A Surveillance University Is Rising in the Desert—And the West Is Helping Build It

In the sprawling deserts of Saudi Arabia, a new city-state is slowly rising from the sands. This city, named NEOM, is part of Saudi Arabia’s ambitious 2030 Vision Plan to make the oil-rich kingdom one of the world’s most technologically advanced nations.

The project is estimated to cost the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) $500 billion and is slated to become an independent economic zone with several interconnected, multi-modal city segments, designed with the latest cutting-edge technology. The project has attracted billions of dollars in foreign investment from corporations worldwide and is slated to host the Winter Olympics in 2029.

The signature project in NEOM is The Line, which will be the world’s first large-scale artificial intelligence (AI)- controlled cognitive city, operating entirely on next-generation renewable energy technologies. The Line folds the traditionally planned horizontal city into a multi-tier perpendicular architecture, where streets and blocks will be vertically integrated into a miles-long mirror-like structure stretching from the Gulf of Aqaba, deep into the windswept escarpments of the Hijaz Mountains.

To achieve its ambitious Vision 2030 plan, the KSA is currently developing NEOM University, which will be the first institution to seamlessly integrate the digital and physical worlds, training its youth for the specialized technological jobs of the future.

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While a smart city monitors around five percent of daily activities in real-time, the cognitive city utilizes a multi-domain information infrastructure to monitor and predict up to ninety-five percent of a city’s daily activities.

This ambitious project seeks to harness the newly emergent technologies of AI in tandem with the Internet of Things, to operate digital monitoring and sensing software such as facial and gait recognition, as well as bio-tech sensors and spatial analytics to create a city that will predict and proactively monitor everything from traffic to the daily routines and biorhythms of its citizens.

This ubiquitous connectivity has been termed “digital air.” It serves as a multi-point reference for data that can be collated and applied to a centralized AI command and control system. To accomplish this goal, the KSA has partnered with TONOMUS AI, which will build “The world’s first mixed reality metaverse as a digital twin of NEOM city … seamlessly merging the physical real world and virtual digital environments.” TONOMUS AI will also construct the digital foundations for NEOM University, a fact that poses serious questions concerning the protection of sensitive information, intellectual property, and proprietary technology developed within NEOM University’s digital architecture.

Over the last few decades, the Saudi Government has sought to modernize its economic model, moving away from oil revenues and the various subsidies it pays its citizens through this revenue, towards a techno-financial public investment greenfield project. NEOM is set to become the showcase hub within the Middle East.

This policy tactic is primarily driven by the KSA’s goal of becoming a developed nation on par with Western and Asian powers. It is also driven by its increasingly youthful and burgeoning population, over which eighty percent are below the age of fifty, thereby making the past fossil fuel subsidy model increasingly cost-prohibitive. Young populations with time to spare also pose a threat to the nation’s stability, as has been seen in the recent Green Revolutions that rocked the Middle East in 2011.

Therefore, following this chain of economic and security-based logic, the KSA requires a well-educated, technologically savvy young population to run the complex and highly specialized jobs that will be necessary in this futuristic cognitive city.

While the KSA has partnered with TONOMUS Technologies for the rollout of their AI systems, the underlying infrastructure within NEOM—namely, internet services, cloud computing, and telecommunications—will primarily be operated by Chinese firms such as Huawei, ZTE, and China Mobile.

These are the same Trojan Horse firms that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has utilized to steal billions of dollars of intellectual property from American universities and corporations over the last two decades.

Education reformers have long warned that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is strategically positioning China to become the global leader in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Backed by trillions of dollars in state-directed investment, this ambition is not merely about academic excellence, but is closely tied to China’s broader geopolitical objectives. According to a U.S. Senate report, “For the Chinese government, international scientific collaboration is not about advancing science, it is to advance China’s national security interests.” In this context, every Chinese corporation must be understood not as an independent entity, but as an extension of the CCP’s strategic apparatus.

This reality has urgent implications for Western entities considering involvement in NEOM University’s development of AI. The KSA, which is funding the futuristic NEOM project, has forged a comprehensive strategic partnership with the Chinese government. This includes collaboration on developing Saudi Arabia’s telecommunications infrastructure and digital systems, core components of national security. The KSA is also a major participant in China’s Belt and Road Initiative and a member of BRICS, the coalition that is actively creating parallel financial systems to rival the U.S. dollar, expanding trade in non-dollar currencies, and coordinating resistance to Western influence.

Collectively, these partnerships suggest that any Western investment in NEOM’s AI programs may function as a direct pipeline to China, enabling the CCP to access cutting-edge research and technologies developed under the guise of global collaboration.

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If one views the NEOM University’s website, one will see that the university is being led by the former University of Illinois Urbana Champaign Provost and Vice Chancellor, who states that, “NEOM is establishing a world-class education research and innovation ecosystem bringing together the world’s greatest minds to co-create a vibrant diverse community to drive progress, pilot new ways of living and focus on the world’s biggest challenges.” TONOMUS AI echoes this sentiment: “In a diverse world you have all aspects of the rainbow, but the potential to create value is in an inclusive world where all aspects of the rainbow are talking and communicating with one another.”

This may sound promising to globalist-minded techno-utopian social justice advocates. However, the problem is that NEOM University, along with all its proprietary research, confidential data, and information, will be controlled and monitored by the Saudi Government, and its foundational digital architecture will be used in tandem with the CCP.

In the KSA, homosexuality is illegal, carrying a maximum penalty of death. Furthermore, freedom of speech is heavily censured and can lead to arbitrary arrest and lengthy prison terms.

Even if NEOM is an autonomous investment zone, real-time and predictive monitoring should prompt any academic considering research in NEOM to think twice about writing anything contrary to Saudi governmental policies or stating anything adverse about foreign affairs or relations with China. Considering that every movement, every reaction, everything one searches, writes, or says is monitored, analyzed, and predicted, is what one does or says in the privacy of one’s home truly safe?

TONOMUS AI states that all user data will be voluntary: “If we don’t establish trust and can’t get your data, we can’t create value.” Yet, how would one function in a city that is ninety-five percent driven by AI without providing your data?

Proponents of NEOM argue that its AI systems and analytics will serve as a Guardian Angel; however, it is in many ways much more reminiscent of Big Brother. While cognitive cities may provide comfort, they will also permit control.

Furthermore, the foundational digital infrastructure upon which NEOM is designed is controlled by China, and thus socially minded private investors and educational professionals are not contributing to a diverse global community with a green future, but rather towards the development of state of the art technologies and research that will aid the KSA and the CCP in strengthening their comprehensive national power in a newly emergent multi-polar world.

NEOM’s website promotes its commitment to diversity, encouraging people to “Celebrate NEOM’s diversity and help us to create a working environment where everyone is free to be themselves, by valuing different perspectives, identities, and opinions, and encouraging a free and open exchange of ideas.”

However, any exchange of ideas may just land an individual in prison. As Amnesty International’s Bissan Fakih has stated, “While Saudi authorities lead discussions on shaping the future of Internet governance, they continue to lock up, forcibly disappear and impose decades long prison sentences and travel bans for people’s online expression.”

By utilizing the nomenclature and semantics of post-modernist Western culture to create the public façade of a futuristic globalist city run on green energy that embraces diversity, the KSA is leveraging investment partnerships with Western AI firms and American university leaders to build a state of the art cognitive university, which will be able to siphon all data and direct all research towards their economic and techno-industrial-military complex.

One of America’s strongest assets lies in its first-rate education system; yet, American academics and tech investors are ceding this strong suit to rival powers, whose own university models will soon diverge and pursue their own interests with our home-grown technology.

It should be disconcerting to consider that the U.S., for so long the leader in visionary projects, is taking a backseat in rolling out large-scale intelligent university development, while the Saudis are at the forefront in their ambitious and visionary cognitive city conception. China is pursuing the same technological arc, while the West is falling steadily behind.

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Jared Gould, Managing Editor of this site, has been tracing how China exploits U.S. universities to advance its military ambitions. He offers this observation: “What ascends in China is a regime of silence—a place where truth is outlawed, the human spirit is shackled, and beauty is sacrificed at the altar of control.” Much the same could be said of NEOM, where American academics and corporations are enabling the rise of a sleek, high-tech authoritarianism disguised as a cosmopolitan utopia. The vision is seductive, but the underlying reality is chilling.

This moment recalls Oswald Spengler’s prescient warning in his 1918 magnum opus, The Decline of the West. Spengler foresaw that the West’s Faustian obsession with technological progress would ultimately lead to its diffusion into rival civilizations—cultures that reject Western values, yet use Western innovations to undermine its global influence. NEOM may well be a case in point.

Spengler was both prescient and correct in his analysis, and the West now faces a multi-polar world and a host of new geo-political rivals. Thus, the path to a more secure and promising future for the West is not to freely export next-generation technology to any nation willing to pay for it, but to impose investment restrictions and export controls on authoritarian regimes that reject universal human rights and actively work to undermine the Western way of life.

As the National Association for Scholars has reiterated time and again, authentic academic inquiry involves the search for truth, not adherence to a dogmatic ideology, whether that be cultural Marxism, Shariah Law, or the CCP’s party line.

Image: “The Line city location” by Luistxo on Wikimedia Commons