Iranian Attacks Need Not Change the Gulf’s AI Ambitions

When Iran struck two Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers in the United Arab Emirates and damaged a third in Bahrain in early March, Washington quickly deemed the Gulf’s artificial intelligence ambitions a catastrophic strategic miscalculation. Gulf states had made a multihundred-billion-dollar bet on AI infrastructure in a volatile, risky region.

The proposed solution was to relocate AI workloads that operate out of the Gulf to safer locations. This rested on two beliefs: The Gulf is too unstable for critical infrastructure, and there is no playbook for building AI infrastructure in such contested territory.

Both assumptions deserve examination, and the second is not true.

Photo by Fadel Senna / AFP via Getty Images

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