Are Gulf data centers a geopolitical risk? FT raises alarm over AI infrastructure concentration in the Middle East
Mar 10, 2026
Key Points
- An Iranian missile strike on an Amazon data center in the UAE gives the Financial Times grounds to argue US tech companies have repeated the Taiwan semiconductor mistake by concentrating AI infrastructure in the Gulf.
- The alarm overstates the case: the UAE Stargate project targets one gigawatt against 150 gigawatts of US capacity already filed, making the Taiwan comparison numerically indefensible.
- The FT piece repeatedly confuses gigawatts with gigabytes, a units error that undercuts the credibility of its core technical argument.
Summary
The Financial Times, in a piece by Rana Foroohar, argues that US tech companies have made a strategic blunder by concentrating AI infrastructure in the Middle East, drawing a direct comparison to American over-reliance on Taiwan for advanced semiconductors. The trigger is an Iranian missile strike on an Amazon data center in the UAE, which Foroohar uses to argue that placing critical economic infrastructure in a geopolitically volatile region is an obvious and repeating mistake.
Foroohar contends that Gulf subsidies made Middle East buildouts artificially cheap, letting the US avoid the harder domestic work of upgrading its grid and resolving the politics of energy sharing at home. She cites the Biden administration's September 2024 agreement with the UAE to deepen cooperation on semiconductors, clean energy, and AI as evidence this was not a Trump-era policy choice. Microsoft and OpenAI are named as early movers, both investing in the region and receiving Gulf funding.
The underlying deal structure is more defensible than Foroohar allows. The Gulf has land, power, and capital. The US has the technology. Gulf capital flows into US data centers, and in return the US helps build capacity in the region. That arrangement makes the concentration risk a known variable in a deliberate trade, not an oversight.
The Taiwan comparison is where the piece overreaches. The UAE Stargate project is currently planned at one gigawatt, with ambitions to reach five gigawatts. Against US plans already filed for 150 gigawatts of capacity, the Middle East share is a fraction of global compute, nowhere near the 92% chip concentration the Taiwan analogy implies. Foroohar does not supply the data to support the scale of alarm the piece projects.
The article also draws criticism for repeatedly referring to gigawatts as gigabytes, a units error significant enough to undercut the credibility of the technical argument entirely.