CoinDCX, one of India's leading crypto exchanges, announced the introduction of Daily SIP, a new addition to its monthly SIP experience that lets users invest in crypto every day, starting at just Rs 100. According to the company, the update will give investors a tighter
Redmi Note 15 has become more expensive in India yet again, with Xiaomi revising the prices of both storage variants by Rs 2,000. The latest increase comes just weeks after an earlier price adjustment, making the phone significantly costlier than its launch price
Editorial independence is core to our work. Some links may earn us a commission, without influencing our opinions. Apple reportedly bringing M6 chip and new colours to iMac later this year Apple is reportedly preparing a new 24-inch iMac with the M6 chip and new colours
Sonova launched its third hearing-aid platform utilising real-time AI on Monday, its latest effort to strengthen its position in a market that relies on rapid technology upgrades to shorten replacement cycles and attract first-time users. The Swiss company was the first one to roll
Drone deliveries are getting a full lift off and for Amazon Prime members the option to get their orders shipped faster is coming to more cities in the US. The company has confirmed that Prime Air deliveries will reach around 500 cities by the end of 2026
New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said on Monday his party will introduce a bill in Parliament that seeks to ban children under 16 from using social media, proposing fines of up to 10% of a platform's global revenue for non-compliance
Apple shipments are expected to decline by around 2.1% in 2026, before returning to growth of around 2.8% in 2027, noted Counterpoint Research. However, it is likely to remain a comparatively resilient due to the sustained demand for the iPhone 17 series
The Indian government has ordered Google to shut down hundreds of Firebase accounts that have been linked to online and bank scams, affecting many people in the country. These scams have become a major issue in India over the last few years and most of it is linked to the rise of digital payments
Iran’s calculated strike on Pax Silica will ripple out
This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.
Wars have always targeted the infrastructure of their age. Medieval armies burned granaries. Modern ones target communications and energy installations.
The Iranian regime has been true to historical form. Under attack by the US and Israel, it has been striking back at the oil and gas infrastructure of its Gulf neighbours, and has closed the Strait of Hormuz – the choke point through which a fifth of the world’s oil supply normally flows. The energy markets understand this kind of damage; they have priced it in for decades.
But Iran has clearly read the new playbook.
When its drones struck three Amazon Web Services data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain on March 1 – the first confirmed military attack on a hyperscale cloud provider in history – Tehran was not lashing out blindly. It was making a calculated statement about the 21st century’s most valuable infrastructure.
The message was simple, and it landed: The cloud has an address, and that address can burn.
The oil markets have been watching Hormuz. Far fewer eyes have been on the server halls. But these deserve more attention, because the implications of their destruction extend far beyond Amazon’s repair bills or the disrupted banking apps and stalled delivery platforms that left residents of Dubai and Abu Dhabi momentarily paralysed.
Iran’s drones didn’t just strike a set of server farms, they struck an assumption – the foundational premise on which the US and Silicon Valley had constructed one of the most ambitious technology partnerships in history.
That assumption was stability. And Washington is the one that shattered it.
Over the past two years, a remarkable convergence has taken shape between the Gulf and the global artificial intelligence industry. The numbers alone are staggering: Microsoft committed $15 billion to the UAE by 2029; Amazon pledged $5 billion for an AI hub in Riyadh; Nvidia partnered with Saudi Arabia’s state-backed Humain to supply up to 600,000 graphics processing units; OpenAI, Oracle, and Abu Dhabi’s G42 announced Stargate UAE, a planned 5-gigawatt campus in Abu Dhabi that would be the largest AI facility outside the US.
When President Donald Trump toured the region last May and came home with $2.2 trillion in investment pledges, it felt like the capstone of a new geopolitical architecture.
The logic was compelling. The Gulf sits at the geographic crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa, making it a natural hub for data traffic serving billions of people across three continents. It has abundant energy in comparison to America’s own grid, which is struggling to power the AI buildout at home.
The region has sovereign wealth funds of staggering depth and ambition to match: The UAE’s MGX had joined OpenAI and SoftBank on the $500 billion Stargate project; Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund had committed tens of billions to global AI ventures.
The deal looked good for everyone. Silicon Valley got energy, capital, and market access. The Gulf got chips, cloud infrastructure, and a fast-track to economic diversification beyond oil.
Then Trump decided to go to war with Iran, and the whole elegant architecture met a drone.
The most damning thing about what has happened is not that the risk was unforeseeable. It is that it was foreseen – and ignored.
Analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies had warned explicitly that in previous Middle Eastern conflicts, adversaries targeted pipelines and refineries. In the compute era, they argued in a paper published just weeks before the war, the same logic would apply to data centers and fiber choke points.
The question was not whether this would happen, but when.
Washington’s response was to build a security framework designed to keep Nvidia chips out of Chinese hands, not Iranian missiles out of server halls.
The Pax Silica initiative, launched as recently as January, brought the UAE and Qatar into a US-led effort focused on semiconductor supply chains and export controls. It said nothing about the kinetic defense of the physical infrastructure those chips would power.
“US government and industry leaders have prioritised expansion over kinetic risk mitigation,” Sam Zabin, a fellow at CSIS, told Rest of World. Ali Bakir, an assistant professor of international affairs at Qatar University, was more direct: “The security frameworks underpinning the US-UAE AI partnership appear to have focused on supply chain control and geopolitical alignment, not on physical defense during high-intensity conflict.”
It was, to put it charitably, a significant oversight. Washington spent years worrying about the wrong threat in the wrong direction.
The physical damage so far is serious but recoverable. Amazon’s UAE region lost two of its three availability zones when multiple data centers went down simultaneously – a scenario its redundancy architecture was explicitly not designed to handle. Banks, payment platforms, and enterprise software went dark. AWS has advised customers to migrate workloads away from the region, and is rebuilding. That is fixable, in time.
What is harder to fix is the digital geography of the Gulf.
Seventeen submarine cables pass through the Red Sea, carrying the majority of data traffic between Europe, Asia, and Africa. Additional cables run through the Strait of Hormuz. When a cable breaks in peacetime, repair ships arrive within weeks. In an active war zone, they cannot safely operate at all.
The sovereign wealth question deserves more careful analysis than the most alarming headlines suggest.
These are not small funds that can be depleted by a few weeks of conflict. The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and Mubadala are designed, as economist Brett Rowley has noted, to “withstand volatility rather than respond to it”.
Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, turbocharged by oil revenues that have climbed sharply since the Strait of Hormuz was threatened, may actually find itself with more capital to deploy, not less – though analysts note it has already signaled a 15% cut in capital spending as it reassesses its priorities.
The more plausible risk is not a wholesale reversal of Gulf AI investment, but a cooling. Several major data center projects in the UAE are already reportedly under review. Companies that had been preparing to break ground are instead asking what war-risk insurance looks like, and discovering, to their dismay, that standard commercial policies exclude acts of war.
The Gulf states – Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar – have so far defended their own territory with remarkable effectiveness, intercepting hundreds of Iranian missiles and drones over a single weekend.
“The region remains attractive to companies in terms of capital from sovereign wealth funds, government buy-in, available energy, and its role as a gateway to markets in the global south,” Tess deBlanc-Knowles, senior director at the Atlantic Council, told CNBC. Governments across the Gulf, she said, would be racing to reassure US companies and hold them to their commitments.
India is the most obvious beneficiary of uncertainty in the Gulf – closer in latency than Europe, rapidly expanding its data center capacity, and connected to the Gulf by existing submarine cable routes. Northern Europe and Southeast Asia will also see accelerated interest.
But these are complements to the Gulf, not replacements. The sunk costs in already operational Gulf facilities, the power contracts, the land agreements, the fiber connectivity – none of that moves easily. Hyperscalers will not abandon what they have built.
The deeper question is what happens to what has not yet been built.
Bobby Ghosh is a geopolitics analyst and commentator, formerly of Time magazine and Bloomberg.
Source: Scroll
Related Posts: Science and Technology, ai investment west asia, ai investments middle east, trump ai investment middle east, iran amazon data center, Iran, United States, OpenAI, Big Tech
India's semiconductor market is projected to reach USD 155 billion by CY31, implying a (CAGR) of 20 per cent and taking the country's share of global to roughly 9 per cent by 2031, according to a report by . The report said India's semiconductor opportunity is being supported by a combination of
11 hours ago
![Washington DC [US], August 23 (ANI): Dr Dre, the legendary hip-hop producer and performer, sees AI as another tool in the music-tech toolbox akin to](http://newsorbit360.com/files/news/en/imgs/its-a-new-tool-for-creativity.jpg?height=520)
Washington DC [US], August 23 (ANI): Dr Dre, the legendary hip-hop producer and performer, sees AI as another tool in the music-tech toolbox akin to synthesisers and asserted that only people "who have trouble creating" are afraid of AI, reported Variety.Washington DC [US], August 23 (ANI): Dr Dre
14 hours ago
Vine is back? Divine app revives six-second videos, bans AI content Vine is making a comeback through Divine, a new six-second video app backed by Jack Dorsey that bans AI content and brings back old Vine videos. Published on: Aug 23, 2026, 22:41:11 IST By Durva More Prefer HTon Google Share via
14 hours ago
The story so far: The head of Flock, a surveillance camera maker-operator that works with a range of clients in the U.S., issued an apology this month after the Washington Post reported that multiple law enforcement officers had abused his product network
1 days ago
Editorial independence is core to our work. Some links may earn us a commission, without influencing our opinions. Fujifilm X-T30 III review: The specs are familiar, but the shooting experience is hard to ignore The Fujifilm X-T30 III is a tiny
1 days ago
Editorial independence is core to our work. Some links may earn us a commission, without influencing our opinions. I tracked my sleep with these smartwatches to see which ones make sleep tracking useful I tested smartwatches with sleep tracking to see how useful their sleep insights are for
1 days ago
firms have become “somewhat marginal” in the artificial intelligence investment cycle given the scale of capital required, and large enterprises should increasingly fund AI companies alongside traditional investors, managing director said on Saturday
1 days ago
Amid growing competition from Anthropic and Chinese AI models, OpenAI said it is cutting the prices of its frontier GPT-5.6 Sol model for developers by more than 20% for the next three months. The price cuts are effective on OpenAI's application programming interface, or API
1 days ago
Union Electronics and IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw on Friday indicated that Apple could broaden its manufacturing operations in India beyond iPhones, potentially adding products such as MacBooks and iPads. Speaking at the launch of the Mobile Phone Manufacturing Scheme (MPMS)
1 days ago
Editorial independence is core to our work. Some links may earn us a commission, without influencing our opinions. Best 32-inch smart TVs in India 2026: Top picks across budgets for sharper viewing, smart features and entertainment Explore 32-inch smart TVs with Full HD and QLED options
2 days ago
Nvidia has made a minority investment in privately held to develop infrastructure to power AI across the U.S., the companies said on Friday. The investment will help Cloverleaf develop sites for the data centers, while Nvidia will support infrastructure buildouts for AI computing
2 days ago
Yuval Noah Harari on the economic and political perils of AI Humanity must not entrust its lot to clever machines, the bestselling historian warns Updated on: Aug 22, 2026, 14:21:37 IST The Economist Prefer HTon Google Share via Copy link YUVAL NOAH HARARI describes himself as a historian who
2 days ago
Anthropic plans to let enterprise customers exercise greater control over their data when using its advanced AI models, a source familiar with the matter said on Thursday, marking a shift in the Claude chatbot maker’s data retention policy
2 days ago
Asset manager suffered a last month in which hackers stole some personal information, according to a letter on Friday. The New York-based firm was among dozens of prominent U.S. and other businesses that were recently targeted by ransom-seeking hackers who use phone calls to compromise their
2 days ago
Zomato founder Deepinder Goyal has revealed a major design update for Temple, the wearable technology project he has been developing, saying the latest version is now less than half the size of the device previously shown. According to Goyal
2 days ago
Editorial independence is core to our work. Some links may earn us a commission, without influencing our opinions. Best Tech Rakhi gifts under ₹1,000: 5 gadgets your brother or sister will actually use Whether your sibling is a fitness enthusiast or someone who's always on their phone
2 days ago
, a startup building data centers in space, said on Friday it had raised $250 million at a $2.3 billion valuation, as it looks to expand AI infrastructure through . SpaceX's blockbuster IPO has rekindled investor interest in the space industry
2 days ago
The new Apple iPhone range is expected to arrive in September, with the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max among the key models revealed. The new lineup is also rumoured to include Apple’s first foldable iPhone. However, for customers seeking a traditional flagship smartphone
2 days ago
As Apple gears up for its major September iPhone event, the company is expected to unveil the iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max and an all-new foldable iPhone. The iPhone 18 Pro models are tipped to feature a faster A20 Pro chipset, larger batteries and upgraded cameras. However
2 days ago
Samsung Galaxy S26 FE launch on August 27? Here’s what the new Galaxy event could reveal Samsung launched the Galaxy S26 series globally back in February this year. Updated on: Aug 21, 2026, 17:09:08 IST Prefer HTon Google Share via Copy link You may be interested in 32% OFF Samsung Galaxy S26
2 days ago
As companies deploy AI across more users and workloads, Snowflake says attention is shifting to token costs, model choice, spending controls and returns. As AI moves from pilots to production, Indian enterprises are beginning to ask a familiar question: “Kitna deti hai?” Only this time
2 days ago
Editorial independence is core to our work. Some links may earn us a commission, without influencing our opinions. Everyday cooking can mean more than reheating when these convection ovens bring several cooking methods together Capacity, cooking modes and preset menus vary across these convection
2 days ago
![New Delhi [India], August 20 (ANI): The next phase of enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) will be less about deploying the latest models and more about](http://newsorbit360.com/files/news/en/imgs/next-phase-of-enterprise-ai-not-about-deploying-models.png?height=520)
New Delhi [India], August 20 (ANI): The next phase of enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) will be less about deploying the latest models and more about managing their continuous upgrades, costs and performance, according to a report by Straive
3 days ago
![New Delhi [India], August 20 (ANI): India's key strength in artificial intelligence lies in the applications layer, while the country is simultaneously](http://newsorbit360.com/files/news/en/imgs/indias-ai-strength-lies-in-applications.jpg?height=520)
New Delhi [India], August 20 (ANI): India's key strength in artificial intelligence lies in the applications layer, while the country is simultaneously building capabilities in data centres and other digital infrastructure, Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said in an interview with Morgan Stanley
3 days ago
Editorial independence is core to our work. Some links may earn us a commission, without influencing our opinions. Built for modern luxury kitchens, these side-by-side fridges make room for more without losing style Whether you buy in bulk or simply need better organisation
4 days ago
Google has a back-to-college gift! Get 1 year of free 400GB storage, better learning tools and higher Gemini limits Google is expanding its student perks with discounted premium services and new ways to research, revise and learn through Gemini and Search. Updated on: Aug 20, 2026
4 days ago
The first healthcare touchpoint for more than half of India’s population are the frontline workers such as ASHA and Anganwadi workers. Strengthening their confidence with AI-enabled tools on their hand-held devices, will significantly improve the quality and reach of primary healthcare in the
4 days ago
