UAE Data Centres Redesign for Missile Resilience

12 September 2026

Executive Summary

The United Arab Emirates is reconsidering the design of one of the world’s largest planned artificial-intelligence infrastructure projects after recent military attacks demonstrated that data centres can become physical targets during geopolitical conflict.

The UAE-US AI Campus in Abu Dhabi was originally planned as a highly concentrated 5-gigawatt development.

Reuters reports that authorities are now considering distributing future capacity across multiple sites rather than concentrating infrastructure within a single campus.

Additional measures under consideration include:

• Underground construction.
• Blast-resistant structures.
• Backup power.
• Additional cooling resilience.
• Electronic jamming.
• Drone and missile defence.

The review follows physical attacks earlier this year that damaged Amazon Web Services infrastructure in both the UAE and Bahrain.

AWS confirmed that two facilities in its UAE region were directly struck, while infrastructure in Bahrain also suffered physical damage.

Those attacks caused structural damage, power interruption and prolonged disruption to cloud services.

The lesson extends well beyond the Gulf.

Digital infrastructure may be virtual from the customer’s perspective, but it still depends upon physical buildings, electricity, cooling and communications infrastructure.

UK Impact

UK businesses increasingly depend upon:

• Cloud infrastructure.
• Data centres.
• AI platforms.
• Software-as-a-service providers.
• Remote databases.
• Financial platforms.
• Digital communications.
• Critical outsourced technology.

Companies may assume that cloud services automatically provide geographic resilience.

That is not necessarily true.

Multiple systems can still depend upon:

• The same data centre.
• The same power source.
• The same cooling plant.
• The same telecommunications route.
• The same geographic region.

A regional physical event can therefore interrupt several apparently independent digital services simultaneously.

Global Impact

Data centres are rapidly becoming critical national infrastructure.

Large AI facilities also require enormous concentrations of:

• Computing equipment.
• Electricity.
• Water.
• Cooling.
• Telecommunications capacity.

This concentration creates efficiency.

It also creates accumulation risk.

A single event affecting a major campus can potentially interrupt services used across:

• Banking.
• Government.
• Logistics.
• Healthcare.
• Manufacturing.
• Telecommunications.
• Defence.
• Energy.

The UAE redesign therefore represents a broader shift in thinking:

digital resilience increasingly requires physical dispersion.

Our View

Businesses should examine the physical architecture behind their cloud and AI services.

Companies should ask:

• Where is our data physically hosted?
• Which cloud region is being used?
• Are backups held in another country?
• Are they on the same provider?
• Are multiple availability zones genuinely geographically separate?
• Do they share electricity infrastructure?
• Do they share telecommunications routes?
• Can workloads move automatically to another region?
• Are backup copies independently accessible?
• How long would migration take?
• Can critical operations continue without cloud access?
• Does cyber insurance cover physical damage to cloud infrastructure?
• Does contingent business interruption apply?
• Are contractual uptime guarantees meaningful during war or political violence?
• Is supplier concentration understood?

The important distinction is between technical redundancy and geographic independence.

Three servers in three buildings do not necessarily provide resilience if all three buildings sit inside the same threat zone.

Risk Indicator: HIGH – DATA CENTRES, AI INFRASTRUCTURE & PHYSICAL RESILIENCE

Disclaimer

The information contained within these Market Alerts is provided for general market awareness and informational purposes only. It does not constitute financial, legal, investment, regulatory or insurance advice. Whilst every effort has been made to ensure accuracy at the time of publication using multiple reputable and independently verified sources, geopolitical events, legislation, regulation and market conditions may change rapidly. Readers should obtain appropriate professional advice before acting upon any information contained herein.

Invictus Risk Solutions LLP – Helping organisations stay ahead of emerging risks through informed insight and independent analysis.