DUBAI-The day after the U.S. and Israel launched their opening strikes on Iran, the Islamic Republic shot back with swarms of drones aimed at the Gulf's newest high-value targets: American data centers.

More than six months after the barrage, a damaged Amazon Web Services facility in Abu Dhabi and another one in Bahrain are still mostly offline. The company has told clients to move their data to other regions while it repairs the sites and hasn't given a date for completing the work.

The attacks and lasting damage are complicating the pitch by Gulf states like the United Arab Emirates to become world-leading data processors for industries such as artificial intelligence. They add a huge new risk for U.S. companies weighing investments that can cost tens of billions of dollars.

The U.A.E. put years of diplomatic muscle into persuading U.S. officials to sell it top-of-the-line AI chips, ultimately swaying the Trump administration to give it the same access as European countries. In a May 2025 visit to Abu Dhabi, President Trump watched as the Emirates' leaders unveiled plans for a data-center complex requiring 5 gigawatts of power, the equivalent of more than two Hoover Dams.

Emirati and U.S. officials boasted that OpenAI had agreed to be the inaugural tenant at the complex, with plans to ultimately take 20% of its capacity. That deal now appears to be stalled. OpenAI still hasn't signed a lease for the project, people familiar with the matter said. OpenAI didn't respond to a request for comment. News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.

AI data centers tend to be far larger than the cloud-computing facilities hit during the war, making them easier targets. They also are far more expensive. Thanks to the cost of the AI chips, each gigawatt of capacity is estimated to cost at least $50 billion between the servers and the infrastructure.

Until the war, the Gulf's plentiful land, strong state backing and easy permitting were clear advantages. Now, the physical risk of putting multibillion-dollar facilities within 200 miles of Iran in a region that regularly struggles with conflict is changing the equation.

"The value proposition that the Gulf states made to the U.S. government and U.S. tech companies was that they will provide abundant capital, cheap energy and easy construction," said Aaron Bartnick, a White House technology official during the Biden administration. "The Iran war has really flipped a lot of that math on its head."

The U.A.E. Foreign Ministry and the Abu Dhabi government media office didn't respond to requests for comment. Amazon Web Services said it is working to restore services to its Bahrain and U.A.E. facilities and that it has provided billing relief for customers who relied on them.

The U.A.E. has borne the brunt of Iran's attacks during the war with more than 2,800 drones and missiles sent its way, far more than Iran fired at Israel.

To address concerns about strikes, the country's officials have floated the prospect of building data centers underground, which would add to the enormous cost, and placing drone defense systems near the computing centers, people familiar with the matter said.

For now, though, data is going the other way. The U.A.E., which generally has strict data-sovereignty policies for domestic companies, has allowed some entities to move their data abroad while Amazon works to restore services to its facility in the country, industry insiders said.

The Iranian strikes on the Amazon facilities set fires, damaged infrastructure and forced authorities to cut the power. The water used to extinguish the fires caused even more damage.

Banking apps, corporate services and financial technology platforms in the region went down as Amazon scrambled to help clients back up their data and move it to the U.S., Europe or elsewhere.

The length of the outage indicates the damage was severe. Even now, more than 130 computing services remain disrupted at its Abu Dhabi facility and 140 at its Bahrain location. Just five in each have been restored.

Some tech companies are moving ahead with Gulf data-center projects. They are betting that the war will end eventually and are drawn to the gusher of Gulf capital. Beefing up projects in the Gulf with better defenses could be cheaper and faster than starting over in less favorable locations.

Amazon and Microsoft separately said last month that they will still launch data centers in Saudi Arabia by the end of the year. Microsoft struck a deal for a 200-megawatt data center in Abu Dhabi in late 2025. Construction is under way.

Cloud-service providers generally want to have data centers close to busy commercial nodes.

"The Middle East has a ton of business interest, and cloud providers want to try to capture that growth," said Doug Madory, head of internet analysis at cybersecurity firm Infoblox.

"But that calculus is changing with the risks," he said. "I compare the data centers to the ships in the Strait of Hormuz-if you hit two, you scare the others off."

This spring, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps threatened American tech companies that it accused of contributing to the attacks on Iran, naming Microsoft, Oracle, Alphabet and Nvidia.

"It is a real risk to build critical infrastructure that needs to be up 100% of the time, and which is necessary to power some of the most important technologies of our generation, in one of the most volatile regions in the world," said Bartnick, now a Columbia University fellow.