{"id":379231,"date":"2026-04-03T02:00:26","date_gmt":"2026-04-03T02:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/379231\/"},"modified":"2026-04-03T02:00:26","modified_gmt":"2026-04-03T02:00:26","slug":"how-will-the-iran-war-impact-the-gulfs-ai-and-tech-boom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/379231\/","title":{"rendered":"How Will the Iran War Impact the Gulf’s AI and Tech Boom?"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s a reason U.S. President Donald Trump, the self-styled \u201cDealmaker-in-Chief<\/a>,\u201d chose to visit Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates for his first overseas trip after returning to the White House in 2025.<\/p>\n

The deals (cumulatively valued at trillions of dollars<\/a>) promptly flowed, largely toward the technology companies whose executives had accompanied Trump on his trip.<\/p>\n

Less than a year later, many of those same investments are under threat from a war that Trump started.<\/p>\n

Nvidia and Tesla\u2014whose CEOs, Jensen Huang and Elon Musk, respectively, both joined Trump in attending an investment summit in Saudi Arabia on last year\u2019s trip\u2014were on a list of 17 U.S. companies whose Middle East infrastructure Iran vowed to target this week, as it continues to retaliate against U.S. and Israeli attacks. The list also included Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Intel, Oracle, Cisco, HP, IBM, Dell, Palantir, GE, Boeing, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Spire Solutions. The one non-U.S. company Iran also namechecked, Emirati tech giant G42, has signed a slew of deals with Microsoft, Oracle, Nvidia, and OpenAI as the UAE tries to parlay its oil wealth into artificial intelligence supremacy.<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s Amazon, whose CEO, Andy Jassy, also attended last year\u2019s Saudi conference with Trump and whose data centers<\/a> in the UAE and Bahrain have repeatedly<\/a> been hit by Iranian drone strikes.<\/p>\n

Foreign Policy reached out to the companies listed above about the war\u2019s impact on their business as well as their current and future investments in the region. All of them either declined to comment or did not respond. But the missiles and drones Iran has fired at its Arab Gulf neighbors have punctured an image that many of them have spent years and billions of dollars building: of a safe, prosperous bubble insulated from wider regional turmoil and as a rapidly growing tech hub for Western companies to expand their foothold and footprint.<\/p>\n

\u201cIs the allure of Dubai and Abu Dhabi gone? We\u2019re going to have to see,\u201d said Adam Farrar, a senior geoeconomics analyst at Bloomberg Economics who served on the National Security Council under former U.S. President Joe Biden and during Trump\u2019s first term. \u201cThere is certainly a perception that they can reconstitute quickly if and when the conflict stops, but the broader question is: Can they bring the talent necessary to maintain these systems and develop these companies that were relying on these data centers moving forward? We simply don\u2019t know,\u201d he added. \u201cThe Gulf has planted the flag of data centers and AI as the future of their economic growth, and so there are real questions as to what their economic futures look like if they\u2019re unable to get the investment from these companies moving forward.\u201d<\/p>\n

The war has also sparked a broader conversation about the region\u2019s relationship with the United States and with Trump in particular. The Gulf countries have long relied on Washington to guarantee their security, hosting U.S. military bases and buying billions of dollars\u2019 worth of U.S. aircraft, equipment, and weapons systems. That dynamic also holds true for tech, as evidenced by the Silicon Valley-Gulf dealmaking sprees of the past decade that have only accelerated under Trump.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe pivot to tech is very much about Trump and opportunities to anchor their economic diversification with the United States,\u201d said Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa program at the London-based think tank Chatham House. \u201cThis is the president that they heavily invested in monetarily as well as politically.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump attempted to reassure those countries in a speech Wednesday night, thanking \u201cour allies in the Middle East\u201d and specifically mentioning Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Kuwait, and Bahrain. \u201cThey\u2019ve been great, and we will not let them get hurt or fail in any way, shape, or form,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Those words may not fall on receptive ears in Gulf capitals these days, at least behind closed doors, said Ali al-Ahmed, director of the Washington-based Institute for Gulf Affairs, given the disillusionment that has set in from the war over many aspects of the U.S. relationship. While the U.S.-made air defense systems and military bases meant to help them maintain that regional safety bubble have largely held up and prevented the damage from being much worse, they have also made the Gulf a bigger target for Iranian assault.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Gulf experience with America has gotten them what?\u201d Ahmed asked. \u201cThey spent money on top of money, money on top of money, and they are still exposed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite any potential dissatisfaction on the part of the Gulf with Washington and the war, they are highly unlikely to disengage from the United States on the security front in the short term, experts said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Gulf states are inevitably going to have to hold on to the U.S. because there aren\u2019t any alternatives\u2014the U.S. is the only anchor that they have and the only country that\u2019s able to protect them,\u201d Vakil said. \u201cBut over a longer period of time, they are certainly going to be asking questions and looking to build more indigenous resilience,\u201d she added. Some of that hedging is already in evidence, with multiple Gulf states signing 10-year defense agreements<\/a> with Ukraine last week to benefit from its experience<\/a> dealing with Russian missiles and drones.<\/p>\n

The U.S. tech ecosystem is relatively less entrenched in the region, but it would still be difficult to dismantle. And even with the war, the long-term incentives for both sides could just end up being too strong.<\/p>\n

Foremost among them is the Gulf\u2019s sheer abundance, according to Mohammed Soliman, \u00a0a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington and author of the new book West Asia: A New American Grand Strategy in the Middle East. \u201cWho is going to give you 5 gigawatts of electricity to bring online 5 gigawatts of compute? No one outside of China is capable of doing that,\u201d he said. (Compute refers to the hardware capabilities required to train and run artificial intelligence, such as processors, memory, and storage.) \u201cSecond, who has the capital to fund that? It\u2019s $30 to $50 billion for 1 gigawatt of compute\u2014that\u2019s a major capital expenditure.\u201d<\/p>\n

And while Trump has consistently pushed to build more data centers in the United States, the immense needs of the technology industry and Silicon Valley firms\u2019 global footprint mean geography does matter, even in the cloud. When it comes to AI at speed, physical distance can lead to data latency issues. \u201cWill you be servicing India from Virginia, or are you going to be servicing it from Abu Dhabi? Are you going to be servicing Egypt, or Nigeria, or Morocco from Saudi or from Texas? Those are fundamental questions,\u201d Soliman added. \u201cWhen you add all these factors together \u2026 those fundamentals are not going to go away.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Gulf states\u2019 investments in U.S. tech have continued apace even during the war. On March 3, less than a week after the United States and Israel first attacked Iran, the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) sovereign wealth fund announced<\/a> an investment in Silicon Valley AI infrastructure company Ayar Labs, backed by former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger. And earlier this week, QIA and the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund Mubadala both invested<\/a> in the U.S. health tech company Whoop.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe continuity has actually expressed itself in fundraising deals for companies that have happened amidst war,\u201d said Ahmed Helal, a former advisor to the Qatari finance minister who launched the U.S.-Qatar Economic and Investment Dialogue.<\/p>\n

And while investment from the Gulf has always outstripped investment to the Gulf, the Gulf states remain in a position to use their immense wealth to woo U.S. investors and companies that may be feeling more skittish as a result of the war.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think that there will be lots of carrots offered to ensure the long-term commitment to the market,\u201d said Helal, who is now managing director for the Gulf practice at The Asia Group, a geopolitical consulting firm. It won\u2019t just be carrots, though. \u201cIf [foreign companies] make a rash decision\u2014which I don\u2019t think they will\u2014of exiting out of caution or fear of security, they will find it to be a real uphill struggle to go back in,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also the sizable presence of Chinese companies in the region such as Huawei, Tencent, and Alibaba that will be well positioned to cash in and give the Gulf a \u201cstrategic optionality that frankly is going to be reinforced in a post-conflict era where the U.S. security guarantee hasn\u2019t been delivering,\u201d Helal said. The Gulf states\u2019 overarching message to watchers and suitors for their tech opportunities is not that dissimilar to the one they employed before the war, he said: \u201cWe\u2019ve got a high concentration of sovereign capital that is unrivaled, and we\u2019re long-term investors\u2014we\u2019re not bound by election cycles, our investment theses are chasing returns for generations of wealth \u2026 and we\u2019re betting on the technologies of the future.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There\u2019s a reason U.S. President Donald Trump, the self-styled \u201cDealmaker-in-Chief,\u201d chose to visit Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":379232,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,63509,114,15373,4920,169513,61,11829,169514,60,3410,35896,130758,8874,4444,383,3971,80,36222,2286],"class_list":{"0":"post-379231","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-bahrain","12":"tag-china","13":"tag-economic-development","14":"tag-editors-picks","15":"tag-homepage_regional_middle_east_africa","16":"tag-ie","17":"tag-iran","18":"tag-iran-u-s","19":"tag-ireland","20":"tag-israel","21":"tag-kuwait","22":"tag-middle-east-and-north-africa","23":"tag-military","24":"tag-qatar","25":"tag-saudi-arabia","26":"tag-science-and-technology","27":"tag-technology","28":"tag-united-arab-emirates","29":"tag-war"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=379231"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379231\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/379232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=379231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=379231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=379231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}