Boring Company Expands Tunnel Push: Abu Dhabi Study Deal and Faster Nashville Digging

The Boring Company is widening its international footprint while accelerating work closer to home. The tunneling firm run by Elon Musk has signed an agreement with Abu Dhabi to explore underground transport and utility tunnels across the emirate, opening a second UAE market alongside its existing commitments there.

The memorandum was formalized Thursday at the Liveability and Investment Exhibition (LIVEX 2026). Steve Davis, president of The Boring Company, signed for the company alongside Maysarah Mahmoud Salim Eid, director general of the Abu Dhabi Projects and Infrastructure Centre (ADPIC), with Mohamed Ali Al Shorafa, chairman of the emirate’s Department of Municipalities and Transport, on hand for the ceremony. The scope is deliberately preliminary: the two sides will examine feasibility, delivery approaches and operating models for tunnels that could move passengers or carry utilities, and they will also weigh Abu Dhabi’s suitability as a regional base for tunneling activity. No construction schedule or budget has been attached to the arrangement yet.

Davis framed the emirate as a natural testing ground, pointing to its growth ambitions and appetite for advanced technology, and said the goal is to see how underground routes can stretch urban capacity and free up surface space. The timing is not accidental. Last month the company closed a $3 billion Series D led by Emirati and affiliated investors, a round that valued it at $23 billion and carried a pledge to build more than 150 kilometers of tunnel across the UAE. That commitment sits separately from the Dubai Loop pilot already contracted with Dubai’s Roads and Transport Authority, a 6.4-kilometer, four-station link between DIFC and Dubai Mall priced at roughly $154 million.

Back in Tennessee, the Nashville program is picking up speed. The company told local outlet NewsChannel 5 that a third Prufrock boring machine could begin excavation on the Music City Loop in late October, with a fourth targeted before the year is out. Two machines are already cutting through Nashville limestone simultaneously, and crews are preparing a fresh launch site for the third. The company says it has applied more than 300 design and performance refinements to its original Nashville machine, and it is negotiating with property owners over more than 40 planned stations. Approvals are already secured for a future connection to Nashville International Airport, a downtown stop near the Music City Center, and stations at residential towers and the JW Marriott.

Construction on the Music City Loop kicked off the same evening Tennessee and federal regulators cleared the project’s lease in February, and the company has aimed at a first operational segment before the end of 2026. Las Vegas remains the other active front, where the company has said it intends to double the station count on its Vegas Loop by year’s end. Together, the Abu Dhabi study and the Nashville ramp-up sketch a company trying to prove its tunneling model can scale in very different regulatory and geological settings at the same time.