Saudi Arabia's Jeddah Tower has passed another milestone. After the latest concrete pour, the tower stands at Level 118, roughly 474 metres above the Red Sea waterfront. The update came from Ian Norman Miller, senior executive project director at main contractor Saudi Binladin Group and head of the tower's construction team, who announced the milestone in a LinkedIn post marking the pour. "For Jeddah Tower and the Saudi Binladin Group team, it's just another Tuesday on our way to 1km+," he wrote.
The number is worth putting in context. At 474 metres, the unfinished tower is already level with some of the tallest completed buildings on the planet. Central Park Tower in New York, the world's tallest residential building, stands at 472.4 metres. Wuhan Greenland Center in China reaches 475.6 metres, according to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. Jeddah Tower has matched that company while still having more than half of its planned climb ahead of it.
Where the tower is headed
Unlike those two finished towers, Jeddah Tower is designed to pass the one-kilometre mark. At its planned height of more than 1,000 metres, it would stand at least 172 metres taller than Dubai's 828-metre Burj Khalifa and take the title of the world's tallest building. The structure has been described as the world's first "skypiercer."
The project carries scale beyond height alone. The tower will hold approximately 530,000 square metres of built-up area, with estimated completion in August 2028. Once finished, it is expected to combine a Four Seasons hotel, short-rental apartments, Class A offices, luxury condominiums, retail space, and the world's highest observation deck. It anchors the wider Jeddah Economic City development and has become one of the most closely watched construction projects in Saudi Arabia.
The road here was not smooth. The project went through a lengthy construction stoppage before work resumed, which makes the current pace - a core that keeps adding levels months after restarting - the more notable.
There is also a design thread connecting the three towers mentioned above. All of them came out of the Chicago office of Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, and all were wind-engineered by the Canadian specialist RWDI. Jeddah Tower's narrow, tapering profile and three-winged base are direct responses to wind: the shape changes progressively as the building rises, so wind pressure never stays concentrated at one point on the structure.
What a climbing core means for formwork planning
As a formwork supplier, we read this kind of milestone differently from the architectural press. A supertall core does not rise because of concrete alone. It rises on the rhythm of its climbing formwork system.
A tower core at this scale is built in repeated lifts. Climbing or jump-form rigs anchor to the concrete from a few pours earlier, climb to the next level, and set up the next pour. The crane-less cycle of climb, set, pour, strip, and climb again is what turns a metre-per-week plan into a level every few days. Every element in that loop - the climbing brackets, the working platforms, the tie-back points, the panel joints - either keeps the loop tight or breaks it.
That is why we treat climbing scaffolding and formwork systems as the pacing equipment on a high-rise site, not as accessories. When the core climb stalls, the floor cycles behind it stall too. The whole building waits on a few hundred tonnes of steel rigged to move itself upward.
Concrete 474 metres up loads your wall formwork differently
Pumping concrete up hundreds of metres places demands on formwork that low-rise sites never see. The pour is deep and fast, and fresh concrete behaves like a heavy fluid: the lateral pressure on the bottom of a wall form can reach values that would deform a light panel. Tall wall forms with a high pour rate need stiff panels, strong backing members, and a tie system rated for the full hydrostatic head, not for the reduced values a shallow pour allows.
For wall pours of this kind we look at three things before anything else. Panel stiffness, so the concrete face stays flat under peak pressure. Tie-bolt capacity, so the form holds its geometry instead of spreading. And joint quality, because on a visible architectural core a single leaking joint means grinding and repair work hundreds of metres in the air. These are the same checks behind our high-tensile tie bolts and our wall system lines - the concrete wall formwork system pages describe the load logic in detail.
The material side is moving too. High-strength concrete is standard on supertall cores because a slender tower needs strong columns and walls more than it needs mass. Stronger concrete usually means denser reinforcement, tighter placement tolerances, and form panels that get cycled more often than the project schedule first assumes. This is one reason steel formwork lines built around high-yield alloys, such as our high-strength alloy steel formwork series, have found a place on demanding cores: panels that hold dimensional accuracy across hundreds of reuses change the economics of a climb, and the steel wall formwork pages cover the panel options.
A three-wing tower means almost no standard panels
The tapering, three-winged geometry that keeps Jeddah Tower stable in the wind has a direct cost at the formwork shop. A rectangular core uses repeated, identical panel layouts level after level. A tapering core cannot. The plan dimension shrinks continuously as the tower rises, corners shift, and the wing walls change angle. Almost every level brings a slightly different panel combination, and the closer the climb gets to the top, the more the geometry diverges from whatever was set out at level one.
For the fabricator this means panel systems must be engineered for rearrangement, not just repetition: adjustable panels, filler plates cut to measured dimensions, and corner solutions that can absorb changing angles rather than fight them. Mixed aluminium and steel strategies are common on cores like this - large standard zones get whatever the project's mainstream system is, and the geometric edges get custom steel. The engineering question is always the same: how much of the core can be formed with standard panels before custom pieces start dominating the cycle?
A useful check we run with contractors planning non-standard cores: count the custom pieces per level, then multiply by the number of levels left to climb. If that figure grows faster than the reuse count on each custom piece, the formwork budget is quietly becoming a fabrication project.
Wind shapes the schedule, not just the structure
Wind engineering influences more than the tower's shape. At 400-plus metres, the working windows for climbing operations narrow. Lifts, platforms, and panel handling all feel wind loads that low-rise sites never plan around, and the safe climbing calendar gets shorter as the tower gets taller. Miller's post credited the night-shift team - led by Prakash Panda and Kabilan Gopalakrishna under the leadership of Fahad Jamalaldeen - for safely reaching Level 118, which tells you something about how the work is actually organised: the climb continues around the clock, and the crews, not just the equipment, are the pacing asset.
None of this is a claim about this project's suppliers or methods; the sources cited here do not detail the formwork system in use, and we make no such representation. What the milestone does show is the engineering space that every tower of this class lives in - vertical logistics, load-rated ties, engineered panel geometry, wind-aware planning - and that space is where our product lines are built to work.
Practical notes for contractors watching this project
Three habits from tall-building cores apply to projects far below the supertall class. First, decide the climbing strategy before the first core pour, because retrofitting a climb system into a started core costs far more than designing it in. Second, rate the tie system for the deepest, fastest pour you will actually place, not the average one. Third, settle the standard-to-custom panel ratio early with whoever fabricates your formwork, and re-check it whenever the geometry changes.
If your team is planning formwork for a high-rise core, a slip-formed element, or a geometrically complex tower, our engineers are glad to look at the drawings. Send us the wall heights, pour rates, and cycle targets, and we will tell you plainly what the panels, ties, and climbing hardware need to carry.