Innovation
From Iran’s shutdown to Sudan’s civil war, conflict is making tech ecosystems go into survival mode — and pushing talent into exile.
Iran was ranked among the world’s rising startup ecosystems as recently as last year. A year later, it is in the middle of a conflict, and a weeks-long internet shutdown is choking off the local economy and freezing tech activity.
“We cannot do most tasks,” an Iranian engineer who works with Digikala, the country’s largest e-commerce company, told Rest of World. He requested anonymity for fear of government retaliation. “The company is trying to create a local LLM [large language model] with open-source models like DeepSeek, Qwen, or Gema, and now it cannot even update these models.”
Many of Digikala’s services, especially those dependent on artificial intelligence, have remained out of operation since the internet blackout began on January 8, he said. The Amazon-like company, which offers free, same-day delivery of consumer goods, was once among the Middle East’s largest e-commerce companies, with around 750,000 unique visitors a day and an estimated valuation of $150 million.
