Credit: 3aFW Microsoft has committed $10B through 2030 across Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, of which roughly $2B is new and the rest was pledged for the UAE last year. Europe is meanwhile legislating to keep American cloud providers away from sensitive public sector data. Microsoft will spend $10B through 2030 across Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, Bloomberg reported. About $2B of that is new.
The rest is the $7.9B it pledged for the UAE last year. The timing carries the meaning. This is the company’s first substantial update on the region since war broke out with Iran, and the money covers capital and operating costs for cloud computing, AI and data centre operations. President Brad Smith set it out in a blog post timed to the United Nations General Assembly.
Washington has pushed the region to buy American rather than Chinese technology. Data centres there have been bombed. Two Amazon facilities in the UAE were struck by drones early in the conflict, which paused investment decisions across the region. Amazon said this month that it could not recover some data from facilities hit in the UAE and Bahrain.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps named OpenAI’s Abu Dhabi campus a potential target. Microsoft’s answer is cable. The pledge includes $400M for undersea cables and related infrastructure. “A diverse network of high-capacity routes allows traffic to be rerouted around disruptions, minimizing latency and maintaining critical data flows,” Smith wrote. Europe is making a different argument.
The Cloud and AI Development Act, proposed in June, would keep US providers away from sensitive public sector data in health, finance and justice, with its top tier demanding EU ownership, EU staff and independence from third-country law. Azure as currently structured would struggle to qualify. The act has not yet been agreed by Parliament or the member states. Europe wants the buildings as well.
The same package aims to triple data centre capacity within five to seven years, which needs roughly EUR 200B, mostly private. Microsoft gave no update on its plan to use about 200 megawatts at a G42 campus in Abu Dhabi, where it has invested $1.5B and holds a board seat. It was the first US company cleared to deploy advanced AI chips in the UAE. The traffic runs both ways.
The UAE said this month it would put EUR 40B into Germany, including about a gigawatt of data centres and EUR 10B for Bavaria. Gulf money is buying European capacity while an American company buys Gulf capacity, and Brussels writes the rules on who may run it. Also tagged with
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