AWS urges UAE and Bahrain customers off two regions it expects to be down for months

A migration recommendation moves the work onto the tenant. Service credits are priced against hours of unavailability inside a region that still functions, and they do not fund the engineering hours of moving workloads and data somewhere else. Seventy days, about ten weeks, separated the first confirmed drone hits on Amazon's Emirati sites from the status listing that still called both Gulf regions disrupted ^[14]. In between, the Bahrain region was hit again in April, with a fire breaking out ^[8].

The damage was not confined to one provider. Oracle has had a Dubai data center hit by shrapnel ^[10], an SES satellite teleport in Israel was struck by missiles [c13a], and US forces have hit at least two data centers inside Iran [c13b]. Iran's answer to the February strikes was aimed in part at US-owned data centers across the region ^[3].

The signing calendar that DataCenterHawk's David Sandars described is the part worth sitting with. The diligence on those deals looks to have been complete and correct on the information available: power was there, new subsea cable routes were being planned, and appetite for the region was high ^[4]. The forecasts agreed. Mordor Intelligence estimated in 2025 that the Middle East hyperscale market was worth about $4.61bn and would reach $16.38bn by 2031, a compound rate near 23.53 percent ^[6], which is 3.55 times the base ^[15]. There is no line in that model for a drone, and the commitments it helped justify are large: DataVolt plans a 1.5GW campus at Neom Oxagon, and Humain has secured 211 plots of land in Saudi Arabia ^[17].

The more useful lesson is narrower than country risk. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps aimed a specific threat at G42's campus in the UAE, still under construction, where at least 1GW is earmarked for OpenAI ^[12]. G42 is an Emirati company, so the threat followed the tenant rather than the landlord.

Here is what teams tell themselves about region selection: it is a latency and price decision with a residency overlay and a political footnote. Here is what the record now shows: the footnote reads off the co-tenant list and the parent company's flag.

The source does not tell us what those February contracts say about war, or what the insurance behind them covers, and that silence is the finding for anyone doing this work in May. Two rows are missing from most region-selection sheets: who else computes in the building, and what the counterparty owes when a region is unreachable for a quarter rather than an afternoon. Where the answer to the second row is credits, the tenant is self-insuring, and the honest place to carry that is the budget for a standby region outside the theatre.