Once Iran ramps up, its going to be a free-for-all against all US data infrastructure. Iran has friends in low places so they don't have to do all of the dirty work themselves. This should be a wake-up call.

Why would water for data center be an issue there? They dont need to drink it.

It was business for those contries. Just like finance, travel and wgat have you.

Hundreds of millions of people live in the Middle East and a lot of large corporations are based there. Likely they thought it would be profitable, and likely they saw some decent use.

I think you are overfitting to temperature as a variable in this decision making equation.

Data centers can run on closed loop cooling systems which doesn't need continuous water supply. Only bottleneck is Energy supply which the MEA area doesn't lack.

I imagine the same reason they have a data center in places like Sao Paulo. More locally centred businesses want the low ping, and AWS wants to be your cloud compute provider of choice no matter where your target audience is.

If anyone here is involved in making decisions about where to locate such centers, I'd love to hear more about how geopolitical risk factors in, and whether you plan and price out contingencies (e.g. "This is near an unstable area, worst case is we write off $###M, but after Y years it breaks even. And the site is better in these other factors than alternative Z over there..."). Is it similar to factoring for geophysical instabilities (e.g. earthquake/tsunami zone) or other risks? Or would this type of event catch you completely offguard? I'm guessing insurance riders specifically exclude these types of risks.

Middle East isn’t some 3rd world. If you can imagine futuristic cities, rich Middle East countries are already living in them with all the oil wealth.

They have phones, computers, digital services just like the US and Europe. Makes sense they want a data center in the region, close to them just like the US and Europe have data enters close to their users.

There's a fair amount of nearby customers. There's decent connectivity via undersea cables to Europe, East Asia, and Africa. UAE, Bahrain, Qatar and Saudi Arabia are very encouraging of outside investments in their countries.

I did some work with hosts on GCP in the region and you get fun things like hosts in Israel has bad routes to customers in nearby countries and vice versa, though. I don't know if AWS has access to better routing. Definitely a case where physical distance doesn't really correspond with network distance.

Because there are customers there

Yes, and also pushed for by the Israeli and US governments. Tech investment is part of the Abraham Accords - i.e this is part of the prerequisites for normalization of ties with Israel.

It's extremely efficient from an evaporative cooling perspective.

I was thinking the same thing about cooling. I guess a high pressure heat pump can work in any environment if it compresses a gas up to a temperature that’s higher than ambient. Couple that with abundant cheap energy — sunny, oily, and gassy! — and it doesn’t seem unreasonable at all.

Data governance compliance is a huge issue for some industries. "The days can't leave the country" will drive AWSs normal customers to demand bespoke regions setup and turned on

Electricity? It's probably one of the best places in the world to have a solar+battery installation?

It's not that they don't want to hit the ones in Israel, it's that they're better defended, and further away.

Bahrain to Iran is ~140 miles. Dubai is ~100 miles. Israel is closer to ~600.

It's supposed to show to regional US allies that the American military cannot really protect them, pushing them to apply pressure to end the war in the short term, and to cool their relationship with the US and Israel in the long term.

It has had some effect; the emirates are desperate to find a way out of this conflict, and various figures have publicly said "the system of alliances [with the US] has worked but needs to be modernized" - i.e. we can't allow Americans to do what they want anymore.

The data centers in Israel are protected by their AA systems that have more interceptors available than the Emirates. For weeks there are rumors about low stocks of interceptors in the Emirates and Saudi Arabia, while Israel manufactures their own while also getting more from US, so their stocks were probably way higher and replenishment better.

Also the Emirates are in range of short range cheapo drones and Iran build lot of these, while Israel is farther away.

it's a good strategy. There's no point in trying to stop Israel by harming them economically because they know perfectly well that like for them, this war is existential. The Gulf states are financial hubs and tourist destinations disguised as countries and so their wealth is a neuralgic point, the Gulf states and also by extension the US actually respond to having their economies wrecked.

I am anything but a legal expert, but my guess would be that this falls under the aspects of force majeure. Which doesn't mean, that in a couple of years they try to take this to court.

No, I’d say they’ll get it back with free Iranian oil in a few weeks.

US gov is not going to reimburse a private company for war damage caused by a sovereign country.

Property insurance generally has war exclusions, insurance co will deny claims. Unless there is some affordable magic 100% war damage coverage policy sold in the middle east, which is doubtful, no insurer would be able to successfully underwrite anything like that.

The company eats the losses and the recovery efforts it wants to persue.