The Boring Company has closed a $3 billion Series D funding round led by the United Arab Emirates, valuing Elon Musk’s tunneling venture at $23 billion.

That’s roughly four times its 2022 valuation of about $5.7 billion. And most of the case for it sits in tunnels the company hasn’t dug yet.

The company announced the round on September 9. Alongside the UAE and its affiliated investment entities, the investor list includes Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Temasek, Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Human Capital, Shamal Holding, and Baron Capital. Musk marked the raise with a line about the company’s reason to exist: “Defeating traffic is the ultimate boss battle. Even the most powerful humans in the world cannot defeat traffic.”

The money is earmarked for hiring across engineering, operations, and production, for scaling Loop projects, and for more Prufrock tunnel-boring machine R&D.

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The UAE is buying an unproven promise

The centerpiece of the deal is a commitment to build more than 150 kilometers of tunnel across the UAE. That’s on top of the Dubai Loop pilot the company was already awarded: 6.4 km of tunnel and four stations, with construction slated to start late 2026.

So the country leading the round is also the customer for the biggest piece of work it’s funding. Precast production for the Dubai pilot is underway, per the company, but no passenger tunnel is open in the UAE yet.

The one place Boring actually moves people is Las Vegas. Vegas Loop has now carried more than four million passengers, and Clark County has entitled a 123-station network after approving 19 more stations. The company recently started boring its 14th tunnel in the city, its 25th overall.

Vegas has gotten better since we last rode it. When we took some of the first rides in 2021, it was human drivers piloting Model Ys at low speed with no Autopilot. Now, it still pretty much that, but there are at least a few more stations.

The main problem with the Vegas Loop is that the company has yet to prove, even in simulation, that it is actually helping with traffic and is more useful than other forms of mass transit.

The company also started its first work in hard rock. Music City Loop in Nashville got its state permit on February 25, 2026, and tunneling began the same day. By August, two Prufrock machines were mining at once, with a third in final assembly in Texas.

A long trail of tunnels that never got dug

Since 2017, Boring has announced roughly a dozen city projects. Vegas is the only one carrying passengers. The rest is a graveyard.

The flagship was the Chicago O’Hare Express, unveiled in 2018 under Mayor Rahm Emanuel: 150-mph pods from downtown to the airport, with Boring footing a ~$1 billion bill. It never had financing or a signed contract, and it was dead by the time Lori Lightfoot took office in 2019.

The 2017 Washington-to-Baltimore Loop got conditional permits from Maryland and then quietly vanished from the company’s own website. In Ontario, California, a $45 million airport connector ballooned toward $500 million, and Boring withdrew rather than sit through a third-party environmental review. San Antonio’s transit authority picked Boring for a 9-mile airport-to-downtown system in 2022, then said the company simply stopped answering emails and the deal died in 2023. Fort Lauderdale’s beach tunnel, selected the same era, has been stuck in the same “ghosted” limbo. Los Angeles lost both the Sepulveda test tunnel and the Dodger Stadium “Dugout Loop” to community opposition and permitting.

That’s the record the new valuation is priced against.

Electrek’s Take

UAE is probably a better investor/project partner for The Boring Company.

They can probably guarantee permitting, and they like to throw things at the wall and see what sticks, which is basically Musk’s and the Boring Company’s way of operating.

My main problem with the Boring Company is that Musk promised me back in 2018 that he would release simulations to show how his loop concept was more efficient than other forms of mass transit, and he never did.

Without that, The Boring Company’s only innovation is boring tunnels a bit cheaper, and even that is up for debate since most of the cost reduction is tied to tunnel size and, therefore, capacity.

Elon Musk’s Boring Company raises $3B at $23B valuation, led by UAE