Status Sep 23, 2026: Hormuz and the Red Sea are both closed to most cable-repair ships. Gulf cable builds are halted, and AWS lost some customer data in Bahrain and the UAE.
Fibre & Data-Center Infrastructure
Subsea cables and overland data routes between Europe and India, colored by who controls them, plus the Gulf's AI and cloud data centers sized by capacity. Click any line or site for details and sources.
Layers
Cable control
Data-center owner
Cable status
Operating
Damaged / degraded
Halted / delayed / planned
Overland data route
Data centers
Live (size = MW)
Under construction / planned
Attacked in 2026
Read-out
~1 GW of live data-center capacity in the Middle East, about 80% of it in Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The GCC is targeting ~3.3 GW by 2030 (Vision2030.ai).
Stalled: 2Africa Pearls (force majeure), SMW6 (delayed indefinitely), and Google's Raman Red Sea leg (Submarine Networks).
Working bypass: Google's Blue cable plus the overland route across Israel are complete. Egypt is still the main crossing and is congested.