower will be a focal point of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, its mission to diversify its economy to reduce its dependence on oil.
He expects the record-breaking building to play a big part in “representing Jeddah in the west of Saudi Arabia” as well as “putting the city of Jeddah on the map.”
Miller explained that even in the Islamic world, “people don't think of Jeddah as a destination. People think of Jeddah as the airport you go to when you want to do a pilgrimage to Mecca.”
Miller hopes the new tower will “put Jeddah on the international map…show everyone what we're capable of in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in terms of engineering and construction excellence, but also having a highly skilled workforce that's respected and given credit for the work they're doing.”
Noting “there’s very little representation of the construction industry in the media,” Miller hopes the roughly two years of work remaining on the project will “put the spotlight on the Jeddah Tower and show the world the wonderful things that men and women in the industry do all over the world every day behind the scenes.”
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Contact Newsweek editors for this story: Sirena Bergman and Anthony Murray.
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