UAE Declares Data Centers Critical Infrastructure as War Reshapes Digital Security Priorit

Data centers now rank above roads, bridges, and tunnels in the UAE’s national security calculus, and a war that began on February 28 is the reason why.

Omar Sultan Al Olama, the UAE’s Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, Digital Economy and Remote Work Applications, made that case at Salesforce’s Dreamforce 2026 conference in San Francisco. His government, he announced, will overhaul its regulatory approach to data centers and stop publicly disclosing their physical locations, a move designed to shield them from military targeting. The logic is blunt: these facilities now underpin the daily lives of ordinary citizens in ways that no road or tunnel does.

Additional reference context is available at https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/while-most-americans-may-hate-datacenters-uae-minister-calls-them-more-important-than-roads-and-has-a-new-hiding-rule-for-them-after-war-destroyed-many/articleshow/134323768.cms.

“Unfortunately they’re more important than bridges. They’re more important than roads. They’re more important than tunnels because our whole lives are on these devices that we’re using,” Al Olama said during the session, which Salesforce published. He expects other governments to reach the same conclusion as they confront the vulnerability of their own digital infrastructure.

The policy shift traces directly to the aerial assault the UAE endured after February 28. During the first week of conflict alone, the country intercepted more than 1,000 projectiles and drones launched from Iran, some arriving within two minutes of launch. Al Olama noted that the UAE intercepted more aerial threats than the entire Middle East and Israel combined, yet managed to prevent any impact on human lives or business operations. That near-miss has reshaped how the government thinks about protecting the services citizens depend on. The response is concrete: decentralizing key digital assets, splitting up the domestic Stargate data center project, and investing in offshore facilities, including infrastructure in Germany.

Meanwhile, public attitudes toward data centers in much of the developed world run in the opposite direction. While the Trump administration has expressed strong support for such projects, most American states oppose them. That opposition, as documented by the Associated Press, cuts across conventional political lines, uniting Republicans from Nebraska, Texas, and Wyoming with swing-state voters in Pennsylvania and Democrats in New Mexico. Data center development has become one of the rare issues that transcends party, demographics, and geography in a deeply divided country.

Al Olama’s broader argument is about what happens when governments let fear drive technology policy. He drew a historical parallel to the Middle East’s technological decline between 813 and 1515 AD, a period that ended when the region banned the Gutenberg printing press for two centuries over concerns about misinformation and alterations to religious texts. Overregulating AI out of caution, he argued, risks repeating that error at a moment when the technology’s pace of change is accelerating.

The UAE has nonetheless drawn firm lines on how AI touches citizens directly. Abu Dhabi’s TAMM administrative platform runs on established, older large language models rather than cutting-edge frontier systems like OpenAI’s Astra or Anthropic’s Fable, which Al Olama warned carry significant cybersecurity and data breach risks for public services. The government has also ruled out predictive policing, citing the danger of false positives and the risk of building oppressive surveillance infrastructure. The focus instead has been on quality-of-life improvements, such as desk-free biometric airport transit, which enhances convenience without eroding privacy.

Workforce preparation has moved in parallel. The UAE has trained all 80,000 federal civil servants in agentic AI, building on an earlier initiative that taught prompt design to one million people. Al Olama dismissed concerns about mass unemployment, arguing the technology will create opportunities and strengthen workforce capability rather than eliminate jobs.

On global governance, Al Olama was direct: no single country can regulate its way to safety alone. Governments, he observed, tend to overregulate while the private sector tends to underregulate. He pointed to the UAE’s data protection laws as a model for collaborative oversight, noting they were initially drafted by tech companies before state officials and civil society refined them. Unilateral bans, he warned Western policymakers, would simply hand competitive advantage to rivals. Restrictions in the United States, he argued, make little sense unless China agrees to follow suit.

The harder question, left open after San Francisco, is whether other governments will act before a conflict forces their hand, or only after one does.