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- China activates subsea facility
- Viable option for Bahrain
- UAE considers Stargate locations
Since Gulf data centres sustained damage in Iranian attacks during the spring, regional authorities have been weighing ways to bolster the assets’ physical security.
Around the same time, China became the first country to activate a subsea data centre, and some researchers say that model might have potential for Gulf states, though it is no perfect fit.
The complexity of maintaining underwater facilities and warm Arabian Gulf temperatures remain the biggest challenges.
Subsea data centres may prove especially resilient during a conflict, said Nir Kshetri, a senior professor of management at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro who studies emerging technologies.
“Land-based data centres can easily be targeted, but if your servers are 500 feet [150 metres] underwater, no one can attack that,” he told AGBI.
Iranian drones struck two Amazon Web Services data centres in the UAE and one in Bahrain in March, and services in the Gulf remain disrupted as a result.
Ensuing conversations in a region with global AI ambitions have focused on where to locate such facilities to fend off attacks, whether to deploy air defences around them and where backups may be placed to protect against data loss.
The UAE and Saudi Arabia started with two approaches to building data centres, the former concentrating on the 5-gigawatt Stargate campus in Abu Dhabi, the latter on individual facilities around the country, said Justin Alexander, a Gulf-focused economist.
“It’ll be interesting to see how investors gravitate to those two different options,” Alexander said recently at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.
Last week, Reuters reported that the UAE is considering splitting up Stargate across multiple locations.
Space optimisation
For Bahrain in particular, putting data centres in the sea might be an option, according to an Atlantic Council post by Minwa Alkhalifa, a Boston College student previously affiliated with the Washington think tank.
“The kingdom encompasses only about 300 square miles [780 square kilometres] of physical land, but about 2,800 square miles in territorial water area,” Alkhalifa wrote. “Underwater data centres can help Bahrain optimise its space.”
Two US-based academics agreed that subsea data centres may help tackle the challenges above-ground facilities face globally.
These include requiring energy-intensive cooling systems that seawater can partially replace, opposition from local residents, and vulnerability to physical attacks.
China’s $225 million, 24-megawatt facility – 10 metres underwater off the Shanghai coast – is powered by a wind farm and said to be 22 percent more energy-efficient than above-ground equivalents.
Because the population of Gulf states, except Saudi Arabia, lives along the coastline, subsea data centres would also eschew delays for users, an issue called latency, Kshetri said.
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Subsea data centres have their own vulnerabilities, according to Sara Rampazzi, an assistant professor at the University of Florida who researches the security of cyber-physical infrastructure.
For instance, attackers can use sound to scramble their frequencies and cause data reading-and-writing processes to crash.
Her lab is identifying strategies to mitigate this weakness, from redundancies that ensure continuity in data access during an attack to on-site robotic systems capable of quickly responding.
“You have pros and cons, there’s no one solution that is better than another,” Rampazzi said of the comparison between above-ground and subsea data centres.
Deploying crews to maintain subsea facilities on a regular basis could also be complicated and costly.
Additionally, Gulf waters are warm in summer months, undermining their self-cooling advantage, said Mohammed Soliman, director of AI and compute infrastructure at McLarty Associates.
“Land was never the constraint for Gulf AI clusters. The real pressure is water and cooling,” Soliman said, adding that new technologies already help cut freshwater usage in above-ground facilities.
“Underwater pods therefore do not win on saving scarce land and water — they only make sense if they beat these new offerings on total cost, deployment speed, and security.”
