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Data gotten and evaluated 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 shows the existence of around 31 American centers, most of them in Gulf nations, while the variety of centers owned by Chinese business reached about 7.
In the Gulf nations, more than 53% of the cloud facilities tracked there is American. 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 actually moved from a "technical choice" for lowering 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 big information, artificial intelligence, and more. The recent Iran war (2026) revealed a new dimension: the cloud itself can be straight and physically targeted, as happened when Iranian drone strikes harmed Amazon AWS cloud service data centers in the UAE and Bahrain, causing disturbances and service interruptions.
However the significance of American and foreign companies does not stop at technical competition or service quality; it encompasses digital sovereignty and questions of control over data for these nations and their numerous delicate sectors. American business undergo U.S. laws managing lawful access to data, such as the CLOUD Act, raising concerns about the limits of judicial ask for information even when it is kept outside the United States.
"CLOUD Act" (March 2018): Area 2713 explicitly forces communications and calculating service providers to maintain and disclose subscriber data 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, specialists called by "Arabi Post" warn of the risks of focusing agreements with American cloud service providers, and of the impact of "foreign jurisdiction" on privacy and security.
residents or homeowners who communicate with people or organizations in those countries where information centers run by American business keep the information of those nations and their people. To comprehend the scope of this danger, it is needed to first examine 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 stored in data centersthe large-scale infrastructure used by business to shop and process informationin some cases, under the Act, U.S. authorities might be needed to inform the federal government of the country worried that there is a legal basis compelling access to that data.
The U.S. government might also punish or target any U.S. resident who takes part in monetary transactions with that nation or sends out cash transfers to people there. Abu Al-Saad likewise says that if a dispute were to happen in between that nation and Washington, the United States could 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 dangers connected to nations' reliance on American data centers, another point also emergesone that Ibtihal Abu Al-Saad thinks about the most important and most unsafe: the U.S. legal and intelligence tool called "National Security Letters" (NSLs).
The GCC Digital Startup Trendsfederal intelligence and security firms. Under these letters, U.S. authorities have the capability to force significant technology companies to hand over delicate data connected to people 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 rigorous nondisclosure order that avoids the innovation company from alerting the Bahraini federal government or the targeted people that this gain access to has taken location.
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