The Gulf in the Age of AI: Geopolitics, Security, and Strategic Autonomy after Regional War
Artificial intelligence has become a new arena of power in the Gulf. GCC states are investing heavily in data centers, sovereign AI models, and computing partnerships with the United States and, more cautiously, with China. At the same time, the region has lived through successive wars. The 2025 Israel–Iran war, the Israeli strike on Doha, and the 2026 Iran war brought missiles and drones onto Gulf soil. Iranian strikes hit energy facilities, ...
Abstract
Artificial intelligence has become a new arena of power in the Gulf. GCC states are investing heavily in data centers, sovereign AI models, and computing partnerships with the United States and, more cautiously, with China. At the same time, the region has lived through successive wars. The 2025 Israel–Iran war, the Israeli strike on Doha, and the 2026 Iran war brought missiles and drones onto Gulf soil. Iranian strikes hit energy facilities, airports, and even commercial data centers. Digital infrastructure has become both a strategic asset and a target. This workshop asks how the rise of AI, combined with regional conflict and intensifying geopolitical competition, is reshaping the Gulf states' security doctrines, foreign relations, economic strategies, and pursuit of strategic autonomy. It invites comparative papers on the six GCC states and their neighbors. Themes include AI in defense and threat perception, the protection of critical and digital infrastructure, US–China technology rivalry and Gulf hedging, AI in economic diversification and geoeconomics, and AI governance. The workshop aims to produce a double special issue of the Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies and policy recommendations for decision-makers.
Description and Rationale
The Gulf states have moved from being consumers of digital technology to aspiring producers of artificial intelligence. The UAE appointed the world's first Minister of State for AI in 2017 and built national champions such as G42 and MGX. In May 2025 it announced a 5-gigawatt US–UAE AI campus in Abu Dhabi (including "Stargate UAE"). Saudi Arabia created the Saudi Data and AI Authority (SDAIA) and, in 2025, launched HUMAIN under the Public Investment Fund. In January 2026, Qatar and the UAE joined the US-led Pax Silica initiative on secure technology supply chains. Access to advanced chips has thus become a question of alliance politics, not only of commerce.
This technological turn has coincided with the most serious regional war in decades. In June 2025 Israel and the United States struck Iran, and Iran fired missiles at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. In September 2025, Israel struck Hamas negotiators in Doha. From February 2026, the wider Iran war brought Iranian missiles and drones onto the territory of all six GCC states. Gas facilities at Ras Laffan were hit and shipping through the Strait of Hormuz was blocked. In March 2026, drone strikes damaged Amazon Web Services data centers in the UAE and Bahrain. It was widely described as the first wartime attack on hyperscale cloud infrastructure. The attack showed that the Gulf's AI ambitions are exposed to the same threats as its oil and gas.
The existing literature rarely connects these developments. Scholarship on Gulf security has explained regional insecurity, the balance of power and the reliance on external protection (Gause 2010; Kamrava 2018). Other work has traced the post-blockade Gulf order and the role of mediation (Aras, Al Ansari and Yorulmazlar 2021), Gulf economic statecraft (Young 2022), and the rise of strategic restraint as a Gulf doctrine (Al-Nabet 2026b). Studies of AI show how it may shift military balances (Horowitz 2018) and reshape foreign policy analysisitself (Aras, forthcoming). Research on weaponized interdependence and the semiconductor rivalry explains how control over networks and chips becomes a tool of coercion (Farrell and Newman 2019; Miller 2022). Early analyses link these debates to Gulf digital sovereignty in wartime (Al-Nabet 2026a). Yet Gulf studies often treat technology as part of diversification. AI studies, in turn, treat the Gulf mainly as a buyer of chips or a source of capital. Very little research asks how war and AI together are changing Gulf strategic thinking.
The Gulf is therefore a critical case. Its states are small or middle powers with vast capital, exposed geography and deep ties to rival great powers. They seek autonomy through hedging (Kuik 2008), yet AI partnerships may create new dependencies. The workshop responds directly to GRM 2027 priorities, including evolving threat perceptions and strategic doctrines, critical infrastructure protection, the changing US–GCC relationship, and the rising importance of geoeconomics.
