Iran war forces UAE to redraw its 5GW AI data center map
The physical build-out of AI just collided with actual warfare — and one of the biggest AI infrastructure projects outside the US is being redesigned around missiles and drones.
The United Arab Emirates is quietly revising its plan for a 5-gigawatt AI data center campus — one of the largest outside the US — after the Iran war forced a rethink of how critical AI infrastructure should be built, six people familiar with the matter told Reuters. The project, announced during President Trump's Gulf visit last year as the UAE-US AI Campus, was originally drawn as a single 10-square-mile site in Abu Dhabi. It will now likely become a network of data centers scattered across the country, with officials weighing air defenses, blast-resistant construction, and — most strikingly — putting some facilities underground or inside mountains in the northern emirates.
The cause is not hypothetical risk. Two Amazon Web Services data centers in the UAE were damaged in Iranian attacks in March, along with one in Bahrain, and AWS cloud services in the region are still disrupted six months later. In April, Iran's armed forces released a video naming Stargate UAE — the project's $30 billion, 1-gigawatt first phase — as a potential target, complete with a map purporting to show its location near Al Dhafra Air Base, a detail two sources confirmed had not been public before. The base has been targeted during the war, which began in February. Air defense systems, drone and missile interceptors, electronic jamming, backup power and cooling are all being folded into the redesign, according to the sources.
The stakes are high because this campus is the centerpiece of a grand bargain. In exchange for access to Nvidia's AI chips and other American technology, the UAE agreed to cut AI ties with China and invest in Stargate's US data centers — the joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank. The project is led by G42, the AI firm controlled by Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed, the UAE's national security adviser. G42 says work is progressing as planned; OpenAI says it is making "good progress" with the UAE. Neither comment contradicts the reporting — masterplans of this scale are always "subject to continuous review," as G42 put it.
What makes this more than a local story is the precedent it sets for every AI build-out in a volatile region. We covered Abu Dhabi's push to court US buyers and keep its AI chip pipeline open past 2027 — Abu Dhabi's G42 courts US buyers to keep its AI chip pipeline open past 2027 — and the assumption underneath all of it was that Gulf money and Gulf land were the safe, cheap, fast option for compute. The war has broken that assumption: the first phase near Al Dhafra continues with hardening modifications, but dispersing the remaining 4 gigawatts across multiple sites raises costs, complicates the ultra-dense network design that modern AI clusters want, and stretches timelines nobody will put a number on yet. A US official, a Western diplomat and industry executives all spoke to Reuters anonymously, and it remains unclear how close the UAE is to a final new masterplan.
What to watch: whether other Gulf AI projects — Saudi Arabia's Humain, Qatar's compute deals — follow with their own hardening and dispersal plans, and whether insurers reprice AI data centers in conflict-adjacent regions.
If AI's biggest infrastructure bets can be redrawn by a drone threat, which regions still look "safe" for compute — and does that push build-out back toward the US and Europe? Tell us in the comments.
