Future skyscrapers: what is being built, what is only announced
Three towers taller than 450 m have steel and concrete going up right now. The famous Saudi megaprojects do not. Telling the two apart is the whole job of a page like this.
Under construction
Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia is the one that would change the record. Its design height is over 1,000 m, which is about172 m more than the Burj Khalifa. Work started in 2013, stopped in 2018 when the contractor left the site with the structure at level 63, and started again in January 2025. In April 2026 it passed 100 floors, and by late July it stood at roughly 430 m with 107 floors poured. The facade is now going on behind the rising core. The announced opening is 2028.
Torre Rise in Monterrey is further along as a share of its target. It is designed for 484 m and 94 floors, and in early 2026 it was around 300 m, past the 74th floor, with 90 MPa concrete being pumped that high. Finished, it would be the tallest building in Latin America and the second tallest in the Americas behindOne World Trade Center. The developer aims for late 2026 or early 2027.
Burj Azizi on Sheikh Zayed Road in Dubai is the newest of the three and the least advanced. The design is 725 m over 133 floors, which would put it second in the world. Site work restarted in August 2024, and as of 2026 the piling and shoring are done. A building at foundation stage with a 2029 or 2030 target is a real project with a long way to go.
What finished recently, so it is no longer future
Two buildings get listed as upcoming long after they opened.Merdeka 118 in Kuala Lumpur topped out in 2021 and opened in 2023 at 678.9 m, which makes it the second tallest completed building on earth. It belongs in the supertall list, not in a forecast. The Mohammed VI Tower in Rabat, about 250 m and 55 floors, was handed over in March 2026 and inaugurated that April.
| Building | Place | Planned | Floors | Built so far | Target |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jeddah Tower | Jeddah, Saudi Arabia | 1000 m | 167 | about 430 m, 107 floors | 2028 |
| Torre Rise | Monterrey, Mexico | 484 m | 94 | about 300 m, past the 74th floor | late 2026 or early 2027 |
| Burj Azizi | Dubai, United Arab Emirates | 725 m | 133 | foundations and shoring | 2029 or 2030 |
Announced, and nothing more
Saudi Arabia's two best known tall-building plans have both stalled. Work on The Line, the 170 km linear city with mirrored walls, has been halted since September 2025 and is now pushed past 2030, with the 2030 population target cut from 1.5 million to about 100,000. The Mukaab, the 400 m cube planned for the New Murabba district in Riyadh, has been suspended beyond excavation and piling while the government moves money to Expo 2030 and the 2034 World Cup. Neither has a frame.
Dubai's Burj Jumeira, announced in 2020 at around 550 m, has never started, and references to it came off the developer's own website. Kilometer-high proposals have a hundred-year record of this: Frank Lloyd Wright's mile-high The Illinois of 1956 was never costed by anyone who would pay for it.
Two cautionary cases are worth the names. The Chicago Spire was designed by Santiago Calatrava for 610 m, got as far as a 23 m foundation hole in 2008, and the hole sat open for a decade before it was filled in. Nakheel Tower in Dubai was announced at over 1,000 m in 2008, with piling begun, and was cancelled in 2009 when Nakheel's debt came due. Both had a developer, a site and a hole in the ground. An announcement is not a building, and piling is not a building either.
The real direction of travel
Height is no longer where the engineering effort goes, and the biggest single reason is China. In 2021 its National Development and Reform Commission banned approval of any new building over 500 m, restricted anything over 250 m, and made the approving official personally accountable for life. China had been building more supertalls than the rest of the world combined, sothat one rule removed the largest source of new height on the planet.
Mass timber is the material people ask about, and it has a ceiling. Ascent in Milwaukee, 86.6 m and 25 floors, is the tallest mass timber building certified by the Council on Vertical Urbanism, and it took the title from Mjøstårnet in Brumunddal, Norway, by about a meter. Both use cross-laminated timber and glulam over a concrete base that carries the parking and the elevator shafts. Timber is light, which is a problem at height: a tall building needs mass to resist wind, and timber sections grow fast once you ask them to.
Carbon is the constraint that reorders everything else. A tall building's structure is its largest embodied-carbon cost, because strength at height means more concrete and more steel per square meter of floor. Cement accounts for roughly 8 percent of global CO₂ emissions, so low-carbon mixes with slag or fly ash and structural optimization that uses less material buy more than any cladding choice. The arithmetic favors keeping a building that already exists.
That is where much of the actual work now is. The United States office-to-apartment conversion pipeline reached 90,300 units at the start of 2026, up 28 percent in a year and 290 percent since 2022, with New York at 16,358 units, Washington at 8,479 and Chicago at 4,360. Office buildings make up 47 percent of planned conversions. A 1960s tower with a deep floor plate and a sealed facade is hard to convert, so the floor plan decides the project more than the height does.
If you want the record itself, the current holder is the Burj Khalifa at 828 m, andthe list by year shows how rarely the title moves.How these buildings go upexplains the core-and-crane sequence Jeddah Tower is working through now.