Will the Iran War Evaporate the Gulf’s AI Oasis? |
Get audio access with any FP subscription. Subscribe Now ALREADY AN FP SUBSCRIBER? LOGIN
Get audio access with any FP subscription.
ALREADY AN FP SUBSCRIBER? LOGIN
There’s a reason U.S. President Donald Trump, the self-styled “Dealmaker-in-Chief,” chose to visit Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates for his first overseas trip after returning to the White House in 2025.
The deals (cumulatively valued at trillions of dollars) promptly flowed, largely toward the technology companies whose executives had accompanied Trump on his trip.
There’s a reason U.S. President Donald Trump, the self-styled “Dealmaker-in-Chief,” chose to visit Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates for his first overseas trip after returning to the White House in 2025.
The deals (cumulatively valued at trillions of dollars) promptly flowed, largely toward the technology companies whose executives had accompanied Trump on his trip.
Less than a year later, many of those same investments are under threat from a war that Trump started.
Nvidia and Tesla—whose CEOs, Jensen Huang and Elon Musk, respectively, both joined Trump in attending an investment summit in Saudi Arabia on last year’s trip—were on a list of 17 U.S. companies whose Middle East infrastructure Iran vowed to target this week, as it continues to retaliate against U.S. and Israeli attacks. The list also included Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Intel, Oracle, Cisco, HP, IBM, Dell, Palantir, GE, Boeing, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Spire Solutions. The one non-U.S. company Iran also namechecked, Emirati tech giant G42, has signed a slew of deals with Microsoft, Oracle, Nvidia, and OpenAI as the UAE tries to parlay its oil wealth into artificial intelligence supremacy.
And then there’s Amazon, whose CEO, Andy Jassy, also attended last year’s Saudi conference with Trump and whose data centers in the UAE and Bahrain have repeatedly been hit by Iranian drone strikes.
Foreign Policy reached out to the companies listed above about the war’s impact on their business as well as their current and future investments in the region. All of them either declined to comment or did not respond. But the missiles and drones Iran has fired at its Arab Gulf neighbors have punctured an image that many of them have spent years and billions of dollars building: of a safe, prosperous bubble insulated from wider regional turmoil and as a rapidly growing tech hub for Western companies to expand their foothold and footprint.
“Is the allure of Dubai and Abu Dhabi gone? We’re going to have to see,” said Adam Farrar, a senior geoeconomics analyst at Bloomberg Economics who served on the........