Smart cities are being built on every inhabited continent, from purpose-built developments in the deserts of Saudi Arabia and the American Southwest to retrofit projects in Stockholm and Seoul. The global smart city market sits at roughly $700 billion in 2025 and is projected to nearly double to $1.45 trillion by 2030, growing at about 15.6% per year. That spending is spread across dozens of major projects, but a handful stand out for their ambition, scale, and lessons learned so far.
NEOM and The Line in Saudi Arabia
The most headline-grabbing project is The Line, part of Saudi Arabia’s NEOM megaproject on the Red Sea coast. Originally imagined as a 105-mile-long, 1,640-foot-high, 656-foot-wide car-free city designed to house 9 million residents, The Line was pitched as a “civilization revolution” powered by renewable energy and artificial intelligence.
Reality has forced dramatic cuts. By April 2024, planners had slashed the initial phase to just 1.5 miles by 2030, with a projected population reduced from 1.5 million to fewer than 300,000. Satellite imagery showed construction resources being diverted to a royal palace complex with 16 buildings and a golf course, while the main infrastructure left what critics called “giant holes in the middle of nowhere.”
The project’s direction has shifted entirely. NEOM is now being repositioned as a hub for data centers to support Saudi Arabia’s push into artificial intelligence. One insider described the logic bluntly: the coastal location provides the seawater needed for cooling servers. What was once billed as the world’s most ambitious smart city may end up as a very expensive server farm with a view of the Red Sea.
Toyota’s Woven City in Japan
At the base of Mount Fuji, Toyota is taking a quieter, more methodical approach. Woven City is a 175-acre test site where the automaker is experimenting with technologies that could reshape how people move through urban spaces. As of September 2025, several Toyota Group employees and their families have moved in as the first residents, with Phase 1 expected to accommodate about 300 people. General visitors are planned to be welcomed starting in fiscal year 2026.
The city is organized around a three-type road system at ground level: one exclusively for pedestrians, one shared by pedestrians and small personal vehicles, and one dedicated to larger vehicles. A fourth road network runs underground, allowing testing that isn’t affected by weather. Throughout the city, multifunctional poles serve as streetlights, traffic signal posts, and mounting points for sensors and cameras.
The technologies being tested are specific and practical. Toyota’s e-Palette platform is a versatile electric vehicle that can be configured for food service, deliveries, or passenger transport. A compact three-wheeled electric vehicle is available as a shared personal mobility option. Perhaps the most interesting experiment is “Summon Share,” where self-driving robots deliver shared vehicles directly to users on demand. A smart logistics platform handles package delivery, with planned expansion into cleaning and storage services. Woven City is small, but it’s one of the few smart city projects where people are actually living alongside the technology being developed.
Songdo, South Korea
Songdo International Business District, built on reclaimed land near Seoul’s Incheon Airport, is one of the oldest examples of a smart city built from scratch. The district was designed with digital connectivity woven into its foundation: a network of sensors collecting real-time data, smart home integration, a pneumatic waste system that eliminates the need for garbage trucks, and infrastructure for eventual self-driving vehicle integration. Ninety percent of the community’s electricity was planned to come from solar panels, with business and cultural amenities connected to multimodal public transit.
Songdo’s technology works. The high-speed internet, digital services, and smart infrastructure are genuinely impressive. The problem has been getting people to show up. Despite the state-of-the-art facilities, actual population density and business activity have consistently fallen short of projections. Office occupancy and residential fill rates have been climbing slowly year over year, but the vibrant urban hub that planners envisioned hasn’t fully materialized. Songdo is a cautionary example that building smart infrastructure doesn’t automatically create a thriving city. People need reasons to move somewhere beyond fast internet and sensor-equipped streetlights.
Stockholm’s Royal Seaport
Europe’s approach to smart cities looks different. Rather than building entire cities from nothing, most European projects retrofit existing urban areas with smart technology. Stockholm’s Royal Seaport is one of the most closely studied examples.
The district focuses heavily on energy management. Apartments are equipped with motion sensors that detect whether rooms are occupied and adjust energy use accordingly. Residents can set predefined energy-saving modes that program the entire apartment based on how it’s being used. Appliances like washing machines, dryers, and dishwashers are “smart machines” that react to fluctuating electricity prices, running themselves during the cheapest time periods. The goal is to shift 5 to 15 percent of each household’s electricity consumption from peak to off-peak hours.
The savings for individual residents are modest in dollar terms, but the system-wide impact is significant. If lighting energy consumption across all apartments were reduced by 75 percent through efficient technology, peak electricity demand would drop by 200 megawatts. Stockholm’s model is less glamorous than a mirrored megastructure in the desert, but it’s producing measurable results in a real neighborhood with real residents.
Telosa in the American Desert
In the United States, the most ambitious ground-up smart city proposal is Telosa, conceived by former Walmart executive Marc Lore. The project carries an estimated price tag of $400 billion and targets a location in the desert between Nevada, Arizona, and Utah, though sites in Idaho, Texas, and Appalachia have also been floated. Cheap building land is a key factor in the site search.
Telosa is still in the planning and fundraising stage, without a confirmed location or construction start date. It represents the high end of American smart city ambition, but it also illustrates a pattern: the bigger and more revolutionary the vision, the longer the gap between announcement and anything a person could actually live in.
What Separates Working Projects From Paper Cities
The global smart city landscape breaks into two clear categories. On one side are massive, blank-slate megaprojects like The Line and Telosa that promise to reinvent urban life entirely. These attract enormous media attention and investment, but they consistently run into the same problems: costs balloon, timelines stretch, and the original vision gets scaled back dramatically.
On the other side are smaller, more focused projects. Toyota’s Woven City tests specific technologies with a few hundred residents. Stockholm’s Royal Seaport adds smart energy systems to a real neighborhood. These projects don’t generate the same headlines, but they’re the ones where people are actually living with smart city technology today.
The most telling pattern across all these projects is that smart infrastructure alone doesn’t make a city. Songdo proved that world-class technology in an empty district still feels empty. The cities making the most progress are the ones that started with a specific, solvable problem, whether that’s energy waste, traffic safety, or last-mile delivery, and built technology around it rather than the other way around.