Amazon said on March 24 that its cloud computing arm’s Bahrain region has been disrupted by the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.
In a March 24 statement to The Epoch Times, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) spokesperson said the company was working with authorities and prioritizing staff safety while assisting clients affected by the outage.
The Epoch Times learned that the disruption has been caused by drone activity.
“We continue to support affected customers, helping them to migrate to alternate AWS Regions, with a large number already successfully operating their applications from other parts of the world,” the AWS spokesperson said.
Customers with workloads in the region should continue relocating them as conditions evolve, the spokesperson added.
Prior Infrastructure Damage
Earlier AWS Health Dashboard updates indicate that physical strikes had damaged facilities in both Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, impairing cloud services relied on by businesses and governments.
On March 2, AWS said that drone strikes had caused structural damage and power disruptions at multiple sites.
“In the UAE, two of our facilities were directly struck, while in Bahrain, a drone strike in close proximity to one of our facilities caused physical impacts to our infrastructure,” the company said.
The March 2 statement said the damage disrupted power delivery and required fire suppression efforts, which led to additional water damage and prolonged recovery.
Customers experienced degraded performance across major services, including computing, storage, databases, and monitoring tools, AWS said on March 2.
Gulf Cloud Investment
The latest disruption comes as major U.S. technology companies invest heavily in cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure across the Gulf.
Amazon Web Services said it would invest more than $5.3 billion to build a new cloud region in Saudi Arabia by 2026 to support the kingdom’s ambitions to become a technology hub ahead of World Expo 2030.
Microsoft said it plans to invest $15.2 billion in the United Arab Emirates between 2023 and 2029, driven by its partnership with sovereign AI company G42.
The company said it had already spent $7.3 billion, including a $1.5 billion stake in G42 and more than $4.6 billion on AI and cloud data-center capacity.
Google Cloud and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund have announced a $10 billion plan to build a global AI hub in the kingdom with local firm Humain, a project first unveiled in 2024.
Oracle said it would invest $1.5 billion to expand cloud infrastructure in Saudi Arabia, including a new public cloud region in Riyadh and expanded capacity in Jeddah, while also deepening cooperation with Nvidia on sovereign AI initiatives in Abu Dhabi.
When asked by The Epoch Times on March 24 about the impact of the Iran war on its regional investments and operations, Microsoft said it had no comment.
The Epoch Times also requested comment from Oracle, Google, and Nvidia, but did not receive a response by publication time.
