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Data obtained and analyzed by "Arabi Post" on the map of cloud service centers and areas (data centers) in the Middle East and North Africa exposed that the area's countries rely heavily on American business for cloud services. The information reveals the presence of around 31 American centers, most of them in Gulf nations, while the number of centers owned by Chinese companies reached about 7.

In the Gulf nations, more than 53% of the cloud facilities tracked there is American. Iran, on the other hand, appears to be an extraordinary case among all the area's nations, as it relies totally on a 100% local cloud environment. 89cloud centers across 22 nations 35%American companies' share (31 centers) 53%Gulf dependence on U.S.

Click on any indicate view details about the center, including the running company, its citizenship, and the year it was introduced. Utilize the filters to focus on a specific citizenship, or look for a specific center or country. Source: "Arabi Post" database of cloud service centers in the Middle East and North Africa (89 centers).

Within a couple of years, cloud service centers have moved from a "technical alternative" for minimizing server costs into important infrastructure for the state and the economy: e-government websites, payment and banking systems, health and education platforms, and the operation of huge data, synthetic intelligence, and more. But the recent Iran war (2026) exposed a brand-new dimension: the cloud itself can be directly and physically targeted, as happened when Iranian drone strikes harmed Amazon AWS cloud service data centers in the UAE and Bahrain, triggering disturbances and service blackouts.

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But the significance of American and foreign business does not stop at technical competitors or service quality; it reaches digital sovereignty and concerns of control over information for these countries and their numerous delicate sectors. American business undergo U.S. laws regulating legal access to data, such as the CLOUD Act, raising concerns about the limitations of judicial demands for information even when it is kept outside the United States.

"CLOUD Act" (March 2018): Area 2713 explicitly obliges interactions and calculating service providers to protect and divulge customer information within their "ownership, custody, or control, regardless of whether it is situated within or outside the United States" verifying the point above., as provided by U.S

At the very same time, professionals contacted by "Arabi Post" caution of the risks of focusing agreements with American cloud service providers, and of the impact of "foreign jurisdiction" on personal privacy and security.

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residents or locals who communicate with people or companies in those nations where data centers operated by American companies keep the data of those nations and their people. To understand the scope of this threat, it is required to initially 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 gain access to data stored in data centersthe large-scale infrastructure utilized by business to store and process informationin some cases, under the Act, U.S. authorities may be required to notify the federal government of the nation worried that there is a legal basis compelling access to that data.

The U.S. government could also punish or target any U.S. citizen who engages in financial deals with that country or sends money transfers to people there. Abu Al-Saad also states that if a dispute were to take place between that country and Washington, the United States might suspend its information storage services for that nation and justify doing so.

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This would affect all sectors, including financial and banking services. In the context of the security threats connected to nations' dependence on American information centers, another point likewise emergesone that Ibtihal Abu Al-Saad considers the most crucial 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 capability to compel significant technology companies to turn over delicate data connected to people or countries. Washington could, for instance, force Amazon to open data records coming from users in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, or in other places, while "imposing a strict nondisclosure order that prevents the technology company from informing the Bahraini federal government or the targeted people that this gain access to has actually happened.