The Netherlands has been building motor yachts for more than a hundred years. Feadship, Heesen, Oceanco, Amels — between them, the Dutch yards have delivered most of the great names in modern superyacht history. What they have never built, until 2026, is a 120-metre motor yacht.
That ceiling has now lifted. Project Tanzanite — currently in final outfitting at Amels’ Vlissingen facility, with delivery scheduled for later this year — is the largest motor yacht ever built in the Netherlands. She is also the largest yacht Amels has ever delivered, by a margin of more than 30 metres over the previous flagship, the 89-metre Here Comes The Sun. The build represents a significant operational and design step for Amels, and a milestone for Dutch shipbuilding more broadly.
The vessel
At 120 metres, Tanzanite has a 20-metre beam and 6,083 gross tonnes of internal volume. She accommodates 22 guests across 11 suites, with a crew complement of 43 plus captain. She carries two helipads and two swimming pools — a main-deck pool that serves as the social centre of the yacht, and a smaller pool on the bridge deck for more secluded use. A glass-bottomed pool above the beach club channels natural light into the lower deck.
The exterior is by Espen Øino, the Norwegian designer responsible for many of the largest yachts in service worldwide. Øino’s signature is visible throughout the design: a clipper bow, a five-deck superstructure with long horizontal proportions, sweeping teak decks against a pristine white hull, and a distinctive diagonal ventilation line that runs midships as both functional element and design feature. The full-height windows that wrap the cabin levels are the kind of architectural choice that has come to define his recent work.
Interiors are by Zuretti Design, the Nice-based studio with extensive superyacht credits including Scheherazade, Symphony, and Katharine. Zuretti’s scheme for Tanzanite, kept largely confidential at the owner’s request, is reported to use warm honey tones, lush marble, and a sweeping spiral staircase that wraps around a glass elevator running the yacht’s vertical axis. Curved furniture, statement walls in wood and marble, and a cream-and-brown palette anchor the residential feel.
The propulsion
Where Lürssen’s Nausicaä makes its environmental case through methanol fuel cells, Tanzanite takes a different but equally considered approach. The yacht is powered by a diesel-electric system driving Kongsberg Elegance pods — a configuration that delivers approximately 18 knots top speed while prioritising ultra-low noise and vibration levels and superior manoeuvring control. The Elegance pods, in particular, allow the yacht to be positioned with extreme precision without conventional rudders or shafts, and to operate at low speeds with significantly less acoustic signature than traditional propeller arrangements.
This is not a fuel-cell yacht, and Amels has not claimed otherwise. What Tanzanite represents instead is what diesel-electric architecture can do at the absolute upper end of motor-yacht design: a 120-metre vessel that runs more quietly, more efficiently, and more responsively than equivalents from a decade ago, without requiring the prototype-stage technology of fuel cells.
The build context
The hull was launched at Damen Yachting’s Galaţi facility in Romania in May 2023 — Romania has become the primary hull-building site for the larger Damen-Amels projects — and arrived in Vlissingen in June 2023. The float-out at the covered dock in Vlissingen occurred in September 2025. Sea trials commenced shortly thereafter. Final outfitting will continue through 2026, with over 1,000 craftspeople involved across the Damen Yachting network.
The build is managed by Deeside Maritime, the project management firm that has overseen the construction for two years on behalf of the owner — who remains undisclosed. Construction costs are reported to be in the order of $550 million.
What Tanzanite signals
For Amels, the project is a deliberate signal that the yard intends to compete at the very top of the custom market alongside Lürssen and Feadship. Historically, Amels has been best known for its Limited Editions line — the popular Amels 60 and Amels 80 series, which have given the yard a strong commercial position in the 50-to-80-metre segment. Tanzanite is something different: a full-custom flagship that demonstrates the yard can deliver above 100 metres at the same level of finish as its more storied competitors.
For the Netherlands more broadly, the project is a statement about the country’s continued primacy in large-yacht construction. Feadship currently has Project 1014 at 101.2 metres in outfitting, and Project 824 at 100 metres recently launched. Oceanco has delivered the 111-metre Leviathan. Tanzanite is the largest of all of them, and the largest Dutch-built motor yacht ever delivered.
For the broader market, the signal is consistency. The 100-metre-plus segment that defined private yacht ambition through the 2010s is no longer exceptional. There are 78 motor yachts longer than 100 metres now in service worldwide, and the rate of new deliveries above that threshold has accelerated significantly through 2025-26. Tanzanite is part of the cohort, not an outlier.
She is also the most beautifully resolved Dutch yacht of the year — a sculptural Espen Øino exterior, a Zuretti interior, diesel-electric propulsion engineered for silence, and the quiet authority of being, simply, the largest of her kind. Delivery is expected later in 2026, with first sightings most likely in the Mediterranean.
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Source of the image: amelsyachting.com
