If you’ve had a hard time opening a favorite website, placing an order online, or getting into your bank accounts the past couple of days, odds are you can thank the ongoing regional war — two major regional data centers experienced outages, with one appearing to have come after it was hit by falling debris from a drone or missile interception.

Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank confirmed yesterday that “regional IT disruptions” were behind problems clients were having accessing its mobile banking and contact center services. We were also impacted: EnterpriseAM.com is one of the many services hosted on AWS out of the UAE, and our site was down for more than a day after the incident, forcing us to use a backup in another jurisdiction.

Why it matters: Data center outages in the UAE and Bahrain were a wake-up call for the digital economy, exposing centralized data centers as a critical infrastructure vulnerability that businesses across MENA had previously ignored. The attacks on data centers will also challenge the Gulf’s image as a secure hub for AI infrastructure — and could yet force a reassessment of physical security risks amid multi-bn-USD data center investments in both the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

What happened?

An Amazon Web Services (AWS) data center in Dubai caught fire on Sunday morning after being struck by unspecified “objects,” prompting the local fire department to cut power to the facility, including backup generators. The incident occurred on the same day Iranian ballistic missiles struck targets across the GCC, including the UAE and Bahrain.

Is it really that simple? AWS services are designed to withstand a single data center failure, but the outage spread to a second group of data centers, triggering a double failure that bypassed standard redundancies. At the same time, a power failure in Bahrain knocked out a single zone, taking other racks offline.

As of Monday night, we understand that full restoration of the two damaged data center zones will take at least another day, with both physical cooling and power systems undergoing repairs.

Why it matters

Data centers and their supporting energy infrastructure are now targets of war on par with oil and gas facilities. Taking them down is a fast way to disrupt government services, businesses, and financial institutions, raising the cost of the conflict — something Tehran seems keen to do.

The data center landscape is highly centralized, Saudi semiconductor design company Rimal’s CEO Houssam Salem tells EnterpriseAM, adding that a handful of companies control most on-the-ground capacity.

Regulations (and quiet pressure) on data sovereignty help keep things that way. Governments across the region have a host of reasons for wanting data about their country (and their residents and businesses) to stay within borders. In our corner of the world, the big issue of the day isn’t “data privacy” as it is in the west, but where data lives and who has access.

Simple economics also mean that clusters of data centers make good sense — until they don’t. The economics of hyperscale AI “push states toward establishing AI hubs which concentrate massive power supply, cooling capacity, and fiber connectivity co-located in a single campus to maximize efficiency,” Rihla Research & Advisory CEO Jesse Marks said in a note. While this is more economically viable, a single strike can take down an entire AI stack, as is evident by the AWS outage, calling into question how builders of AI clusters currently under construction will help harden infrastructure and design fallbacks.

Salem argues this centralization is going to change in the near future as more data centers come online across the region. Gulf states could also resort to embedding frameworks in their existing contracts with hyperscalers, allowing critical systems to be shifted to secure facilities in allied countries within minutes of a disruption, Marks suggests.

The context

Considering security risks to AI infrastructure is now a pressing priority if the UAE and Saudi want to become global hubs of compute. The GCC data center market is projected to hit USD 9.5 bn by 2030, buoyed by sovereign capital flows into hyperscale, AI-native infrastructure by the UAE’s G42 and Saudi PIF’s Humain. Humain’s data centers — currently under construction — were set to come online this year.

Regional stability is among the top selling points for those looking to attract AI investment to our part of the world. “The challenge now is to ensure that the digital infrastructure [countries in MENA] are building commands the same strategic protection they have long afforded their energy assets,” says Marks.

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