Iran's drone attacks on American data centers in the UAE and Bahrain have caused damages whose effects on artificial intelligence and digital technology projects in the region continue. These attacks, which followed the onset of military conflicts between the United States and the Israeli regime against Iran, have become one of the major challenges for the Gulf Arab countries.
Current and Future Costs
Reports indicate that American data centers in Abu Dhabi and Bahrain are still facing serious problems more than 6 months after the attacks. These issues have not only disrupted current services but have also harmed calculations for future investments in the region. Specifically, Amazon has asked its customers to move their data to other regions, as the company has not yet announced a specific date for returning to normal operations.
Read more: Amazon Web Services Unable to Restore Bahrain Data Network
Data centers are considered critical infrastructure for the digital economy and banking services, and thus, damage to them is not limited to financial losses. This issue highlights the vulnerability of Gulf countries to military threats and its impact on economic security.
Challenges Facing Major Investments
In recent years, the United Arab Emirates has sought to become one of the main centers of artificial intelligence in the world and has engaged in extensive diplomatic negotiations with the United States to achieve advanced technologies. During the U.S. President's visit to Abu Dhabi, a plan to build a massive data center complex requiring 5 gigawatts of electricity was unveiled, which was supposed to be operated by OpenAI as the first tenant of the complex.
However, with the outbreak of war and attacks, the status of these contracts and projects has been severely affected, and OpenAI has yet to sign the lease for this project. This situation somewhat reflects investors' lack of confidence in the future security and economic stability of the region.
The cost of building artificial intelligence data centers is very high, and estimates show that each gigawatt of capacity for these centers, including infrastructure, costs at least $50 billion. Therefore, given the geographical location of these facilities and the risks associated with war, investment in this area has faced serious challenges.
To reduce vulnerability, Abu Dhabi officials have considered options such as building underground data centers and deploying defensive systems. However, these solutions also come with high costs and somewhat shift the financial burden of the war onto investors.
Ultimately, the impacts of these attacks have been so serious that they have affected the performance of banking applications and financial technology platforms in the region, causing service disruptions. More than 6 months after the attacks, over 130 computing services in the Abu Dhabi center and 140 services in the Bahrain center are still facing serious issues.
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