The booming Gulf emirate of Dubai boasted on Saturday that it has created a "new global landmark," with its Burj Dubai tower becoming the tallest building in the world at 512.1 metres (1,680 feet).
Burj Dubai, Arabic for Dubai Tower, now surpasses Taiwan's Taipei 101 which is 508 metres (1,667 feet) tall, and has 141 storeys, more than any other building in the world, developers Emaar Properties said in a statement.
The skyscraper, being built by South Korea's Samsung and scheduled for completion next year, is one of a string of grandiose projects taking shape in Dubai, which is part of the United Arab Emirates.
The statement did not reveal the final projected height or number of storeys of the tower, which Emaar has kept secret since launching the project in January 2004.
But Emaar officials have said the skyscraper, which will have cost one billion dollars by the time it is completed at the end of 2008, will be more than 700 metres (2,296 feet) tall and have more than 160 storeys.
Burj Dubai "became the tallest building in the world in just 1,276 days," leaving behind other skyscrapers which previously defined tall tower architecture such as Malaysia's Petronas Towers, Chicago's Sears Tower and New York's Empire State Building, Emaar said.
Burj Dubai is the centrepiece of a 20-billion-dollar venture featuring the construction of a new district, "Downtown Burj Dubai," that will house 30,000 apartments and the world's largest shopping mall.
Emaar, in which the Dubai government has a 32.5 percent stake, is seeing its profits climb thanks to a construction boom. It posted a first half net profit of 893 million dollars for an on-year rise of seven percent.
But the real estate giant is facing competition in Dubai itself, where the city state's other property development major, Nakheel, has announced it will build "Al-Burj" or "The Tower"-whose projected height also remains a closely guarded secret.
Nakheel is behind such feats as three palm tree-shaped man-made islands and "The World", a cluster of some 300 islands looking like a blurred vision of the planet's nations being built off Dubai's coast. Dubai also prides itself on the sail-shaped Burj Al-Arab hotel, one of the city state's best known structures.
Another venture gradually emerging across its desert sands is Dubailand, a cluster of multi-billion-dollar projects touted as the Middle East's own Orlando.
Last month, Dubai paid 100 million dollars to buy the Queen Elizabeth 2, one of the world's most majestic cruise liners, which it plans to turn into a luxury floating hotel. Faced with dwindling oil wealth, the Western-oriented emirate has raced to posit itself as a business and leisure hub. It aims to more than double the number of tourists to 15 million by 2015.
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