Saudi Arabia’s OXAGON, the industrial city within NEOM, will begin construction of large-scale solar and wind manufacturing facilities in 2026, a move CEO Vishal Wanchoo says will create thousands of jobs and mark NEOM’s first wave of large-scale industrial employment.
“If I talk about OXAGON, the reason we’re creating OXAGON is for developing economic growth,” Wanchoo told Arabian Business at the Future Investment Initiative (FII) in Riyadh.
“All the companies that we’re bringing in are job creators. This is really the first kind of, I would say, at-scale job creation in NEOM with what these companies bring.”
The manufacturing drive expands NEOM’s industrial agenda beyond its flagship green hydrogen project into clean energy production.
“Beyond green hydrogen and renewable energy, the next big thing for us is solar manufacturing, wind manufacturing at a large scale, multiple gigawatts of capacity annually,” Wanchoo said.
“We expect in 2026 that we’ll have companies starting construction, and production starting in 2027 or 2028, depending on which technology.”
The plans will also include grid-scale battery storage facilities designed to stabilise renewable energy output and support the region’s wider power needs.
Wanchoo said OXAGON’s focus on sustainability extends to how these industries are powered. “We’re really looking at elimination of all carbon-generating assets,” he said, noting that backup systems would use green hydrogen instead of conventional diesel.
OXAGON, located on the Red Sea coast, is being developed as one of the world’s largest floating industrial complexes and as the manufacturing and logistics hub of NEOM. The site already hosts the Port of NEOM, which handled about 1,000 vessel calls last year.
Construction of a second terminal is underway and expected to be completed by 2027.
Wanchoo said the port’s expansion and automation programme would support logistics for the new manufacturing facilities alongside ongoing projects in green hydrogen and digital infrastructure. “Those are all the key pieces to put together,” he said.
OXAGON recently signed an agreement with Saudi data centre developer DataVolt to create a 1.5-gigawatt AI and data infrastructure campus powered entirely by renewable energy. The campus will use seawater cooling from the Red Sea and hydrogen-based backup systems to eliminate diesel use.
Wanchoo said momentum across OXAGON’s projects is now building quickly.
“I think you’ll start to see this become much more common, and a lot more people get to know it,” he said. “The general public will start to get a lot more exposure to it, with the goal of putting people in the projects here, really, as soon as possible.”
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