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.

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.

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.

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

They have the cheapest oil in the world and in the future (and present) they will likely have cheap solar energy.

And until this fine misadventure, it was also possible they would get extremely cheap nuclear energy.

Given that the Gulf is fairly central, has tremendous flight connectivity, has tremendous capacity for business and business conference growth, Dubai was only looking to increase its share of global finance, law, and other major services, is a major center of shipping, is a region that has neutral to friendly relations with nearly every country, has 3rd world like cheap labor but first world like luxuries if you have the money, and a lot of money they were willing to spend on these data centers, it’s not the worst idea.

Of course, that whole plan has come crashing down now that having US bases has turned from an asset to a liability.

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.

I think the easy answer is: because there are customers there. It’s a region full of major commercial and industrial companies. I can imagine that you’d want data centers close to where those customer are.

Technically, I can see challenges in power and cooling, but those can be overcome. The real question is- Are there enough customers in the region to support local data centers? I think that’s clearly yes.

There are customers there, some of whom are large enough to create significant demand just by insisting on their compute and storage being local.

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.

> local politicians and monarchs who believe they have a seat at the table.

Are you from another planet? They DO have a set at the table because gulf Sovereign Funds are one of the largest and most reliable LP pools available for VC funds for quite some time.

The current AI buildout is heavily dependent on Gulf money.

Oil is not forever and Sovereign Wealth Funds usually have goals that are not simply acruing direct investment returns, it makes sense that the folks deploying 100 billions tranches will have some say on where to put all those H100 their money will buy.

Nobody sane would predict Israel and the US would start this war.

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.

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

My guess.

Edge compute. Data (coughlaugh) residency. Obsession with low latency on our 42Mb web pages.

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.

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.

Closed-loop water cooling systems are common and use very little water, despite what you may hear from alarmists.

Because there are customers there

Sovereign data requirements for government and business.

It's extremely efficient from an evaporative cooling perspective.