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Data obtained and evaluated by "Arabi Post" on the map of cloud service centers and regions (data centers) in the Middle East and North Africa revealed that the area's countries rely greatly on American companies for cloud services. The data reveals the existence of around 31 American centers, many of them in Gulf countries, while the number of centers owned by Chinese companies reached about 7.

In the Gulf nations, more than 53% of the cloud infrastructure tracked there is American. Source: "Arabi Post" database of cloud service centers in the Middle East and North Africa (89 centers).

Within a few years, cloud service centers have actually moved from a "technical alternative" for reducing server costs into crucial infrastructure for the state and the economy: e-government portals, payment and banking systems, health and education platforms, and the operation of big data, artificial intelligence, and more. The recent Iran war (2026) revealed a brand-new measurement: the cloud itself can be directly and physically targeted, as taken place when Iranian drone strikes damaged Amazon AWS cloud service information centers in the UAE and Bahrain, causing disruptions and service blackouts.

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But the significance of American and foreign companies does not stop at technical competitors or service quality; it encompasses digital sovereignty and concerns of control over data for these nations and their various delicate sectors. American business go through U.S. laws managing legal access to data, such as the CLOUD Act, raising concerns about the limits of judicial demands for data even when it is saved outside the United States.

"CLOUD Act" (March 2018): Section 2713 clearly forces communications and calculating service companies to maintain and divulge subscriber information within their "ownership, custody, or control, regardless of whether it is situated within or outside the United States" verifying the point above., as presented by U.S

At the exact same time, professionals called by "Arabi Post" warn of the threats of focusing contracts with American cloud service providers, and of the effect of "foreign jurisdiction" on privacy and security.

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people or locals who communicate with people or companies in those nations where information centers operated by American companies keep the information of those nations and their residents. To comprehend the scope of this risk, it is necessary to first examine U.S. federal laws such as FISA Section 702 and the CLOUD Act, which governs U.S.

Although the CLOUD Act grants Washington broad authority to access data saved in data centersthe large-scale facilities utilized by business to store and process informationin some cases, under the Act, U.S. authorities may be required to notify the government of the country concerned that there is a legal basis engaging access to that information.

The U.S. government might likewise punish or target any U.S. person who engages in financial transactions with that country or sends out money transfers to individuals there. Abu Al-Saad likewise says that if a dispute were to occur in between that country and Washington, the United States could suspend its data storage services for that nation and validate doing so.

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This would affect all sectors, including financial and banking services. In the context of the security risks connected to nations' reliance on American data centers, another point likewise emergesone that Ibtihal Abu Al-Saad considers the most important and most unsafe: the U.S. legal and intelligence tool called "National Security Letters" (NSLs).

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federal intelligence and security agencies. Under these letters, U.S. authorities have the ability to force significant technology business to hand over sensitive information connected to citizens or countries. Washington could, for instance, force Amazon to open data records belonging to users in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, or somewhere else, while "enforcing a stringent nondisclosure order that prevents the technology business from informing the Bahraini federal government or the targeted individuals that this access has actually taken place.