The Gulf kept building. What it builds has changed.

MEI’s Mohammed Soliman writes that the strikes highlighted a new reality: data centres have become targets in wars between states, a shift that began with Russian attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure.

The World Bank and the IMF describe a build-out that is large, concentrated and led by the state.

Taken together, the reports describe a changed brief rather than a smaller one.

• Protected. MEI’s Daniel Benaim and Karen E. Young expect Gulf spending on hardening infrastructure, data centres included. Soliman notes that the Gulf is building anti-drone capacity to protect both its energy and its compute infrastructure.
• Sited with care. Soliman expects the Gulf to recalibrate how data centres are designed and sited.
• Backed up across borders. An Atlantic Council policy brief argues that the war shows data centres are now targets and that true data resilience can only be achieved through redundancy across borders. It proposes Gulf investment in European data centres, while noting EU investment screening and regulation as obstacles.
• Delivered fast. A published model cited by Soliman finds that a six-month delay, 10% higher non-IT construction costs and an annual war-insurance premium of 0.5% of capital expenditure would take an Emirati data centre’s lifecycle value from 3.5% above the US level to about 1.7% below. The same model finds that speed of delivery dominates everything else.

For suppliers, the last point matters most. Where delay costs more than construction, the ability to deliver, install and repair quickly in the region becomes part of what is being bought. In energy, Saudi Aramco has suggested that localising the procurement of materials and components was a major factor in how quickly it responded to attacks (Colby Connelly, MEI).

A finding matters commercially when it is connected to a specific business. For a company that supplies equipment, systems or services to Gulf data centres, these are the questions Fractionova would put first, organised by the dimension of the opportunity they affect.

The reports are useful evidence and an incomplete basis for a supplier’s decision. Four limits matter.

• They are analysis, not order books. None of them measures demand for a particular product, at a particular price, from a particular buyer.
• Views are their authors’. MEI’s essays and the Atlantic Council brief argue positions. The facts they report are attributed here, and the arguments are attributed to their authors.
• Some figures are second-hand. The lifecycle cost model and the latency figures are cited by Soliman from other studies.
• Scale figures overlap. The IMF’s 2025 total and the national programmes described by the World Bank and MEI differ in scope and should not be added together.

Those gaps are where a supplier’s decision is made: in specifications, buyers, contractors, origin and the economics of a local presence.

Bring the question in the form your board would ask it.

You do not need to choose a format first. The starting point is the decision your business needs to make.

Founder & Principal Prabha Shankar leads the technical-commercial judgement behind Fractionova’s work. An engineer and international business specialist, he brings nearly three decades of experience across automotive engineering management, advanced mobility, new energy, international market development and complex programme execution.

At Fractionova, that experience shapes the questions put to the AI engine, the assumptions challenged during investigation and the commercial significance assigned to its findings.