Iran threatens Gulf data centres: How exposed is the region’s internet?

Iran’s security chief, Mohsen Rezaei, has warned that cables, data centres and artificial intelligence (AI) facilities across the region could be attacked if war with the United States erupts again.

The warning comes as the capture of Yemeni territory along the Red Sea coastline last month by the Iran-backed Houthis has raised concerns over the safety of internet cables linking Europe and Asia. Fierce fighting is under way between Yemen’s internationally recognised government and the Houthis at several locations, including Bab al-Mandeb, through which nearly one-fifth of global internet traffic passes.

Data centres and US business interests were hit in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates during the US-Israel war on Iran. Tehran said these attacks were in response to US attacks on Iranian civilian installations.

Active hostilities have largely ended since the June memorandum of understanding between Iran and the US, but attacks on ships passing through the global oil chokepoint – the Strait of Hormuz – have continued.

So how exposed is the region’s internet? Here’s what you need to know:

Why are data centres and internet cables vulnerable?

Because so much data travels through a few narrow routes.

More than 90 percent of data capacity between Europe and Asia passes through cables under the Red Sea, according to estimates by the research firm TeleGeography.

They enter the sea through Bab al-Mandeb, a strait about 26km (16 miles) wide at its narrowest, one of the busiest maritime routes connecting Europe to Asia.

Cables can be cut by anchors or sabotage, and repairs in a war zone need permits and safety guarantees.

Data centres, which run banking apps and cloud services, are large, fixed targets.

“An attack does not necessarily need to destroy the servers themselves to render an entire facility inoperable,” Andreas Krieg, a senior lecturer in security studies at King’s College London, told Al Jazeera.

Data centres depend on uninterrupted electricity, cooling and telecommunications, he said, while undersea cables “are difficult to protect continuously and disruption can affect several countries simultaneously”.

Has Iran threatened to attack data centres and cables?

Yes, repeatedly since the war began in February.

On March 11, the semi-official Tasnim news agency said Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has published a list of “Iran’s new targets”, including cloud infrastructure belonging to Google, Microsoft and Oracle in Israel and some Gulf states.

That same month, the IRGC named 17 US firms in a Telegram post, including Google, Meta, and Apple, as well as the Emirati AI company G42 as potential targets.

Krieg said he would take Rezaei’s threat seriously, but drew a distinction between Iran’s ability to cause significant disruption and its ability “to systematically destroy the Gulf’s digital infrastructure”.

“What makes Mohsen Rezaei’s warning particularly significant is that he is not simply threatening another set of targets,” he said. “He is identifying a new category of strategic infrastructure that connects Gulf economic diversification directly to American technological power.”

He described the warning as “fundamentally about deterrence”, aimed “as much at Abu Dhabi, Riyadh and Doha as at Washington”, giving Gulf governments a reason to discourage another US offensive.

Have tech infrastructure and cables been attacked before?

Yes.

In March, Amazon Web Services (AWS) said two of its facilities in the UAE were “directly struck” by drones, while a strike near one in Bahrain “caused physical impact to our infrastructure”.

Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank said its app was unavailable due to a region-wide IT disruption, though it did not directly link this to AWS.

In September, AWS said it could not restore several sites in Bahrain and one in the UAE.

Under the sea, three cables were damaged in February 2024, most likely by the dragging anchor of the Rubymar, a cargo ship disabled by a Houthi missile, according to the industry consensus reported by Data Center Dynamics, with repairs taking months.

In September 2025, two cables were cut near Jeddah, slowing internet access across the Middle East and South Asia. No cause has been confirmed.

The March attacks “exposed the limits of treating commercial infrastructure as something that automatically benefits from national air defence”, Krieg said.

“Gulf militaries can intercept most incoming threats, but even a small number of successful strikes can produce disproportionate economic consequences,” he said, adding that relatively cheap drones can threaten facilities holding billions of dollars’ worth of equipment.

Have the Houthis attacked undersea cables?

Not directly, as far as is known, and the group has denied causing the 2024 damage.

But in mid-September, the Houthis seized the port of Mocha and territory around Bab al-Mandeb.

On September 11, they reached Mayyun Island, which splits the strait in two.

On October 5, Yemen’s internationally recognised government said it had retaken Mocha and positions near the strait. The Houthis denied it.

Are there alternatives to the Red Sea?

Some, but they cost more and are still being built.

On September 10, Iraq signed a contract with Qatar’s Ooredoo to carry data from the Gulf to Europe across its territory, the Ministry of Communications said in a statement.

Minister Mustafa Jabar Sanad told the Iraqi News Agency the underground cable runs from al-Faw to Rabia near Turkiye’s border.

On October 7, Ooredoo’s international arm agreed to buy fibre from Iraq’s iQ Networks to extend the route towards Turkiye, subject to government approval.

Microsoft said in September it would invest more than $400m in subsea and land connectivity across the Middle East by 2030, in a blog post.

The technology news site Rest of World reported on October 7, citing an unnamed source, that Google and Meta had begun sending some traffic through Iraq.

Neither company has responded to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

Krieg said genuine resilience would require geographical redundancy, “potentially including facilities outside the Gulf”.

“That creates a tension between digital sovereignty and operational security,” he said, as Gulf governments have invested heavily in keeping sensitive data and computing within their own borders.

How will it affect the Gulf’s tech hub ambitions?

Investment continues, but the war has already taken a toll on the sector. Gulf states have staked their post-oil economies on technology.

In Abu Dhabi, the Emirati firm G42 is building Stargate UAE with OpenAI, Nvidia and others.

It sits within a planned 5-gigawatt UAE-US AI campus.

Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund launched Humain, an AI company chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, in May 2025 to build data centres and an Arabic-language AI model, the Saudi Press Agency reported.

Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund joined the US investor Blue Owl in a $3bn data centre push in September 2025.

In September, Microsoft said it would invest more than $10bn in Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE through 2030, with a new focus on “digital resilience”, in a blog post.

But AWS said it had “exhausted every option” to restore some data hosted in Bahrain.

Krieg said the threats would not “fundamentally reverse” Gulf ambitions, but would “change the economics and geography of AI investment”.

“The Gulf has traditionally sold itself as a stable environment in an unstable region. The war has challenged that proposition,” he said.

The UAE is particularly exposed, he said, because its AI strategy is “deeply integrated with American technology companies”, making Emirati infrastructure “more attractive as a target for Iran”. Qatar, with its diplomatic ties to Tehran, is “somewhat better positioned politically”.

“In many ways, Iran is threatening to do to the Gulf’s emerging digital economy what it has already done to its maritime economy,” Krieg said – to “make reliability itself a geopolitical bargaining chip”.