"Seventeen submarine cables pass through the Red Sea, carrying the majority of data traffic between Europe, Asia, and Africa. Additional cables run through the Strait of Hormuz. When a cable breaks in peacetime, repair ships arrive within weeks. In an active war zone, they cannot safely operate at all.

The sovereign wealth question deserves more careful analysis than the most alarming headlines suggest.

These are not small funds that can be depleted by a few weeks of conflict. The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and Mubadala are designed, as economist Brett Rowley has noted, to “withstand volatility rather than respond to it.”

Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, turbocharged by oil revenues that have climbed sharply since the Strait of Hormuz was threatened, may actually find itself with more capital to deploy, not less — though analysts note it has already signaled a 15% cut in capital spending as it reassesses its priorities.

The more plausible risk is not a wholesale reversal of Gulf AI investment, but a cooling. Several major data center projects in the UAE are already reportedly under review. Companies that had been preparing to break ground are instead asking what war-risk insurance looks like, and discovering, to their dismay, that standard commercial policies exclude acts of war.
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“The region remains attractive to companies in terms of capital from sovereign wealth funds, government buy-in, available energy, and its role as a gateway to markets in the global south,” Tess deBlanc-Knowles, senior director at the Atlantic Council, told CNBC. Governments across the Gulf, she said, would be racing to reassure U.S. companies and hold them to their commitments.

India is the most obvious beneficiary of uncertainty in the Gulf."

https://restofworld.org/2026/gulf-war-aws-data-center-attack-ai-investment-risk/

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