Saudi giga-projects are generating construction-phase site services, asset operations at handover, and city-scale municipal functions that have no private-sector precedent in the Kingdom. Red Sea International's SAR203m integrated facilities management contract at Trojena shows how large even the first category has become.
A giga-project has a defined end for its contractors and no end at all for its owner. The question of who runs a district of several hundred thousand square metres once the last main contractor demobilises is currently being answered three separate ways in Saudi Arabia, and only one of the three resembles a conventional facilities management contract.
The first market exists during construction, and it is already substantial. Remote sites need accommodation, catering, cleaning, water and wastewater, power, waste removal, transport and maintenance of everything supporting a workforce that can run into the tens of thousands. Red Sea International signed a contract worth about SAR203m with Italy's Webuild covering integrated facilities management, including operations and maintenance, for the main camp and spike camp supporting the Trojena dam works at NEOM. That is a two-year services contract on a construction camp, not a completed asset, and it is larger than many operating contracts on finished buildings.
Construction-phase services are a good business with an obvious flaw: they end. The camp is demobilised when the works finish, and the provider has to win the next one somewhere else. Companies built around that model are cyclically exposed in exactly the way contractors are, and for the same reason.
The second market begins at handover, and it is the one the industry usually means. A completed asset needs mechanical and electrical maintenance, cleaning, security, landscaping, energy management and the technical services that keep cooling plant, lifts, fire systems and building controls working. The Saudi facilities management market as a whole is put at roughly $52bn to $55bn for 2026 depending on the research house, and is forecast to grow faster than construction output for the rest of the decade.
Who holds those contracts is unsettled. Broadly there are four models in use. Giga-project developers can build their own operating companies, which gives control and builds institutional knowledge but requires them to become service businesses. They can appoint international integrated facilities management providers, which buys capability immediately at the cost of dependency. They can use joint ventures, which is the most common Saudi structure and combines a foreign operator's systems with a local partner's workforce and permitting position. Or they can keep the main contractor on under an extended defects and services arrangement, which is convenient and tends to blur accountability for the quality of what was built.
The joint venture route is visible in who turns up at industry events. Dussman Ajlan & Bros, a Saudi joint venture with the German services group, is among the speaking organisations at Big 5 Construct Saudi in Riyadh next week, and Al-Futtaim Engineering, which provides integrated facilities management and energy management across the region, is exhibiting. The presence of both alongside the giga-project clients is a fair indication of where the contracting conversation currently sits.
The third market is the one with no precedent. NEOM, Diriyah, Qiddiya, the Red Sea developments and New Murabba are not buildings; they are urban areas, and an urban area needs functions that a facilities management contract does not normally include. Street lighting, road maintenance, public realm, waste collection, water distribution, district cooling networks, security across open space, transport operations and the utility infrastructure underneath all of it have historically been municipal responsibilities in Saudi Arabia, funded by government. On a privately developed district they are the developer's operating cost, and they arrive at a scale where the difference between good and bad management is a line item in the sponsor's returns.
Nobody in the Saudi private sector has run that before, because until this decade nobody in the Saudi private sector owned a city. The skills required sit somewhere between a municipality, a utility and a shopping centre operator, and the workforce needed to deliver them at giga-project scale runs to thousands of people per district.
Two practical constraints will shape how this resolves. The first is information: an operator can only run what it can see, and the asset registers, commissioning records, control system credentials and as-built documentation handed over at completion are frequently incomplete. The second is labour. Facilities management is the most people-intensive part of the built environment, and Saudi localisation policy applies to service employment as much as to manufacturing. Recruiting, training and retaining tens of thousands of technicians is a harder problem than any of the technology in the sector, and it is the one least discussed.
What is reasonably certain is that the operating phase will outlast the construction phase by decades, and that the contracts being signed now are setting the structure the Kingdom will live with. The developer that treats operations as an afterthought at handover will be paying for that decision in 2040.