AWS is done waiting for the Middle East to feel safe again.
AWS data centers in Abu Dhabi and Bahrain were damaged by drone and missile strikes that began in February 2026, after the U.S. and Israel struck Iran. Iranian state media claimed the Bahrain facility was "destroyed." Six months on, AWS still won't give a repair timeline. Its status dashboard now tells customers to restore from backups in other regions instead of waiting it out, and support staff are available to help with the move.
That's a real setback for the UAE's yearslong push to become a global AI and cloud hub, a campaign that included lobbying U.S. officials for access to advanced chips. OpenAI's planned stake in a 5-gigawatt Abu Dhabi data center complex, reported at 20% of total capacity, still has no signed lease more than a year after it was announced.
UAE officials are reportedly weighing underground data centers, which would blunt the drones but do nothing about why Iran's Revolutionary Guard keeps aiming at American cloud providers in the first place.