Boring Company Digs in Three Cities as Nashville Nears Debut

LAS VEGAS — The Boring Company has quietly reached a milestone no tunneling firm has matched: simultaneous active digging in three American cities, with Las Vegas, Nashville, and Bastrop, Texas all under excavation as the company's Loop network scales from novelty to infrastructure.

The expansion is anchored by the Vegas Loop, which has now carried more than 4 million passengers across its 11 operational stations. Clark County and the City of Las Vegas have approved an eventual 68-mile network with 104 stations — a plan that would make the Loop a backbone of the city's transportation future, building on the $25 million operating agreement the company recently secured for the Vegas Loop.

Nashville's Music City Loop Takes Shape

The nearest-term prize is in Tennessee. The Music City Loop — a pair of 9.5-mile tunnels connecting Nashville International Airport to downtown, Music City Center, and Lower Broadway — is targeted to open its first segment as early as fall 2026, according to the governor's office.

The machinery is in place to hit that date. Prufrock-MB2, the company's newest tunnel boring machine, completed commissioning in Nashville and has begun active mining, effectively doubling the project's dig rate. A third machine, Prufrock-MB3, ships in August. The privately funded project carries a budget of roughly $240 million — a fraction of the cost of comparable transit tunnels, and delivered without taxpayer dollars.

An on-time airport connection would be transformative for the company's credibility as a city-scale builder, proving the Loop model can be exported beyond Las Vegas.

Records in the Ground, Contracts Overseas

The engineering pace keeps accelerating. In March, Prufrock-2 completed a 2.28-mile drive in Las Vegas — the longest single Vegas Loop tunnel to date — while the second tunnel machine came online in Nashville shortly after arriving from Texas.

The pipeline extends abroad, too. The Boring Company signed a construction contract with Dubai's Roads and Transport Authority for the pilot phase of the Dubai Loop — 6.4 kilometers of tunnel and four stations — with boring targeted for the second half of 2026. Concrete segment rings for the project are already being cast, with the machine designed to dig and line tunnels simultaneously, steered from a control room in Texas.

From Curiosity to Backbone

For years, skeptics dismissed the Loop concept as a niche experiment under the Las Vegas Convention Center. The numbers now tell a different story: 4 million passengers moved, fares projected at $5 to $12, transit times of 2 to 8 minutes between key destinations, and three cities' worth of tunnel boring machines in the ground at once.

With Nashville's debut months away, Dubai mobilizing, and Las Vegas approvals covering 68 miles of future tunnel, The Boring Company is assembling the pieces of a genuinely new category of urban transportation — fast, electric, underground, and privately funded. The full project map is available at the company's official projects page.

If the Music City Loop opens on schedule this fall, 2026 will be remembered as the year tunneling stopped being the future and started being the commute.