Middle East and North Africa

When Iran struck two Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers in the United Arab Emirates and damaged a third in Bahrain in early March, Washington quickly deemed the Gulf’s artificial intelligence ambitions a catastrophic strategic miscalculation. Gulf states had made a multihundred-billion-dollar bet on AI infrastructure in a volatile, risky region.

The proposed solution was to relocate AI workloads that operate out of the Gulf to safer locations. This rested on two beliefs: The Gulf is too unstable for critical infrastructure, and there is no playbook for building AI infrastructure in such contested territory.

When Iran struck two Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers in the United Arab Emirates and damaged a third in Bahrain in early March, Washington quickly deemed the Gulf’s artificial intelligence ambitions a catastrophic strategic miscalculation. Gulf states had made a multihundred-billion-dollar bet on AI infrastructure in a volatile, risky region.

The proposed solution was to relocate AI workloads that operate out of the Gulf to safer locations. This rested on two beliefs: The Gulf is too unstable for critical infrastructure, and there is no playbook for building AI infrastructure in such contested territory.

Both assumptions deserve examination, and the second is not true. A playbook already exists, written under far heavier fire, in Europe. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Kyiv has kept its digital infrastructure running through sustained bombardment. It moved terabytes of government data across borders in a matter of weeks to keep government services functioning and the state digitally intact, rebuilt its power grid and broader architecture around the assumption of continued Russian aerial attacks, and treated survivability as the core design principle of its critical infrastructure and, by extension, of its own survival and ultimate victory in the war.

The comparison is imperfect, and the differences in geography and war intensity matter. But Ukraine remains the only state to have stress-tested its digital infrastructure in a full-scale war with a bigger enemy, and its lessons map onto the Gulf’s AI buildup after the Iran war. The question facing Gulf capitals is how they can adapt Kyiv’s wartime playbook to their own threat environment.

The case for relocating the Gulf’s compute ambitions rests on a fundamental misreading of why Gulf states are dedicating enormous resources to AI. The core belief in Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Doha, and other Gulf capitals is clear: They cannot miss the next economic transformation that will reshape geopolitical powers and their countries’ place in the global order. They missed the Industrial Revolution, and when the post-World War II energy-dependent global order enriched them financially, the gains lacked strategic depth, leaving their political economy tied to the oil boom. AI is seen differently, almost existentially, for Gulf states.

It is therefore unsurprising that the Iranian attacks haven’t deter the Gulf’s compute buildout. Instead, the war has reframed the question entirely. It is no longer about whether to build—the Gulf........

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