World Records
The Tallest Buildings in the World: Burj Khalifa and the Race to a Kilometre
At 828 metres, Dubai's Burj Khalifa has held the title of world's tallest building since 2010 — and as of 2026 nothing completed has come close. The runner-up, Kuala Lumpur's Merdeka 118, tops out at 678.9 metres, nearly 150 metres shorter. But the real story is the building rising in Jeddah: a tower designed to break one kilometre, a height engineers once argued was physically impractical. How tall can we actually build, and what stops us?