Hong Kong/New York —
President Donald Trump arrived in the Middle East last spring, making deals that would vault the Gulf into the global race for artificial intelligence.
Accompanied by an entourage of Big Tech CEOs during the trip from OpenAI’s Sam Altman to Amazon’s Andy Jassy, Trump hailed a region “forging a future where the Middle East is defined by commerce, not chaos” at an address in Riyadh.
Nine months later, the Iran conflict has led to drone and missile strikes on data centers in the UAE and Bahrain, disrupting critical cloud infrastructure, knocking some