one hundred twenty-three stations
The Boring Company just raised three billion dollars. The constraint it needs to solve is not the machine, and it was never the permit.
On 10 September the Boring Company closed a $3 billion Series D at a $23 billion valuation, led by the UAE and related investment entities, with Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Temasek, Valor Equity, Vy Capital, Human Capital, Shamal Holding and Baron Capital along for it. That is roughly four times the $5.7 billion the company was worth in 2022.
The money is earmarked for more than 150 kilometers of underground infrastructure in the UAE, extending the Dubai Loop, plus expansion of the Las Vegas and Nashville systems and hiring across engineering, production and operations.
Now the other set of numbers.
In Southern Nevada, Clark County and the City of Las Vegas have approved 68 miles of tunnel and 123 stations. Fourteen stations are open. Public trackers put total boring at something like eleven miles, with roughly three and a half of those in passenger service.
One hundred twenty-three stations approved. Fourteen open.
I want to be fair before I’m skeptical, because the fair part is genuinely unusual.
The Vegas Loop works. It has carried more than four million passengers. During CONEXPO in March it moved about 82,000 people in five days, which is a real operating load in a real week with real crowds and no rehearsal. Transit times run two to eight minutes. Whatever else you want to say, this is a functioning transit system that people who are not journalists use to get somewhere, which is more than almost any urban mobility startup of the last fifteen years can claim.
It is also a very small one.
The thing that interests me is which constraint this round is actually aimed at, because the obvious two are both wrong.
It is not the machine. Boring machines existed before this company, and while faster tunneling was the original pitch, nothing about a 20-to-1 gap between approved and open network says the cutterhead is the holdup.
And it is not the permit. This is the part people get wrong, including me until I looked. The intuition is that America can’t build because America won’t approve, and that Dubai is attractive because approval there is a phone call. But Clark County approved sixty-eight miles. The permission is sitting there, granted, for a network twenty times the size of the one carrying passengers.
So the binding constraint is somewhere in the middle of the pipeline — between having the right to dig and having a station people can walk into. Capital, crews, utility conflicts, station real estate, the ordinary grinding sequence of getting a hole in the ground turned into a place with an entrance and an exit and a fire code. That is the part that has not compressed.
Which makes this a bet on jurisdiction, not a bet on technology.
The pitch to the UAE investors is 150 kilometers under Dubai. The company’s demonstrated rate of converting approval into service, in the one place where it has had approval and years, is what it is. Adding a second network in a new country does not fix that ratio. It starts a second one.
There is a real counterargument and it deserves saying: the UAE is a different pipeline end to end, not just a friendlier permitting office. One landowner, one utility, one regulator, sovereign money that does not need quarterly returns, and a client that wants the thing built as a matter of national policy rather than as a transit line that must pencil. That combination genuinely does remove most of the middle of the pipeline, and it is the reason infrastructure gets built there at speeds that look fake from here. If the constraint really is the coordination cost of fifty separate parties, then moving to a place with one party is not a dodge. It’s the fix.
I don’t think that’s a stupid bet. I think it’s a different bet than the one the company was founded on, which was that the tunneling itself was the expensive part and that making it cheap would make tunnels ordinary everywhere.
Sixty-eight miles approved, three and a half open, four million riders, twenty-three billion dollars.
Every one of those numbers is real. Only one of them is a hole in the ground.
Sources: TechCrunch ↗ · Electrek ↗ · Quartz ↗ · Las Vegas Review-Journal on the 123-station approval ↗ · Teslarati on CONEXPO ridership ↗ · Vegas Loop, Wikipedia ↗