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. A playbook already exists, written under far heavier fire, in Europe. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Kyiv has kept its digital infrastructure running through sustained bombardment. It moved terabytes of government data across borders in a matter of weeks to keep government services functioning and the state digitally intact, rebuilt its power grid and broader architecture around the assumption of continued Russian aerial attacks, and treated survivability as the core design principle of its critical infrastructure and, by extension, of its own survival and ultimate victory in the war.
