UAE Leads Boring Company's $3 Billion Round at $23 Billion

The Boring Company raised $3 billion in a Series D round led by the United Arab Emirates, the company said Sept. 9 on its own funding announcement page, valuing Elon Musk's tunneling venture at $23 billion. That is roughly four times the $5.675 billion valuation the company carried after a $675 million round in April 2022, led by Vy Capital and Sequoia Capital and reported at the time by Yahoo Finance.

Sequoia and Vy Capital returned as co-investors alongside the UAE and its affiliated investment entities, joined by Andreessen Horowitz, Temasek, Valor Equity Partners, Human Capital, Shamal Holding and Baron Capital, according to the company's announcement. Musk was quoted saying, "Defeating traffic is the ultimate boss battle. Even the most powerful humans in the world cannot defeat traffic." The company said the money will fund more than 150 kilometers of tunnel construction across the UAE, additional hiring in engineering and operations, and continued development of its Prufrock tunnel-boring machines.

1. April 2022 round5.67 $ billions
2. September 2026 Series D23 $ billions

Source: Yahoo Finance, April 2022; The Boring Company, accessed 2026-09-13

The company is still finishing its first commercial network

Most of that valuation still rests on a single operating system: the Vegas Loop, which the company says has carried more than 4 million passengers through a network with 123 stations entitled by Clark County. As of the Sept. 9 announcement, the company's 25th tunnel overall, and 14th under Las Vegas, was being bored, and new stations at the Westgate, Encore, Fontainebleau and Sahara resorts are planned. Boring says its Encore connector cut a 15-minute surface walk down to a 55-second ride, and the system received a TSA Gold Standard Award in July 2025.

Project	Stage	Stations
Vegas Loop	Operating, 25th tunnel underway	123 entitled
Music City Loop (Nashville)	Tunneling since Feb. 2026, two machines mining	Not yet disclosed
Dubai Loop	Pilot phase, construction planned late 2026	4 planned

Nevada regulators have documented nearly 800 alleged violations

The UAE round arrives months after Nevada's Division of Environmental Protection sent Boring a cease-and-desist letter on Sept. 22, 2025, alleging close to 800 violations, including 689 missed inspections, and proposing a $242,800 fine, according to ProPublica's reporting. ProPublica said the maximum possible penalty under the company's 2022 permitting agreement exceeds $3 million, and that Boring was separately fined more than $112,000 by Nevada's occupational safety regulator in late 2023 after workers complained of ankle-deep water in the tunnels and chemical burns. Neither Musk nor the company responded to ProPublica's requests for comment, and a state spokesperson said Boring is disputing the violation letter.

Nashville's council voted against the next project by name

The company's next major buildout, the Music City Loop connecting downtown Nashville to the airport, has drawn direct political opposition. Nashville's Metro Council voted 20 to 15 on March 4, 2026, to pass a resolution formally opposing the project, the Nashville Banner reported. The resolution, sponsored by Councilmember Delishia Porterfield, cited the company's "lack of transparency, inadequate community and Metropolitan Council engagement, and troubling labor and safety practices." The vote is nonbinding, and Tennessee's state government has continued backing the project, including legislation that would strip Nashville of local oversight authority over the tunnel.

The political friction followed a labor dispute in the field. A subcontractor, Shane Trucking and Excavating, walked off the Nashville job site on Nov. 25, 2025, saying it had received only 5% of what it was owed for work preparing the launch pad for a Prufrock machine, and cited safety concerns over the use of wood bracing instead of concrete at depth, according to Electrek. Boring Company Vice President David Buss attributed the missed payments to invoicing errors and said the company would investigate the safety allegations.

Comparisons within Musk's own portfolio show how much investors are pricing on potential rather than results. Stoke Space raised its own Series E at a $10 billion valuation before its rocket had flown once, and Cognition's $48 billion valuation is at least tied to a disclosed revenue multiple that investors can check against the prior round. The Boring Company has never disclosed revenue at all, so the $23 billion figure cannot be checked against a multiple. The only public yardsticks are construction pace and the regulatory record piling up around it in two states.

That leaves the UAE deal itself as the clearest available signal. Sovereign investors do not typically lead venture rounds in companies whose core product, a system of car-only tunnels, has one paying market nine years after the company's 2016 founding. The 150-kilometer commitment folded into this round is larger than anything Boring has built domestically, and it is happening in a jurisdiction where the company will not face an elected Metro Council or a state occupational-safety agency of the kind that fined it in Nevada. Dubai's 6.4-kilometer pilot loop, the first piece of that commitment, is scheduled to begin construction in the last quarter of 2026, which will be the first test of whether the new money buys faster delivery abroad than Nevada and Nashville have produced at home.