Construction on the Jeddah Tower, formerly known as the Kingdom Tower, has reached Level 91 at a height of 370 meters, according to Kingdom Holding Company's 2025 financial statement disclosure dated March 25, 2026. The project is advancing at a pace of roughly one floor every five days, with a workforce of approximately 5,200 people on site. The developer reports more than 8 million work hours have been logged without a lost-time incident. When completed, the tower will surpass 1 kilometer in height and exceed 157 floors, making it the tallest building ever constructed, eclipsing the Burj Khalifa's 828-meter record by a significant margin.
For the vertical transportation industry, the Jeddah Tower is not just another supertall project. It is a test case for technologies that have never been deployed at this scale. KONE Corporation is supplying 65 elevators to the tower, including two-story elevator cars designed to travel at speeds up to 10 meters per second, approximately 30 feet per second. The centerpiece of the elevator system is KONE UltraRope, a carbon-fiber hoisting technology that KONE developed specifically for buildings exceeding the practical limits of conventional steel wire rope. At heights above approximately 500 meters, the weight of steel rope itself becomes a limiting factor: the rope weighs so much that the elevator system spends a growing percentage of its energy simply moving the rope rather than passengers. UltraRope replaces steel with a carbon-fiber composite that weighs a fraction of steel rope while maintaining equivalent tensile strength, enabling elevator travel distances of up to 1,000 meters in a single run.
The Vertical Transportation Challenge
Moving people efficiently through a building that extends more than a kilometer into the sky requires a fundamentally different approach to vertical transportation than a conventional high-rise. The Jeddah Tower's elevator system uses a zoned express and local configuration, with sky lobbies at intermediate levels where passengers transfer between high-speed express elevators and local elevators serving individual floor groups. This is the same conceptual approach used in the Burj Khalifa, Shanghai Tower, and other supertalls, but the Jeddah Tower pushes the distances involved far beyond any previous implementation. The longest express runs in the building will exceed anything currently operating anywhere in the world, and the environmental conditions at those heights, including wind loads, temperature differentials, and building sway, impose demands on elevator guide rails, compensation systems, and control algorithms that have no direct precedent.
The project's safety record is notable in its own right. Eight million work hours without a lost-time incident on a construction project of this complexity reflects a safety management system operating at a very high level. For elevator constructors, who face the 6th-highest workplace death rate among construction trades, the Jeddah Tower project demonstrates that even the most extreme construction environments can be managed safely when safety systems and culture are treated as non-negotiable. The IUEC, which has achieved more than three consecutive years without a jobsite fatality among its members, has made similar progress in North America through exactly this kind of institutional commitment to safety management.
KONE's Supertall Strategy
For KONE, the Jeddah Tower is a flagship reference project for UltraRope and its broader supertall building capabilities. The technology, first installed commercially in 2013, has now been deployed in multiple supertall projects globally. But the Jeddah Tower represents the most extreme application to date and, if completed successfully, will provide KONE with a reference that no competitor can match for buildings in the 500-meter-plus range. This matters competitively because the pipeline of supertall buildings continues to grow, particularly in the Middle East and Asia, and the OEM that can demonstrate proven performance at 1,000 meters has a significant advantage in winning future contracts at 600, 700, or 800 meters. The Jeddah Tower win also comes at a pivotal moment for KONE, which is simultaneously pursuing a $28.7 billion acquisition of TK Elevator that would reshape the entire competitive landscape of the industry.