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Data gotten and examined by "Arabi Post" on the map of cloud service centers and areas (data centers) in the Middle East and North Africa revealed that the region's nations rely heavily on American business for cloud services. The data reveals the existence of around 31 American centers, most of them in Gulf countries, while the variety of centers owned by Chinese companies reached about 7.
In the Gulf countries, more than 53% of the cloud infrastructure tracked there is American. Iran, meanwhile, seems an exceptional case among all the area's nations, as it relies totally on a 100% local cloud community. 89cloud centers throughout 22 nations 35%American business' share (31 centers) 53%Gulf reliance on U.S.
Click on any indicate see information about the center, consisting of the running business, its citizenship, and the year it was introduced. Use the filters to focus on a specific citizenship, or look for a particular center or nation. 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 shifted from a "technical choice" for reducing server costs into crucial facilities for the state and the economy: e-government portals, payment and banking systems, health and education platforms, and the operation of big information, expert system, and more. However the recent Iran war (2026) revealed a 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 failures.
However the significance of American and foreign companies does not stop at technical competition or service quality; it extends to digital sovereignty and concerns of control over information for these nations and their various sensitive sectors. American companies go through U.S. laws managing legal access to information, such as the CLOUD Act, raising questions about the limitations of judicial ask for information even when it is stored outside the United States.
"CLOUD Act" (March 2018): Area 2713 explicitly obliges interactions and computing service providers to preserve and reveal subscriber data within their "ownership, custody, or control, regardless of whether it is located within or outside the United States" validating the point above., as presented by U.S
At the same time, professionals contacted by "Arabi Post" caution of the dangers of concentrating agreements with American cloud service companies, and of the impact of "foreign jurisdiction" on privacy and security.
people or locals who engage with people or companies in those nations where information centers run by American companies keep the information of those nations and their people. To understand the scope of this threat, it is essential to initially take a look at U.S. federal laws such as FISA Area 702 and the CLOUD Act, which governs U.S.
Although the CLOUD Act grants Washington broad authority to access information saved in information centersthe large-scale facilities utilized by companies to store and process informationin some cases, under the Act, U.S. authorities may be needed to notify the federal government of the country concerned that there is a legal basis compelling access to that information.
The U.S. government could likewise penalize or target any U.S. person who engages in financial deals with that country or sends out money transfers to people there. Abu Al-Saad also says that if a conflict were to take place in between that nation and Washington, the United States might suspend its information storage services for that country and validate doing so.

This would affect all sectors, consisting of financial and banking services. In the context of the security threats linked to nations' reliance on American information centers, another point also emergesone that Ibtihal Abu Al-Saad considers the most essential and most hazardous: the U.S. legal and intelligence tool called "National Security Letters" (NSLs).
Comparing Cloud Systems for Middle Eastfederal intelligence and security firms. Under these letters, U.S. authorities have the ability to compel significant technology business to turn over delicate information connected to people or nations. Washington could, for example, force Amazon to open data records belonging to users in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, or in other places, while "enforcing a stringent nondisclosure order that avoids the innovation company from notifying the Bahraini government or the targeted individuals that this access has happened.
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