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Information acquired and evaluated by "Arabi Post" on the map of cloud service centers and areas (data centers) in the Middle East and North Africa revealed that the region's countries rely greatly on American companies for cloud services. The data reveals the existence of around 31 American centers, many of them in Gulf nations, while the number of centers owned by Chinese companies reached about 7.

In the Gulf nations, more than 53% of the cloud facilities tracked there is American. Source: "Arabi Post" database of cloud service centers in the Middle East and North Africa (89 centers).

Within a couple of years, cloud service centers have actually moved from a "technical option" for decreasing server expenses into important infrastructure for the state and the economy: e-government websites, payment and banking systems, health and education platforms, and the operation of huge data, expert system, and more. The recent Iran war (2026) exposed a new measurement: the cloud itself can be directly and physically targeted, as taken place when Iranian drone strikes damaged Amazon AWS cloud service data centers in the UAE and Bahrain, causing interruptions and service blackouts.

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The significance of American and foreign companies does not stop at technical competitors or service quality; it extends to digital sovereignty and concerns of control over data for these countries and their different sensitive sectors. American business are subject to U.S. laws managing legal access to data, such as the CLOUD Act, raising questions about the limitations of judicial requests for data even when it is stored outside the United States.

"CLOUD Act" (March 2018): Section 2713 explicitly forces interactions and computing company to protect and divulge customer information within their "possession, custody, or control, regardless of whether it is located within or outside the United States" verifying the point above. (Click an image to view it complete size.) This dependence also converges with the context of cross-border intelligence gathering under frameworks such as FISA Section 702, as presented by U.S

At the same time, specialists called by "Arabi Post" warn of the threats of concentrating agreements with American cloud service companies, and of the impact of "foreign jurisdiction" on privacy and security. In between concerns over sovereignty and the market's requirement for ready-made facilities, the importance of data localization policies and the limitations of cross-border data streams is growing, as gone over in worldwide reports such as those by the OECD.

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citizens or residents who communicate with people or organizations in those countries where data centers run by American companies keep the information of those nations and their people. To comprehend the scope of this danger, it is necessary to first analyze U.S. federal laws such as FISA Section 702 and the CLOUD Act, which governs U.S.

Although the CLOUD Act grants Washington broad authority to gain access to data kept in information centersthe large-scale facilities used by business to store and process informationin some cases, under the Act, U.S. authorities may be needed to alert the government of the country concerned that there is a legal basis compelling access to that information.

The U.S. federal government might likewise punish or target any U.S. person who takes part in monetary transactions with that nation or sends out cash transfers to individuals there. Abu Al-Saad also says that if a disagreement were to happen between that country and Washington, the United States could suspend its data storage services for that nation and justify doing so.

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This would affect all sectors, consisting of monetary and banking services. In the context of the security dangers connected to nations' reliance on American information centers, another point also emergesone that Ibtihal Abu Al-Saad thinks about the most important and most hazardous: the U.S. legal and intelligence tool known as "National Security Letters" (NSLs).

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federal intelligence and security firms. Under these letters, U.S. authorities have the ability to compel significant innovation business to turn over delicate data related to people or countries. Washington could, for instance, force Amazon to open information records belonging to users in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, or somewhere else, while "imposing a strict nondisclosure order that avoids the innovation company from alerting the Bahraini government or the targeted individuals that this access has taken location.