The UAE is redesigning its critical infrastructure as war reshapes planning

From runway fuel tanks to AI data centers, the UAE’s most strategic infrastructure is being redesigned around the assumption it will be shot at. Dubai Airports is weighing burying fuel tanks and reinforcing other systems at Al Maktoum International against drone and missile strikes, CEO Paul Griffiths told the Financial Times — while across the emirates, the UAE is quietly breaking up its 5-GW UAE-US AI Campus into a dispersed network and weighing underground builds, six sources told Reuters.

The AI Campus rethink runs on the same logic. What was originally a single 26 sqkm site in Abu Dhabi will likely be broken up into a network of data centers spread across the country, with authorities weighing air defenses and underground construction to protect facilities from drones and missiles, Reuters reported. G42, which is leading the project with Nvidia, Oracle, Cisco, OpenAI, and SoftBank, told Reuters the campus is “subject to continuous review in line with the security, resilience and operational standards expected of critical infrastructure at this scale.”

REMEMBER- UAE knows what an airport and data center under fire need to do. Two AWS data centers in the UAE and one in Bahrain were damaged during the June exchanges, and Iran’s armed forces released a video in April naming the Stargate UAE campus as a potential target. Meanwhile, Dubai International fielded 111 alerts of ballistic activity during the war, but only 17 actually hit. Real-time coordination with the UAE military let the airport shift passengers to underground locations at short notice — with as little as 10 minutes between alert and all-clear. One of those strikes did hit above-ground fuel tanks, briefly halting operations before flights resumed within about an hour.

Why it matters: The Gulf’s operator class spent a decade optimizing critical infrastructure for scale and cost. The next decade will price in redundancy and resilience. That means reshaping things like site selection, procurement, insurance, and construction timelines for anything that qualifies as strategic infrastructure: airports, data centers, power, refining, ports.

What’s next: More than AED 55 bn of contracts for Al Maktoum are due to be awarded this year, with the first phase of commercial operations slated for 2032. Watch the technical specs on the fuel-storage and utilities tenders — that’s where the new doctrine for battle-hardened infrastructure would show up.