The Gulf’s AI nightmare came courtesy of an Iranian drone

MSN ^ | 09/14/2026

[BenLurkin]

DUBAI—The day after the U.S. and Israel launched their opening strikes on Iran, the Islamic Republic shot back with swarms of drones aimed at the Gulf’s newest high-value targets: American data centers.

More than six months after the barrage, a damaged Amazon Web Services facility in Abu Dhabi and another one in Bahrain are still mostly offline. The company has told clients to move their data to other regions while it repairs the sites and hasn’t given a date for completing the work.

The attacks and lasting damage are complicating the pitch by Gulf states like the United Arab Emirates to become world-leading data processors for industries such as artificial intelligence. They add a huge new risk for U.S. companies weighing investments that can cost tens of billions of dollars.

The U.A.E. put years of diplomatic muscle into persuading U.S. officials to sell it top-of-the-line AI chips, ultimately swaying the Trump administration to give it the same access as European countries. In a May 2025 visit to Abu Dhabi, President Trump watched as the Emirates’ leaders unveiled plans for a data-center complex requiring 5 gigawatts of power, the equivalent of more than two Hoover Dams.

Emirati and U.S. officials boasted that OpenAI had agreed to be the inaugural tenant at the complex, with plans to ultimately take 20% of its capacity. That deal now appears to be stalled. OpenAI still hasn’t signed a lease for the project, people familiar with the matter said. OpenAI didn’t respond to a request for comment. News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.

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TOPICS: Business/Economy; Computers/Internet
KEYWORDS: amazon

[BenLurkin]

“Diplomatic muscle”

[Nateman]

The Joke's on them. All that oil money brought Islam back from the morbid backwater state it was in thanks to the success of Western science. Now a country devoted to World Wide Islamic domination is destroying the very thing that brought Islam back from the brink of irrelevance.