The Gulf’s tech sector — once seen as an emerging hub, with cheap energy, abundant land, and plentiful government and consumer appetite — is confronting a newly uncertain future.
Iran has made a point of targeting its “enemy’s technological infrastructure,” with US tech firms Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle, and Palantir all in the firing line.
Amazon data centers have already been damaged in Bahrain and the UAE. Meanwhile, Meta’s work on a subsea cable to boost internet connectivity in Africa via the Gulf, in partnership with a Saudi telecom company, has been put on pause, Bloomberg reported.
The tech giants that flocked to the Gulf, spurred on by the region’s push to be a major player in AI, are now belatedly confronting the risks that were always there. “Most non-energy investors in the Gulf underpriced risk before the current war, including US tech companies,” Steffen Hertog, an expert on the Gulf economies, told The New York Times.