On March 1, Amazon Web Services told customers that a facility in its UAE region “was impacted by objects that struck the data center,” creating sparks and a fire. The fire department cut power to the building and to its generators while the fire was put out. The disruption reached two of the region’s three availability zones, the separate clusters of facilities that cloud providers build so that a failure in one place does not become a failure everywhere. A facility in Bahrain was also damaged. [1] The incident came a day after the conflict with Iran began, and it tested an assumption the Gulf’s technology strategy had rested on for a decade: that the region’s stability was part of what it was selling.
Four months on, the building has not stopped. What has changed is the meaning of the word resilience, and with it the kind of technology professional the region now needs most.
The scale of the commitment explains why. In its last forecast before the war, Gartner expected IT spending in the Middle East and North Africa to reach $169 billion in 2026, up 8.9%, with spending on data center systems growing faster than any other category at 37.3%. Eyad Tachwali, a vice president in Gartner’s advisory practice, expected that spending to “accelerate as MENA CIOs invest in AI-enabled software and AI-optimized infrastructure.” [2] Gartner’s worldwide forecast in April, published with the conflict already under way, put global growth in data center systems at 55.8%, part of a $6.31 trillion IT market growing 13.5%. [3] The projects behind those numbers are physical and slow to reverse. G42 said in October that the first 200 megawatts of Stargate UAE, a planned one-gigawatt cluster built with OpenAI, Oracle, Nvidia, Cisco and SoftBank, would be completed in 2026. [4] In Saudi Arabia, Humain broke ground last August on 100-megawatt facilities in Riyadh and Dammam scheduled to go live in the second quarter of this year. [5]
The wider economy has not held up as well. BMI cut its forecast for UAE growth in April from 5% to 1.4% in a scenario where hostilities extended through May, and its forecast for the Gulf as a whole from 4.8% to 1.9%. [6] A ceasefire that began in early April was tested on May 4, when the UAE reported missile and drone attacks for the first time since the truce took effect. [7] On June 15, the United States and Iran announced an agreement to end military operations, with the Strait of Hormuz set to reopen on June 19, though shipping was slow to resume. [8]
These figures establish that the investment case for Gulf technology has outlasted the first months of the war. They do not establish that the hiring has. Spending forecasts describe what organizations intend to buy. They say nothing about whether the teams to build, run and secure those systems are being added at the same pace, and the most recent labor data suggests caution.
S&P Global’s purchasing managers’ survey for June, published on July 3, showed the UAE’s non-oil private sector growing at its weakest pace in five years, with a reading of 50.8, down from 52.6 in May. Employment fell for the first time in more than four years, in one of the sharpest declines since August 2020. In Dubai, job losses were the fastest in five and a half years. [9] Cooper Fitch, whose Gulf Employment Index tracks new jobs across the region, described a first quarter that turned within weeks: February was “the strongest month we’ve had in 24 months,” in the words of its chief executive, Trefor Murphy, before job creation fell 12.5% in March. Across the quarter, it still counted technology among the strongest sectors, alongside healthcare and financial services, and it expected pay rises of 6% to 10% in those fields against 2% to 3% elsewhere. [10]
The distinction matters. A tourism business that loses its visitors stops hiring because the demand has gone. A technology team facing the same uncertainty is more likely to keep its essential hires and defer the rest, because the systems still have to run. Cooper Fitch reported no widespread layoffs or salary cuts among its clients in the first quarter. [10] The pattern is not a freeze. It is a narrowing.
The March incident shows where that narrowing leads. Availability zones exist to protect against equipment failure, power cuts and other disruptions that happen to one site at a time. An attack on a region is a different kind of event, and the businesses best placed to keep running were those that had planned for an entire region going offline at once. That planning is engineering work. It decides where data sits and how it is copied, how quickly services can move to another country, which systems may legally leave the UAE at all, and who is on hand to make those decisions at three in the morning. Before February, many organizations treated that work as an insurance policy. It is now closer to a condition of doing business, and it falls to cloud architects, platform and site reliability engineers, security teams and the leaders who manage them.
The second pressure comes from AI itself, and it predates the war. PwC’s AI Jobs Barometer, published on June 17, found that the share of UAE job postings requiring AI skills rose from 1.0% in 2021 to 3.2% in 2025, and stood at about 10% in technology, media and telecommunications. The skill demands on those roles are expanding quickly: occupations highly exposed to AI now require an average of 77 new skills, against 22 for those least exposed. [11] Cooper Fitch identified the gap that matters most to employers: experienced leaders able to deploy AI at enterprise scale. [10] The region has spent heavily on compute. Its constraint is increasingly the people who can turn that compute into products that work, are secure and can be relied on when conditions change.
Put together, the evidence describes a technology market with two speeds. Hiring tied to expansion, such as new product teams, new market launches and roles justified by growth that has not yet arrived, is the kind most likely to be paused while employers wait for clarity. Hiring tied to operation and protection has stronger support: data and AI engineering, infrastructure and platform work, security, and the leaders who can run all three. The investment in data centers creates demand for the second group whether or not the first recovers quickly.
Looking to the third quarter, I expect technology hiring in the UAE and Saudi Arabia to recover ahead of the wider private sector if the June agreement holds, because much of the delayed hiring in technology was deferred rather than canceled. I have not seen evidence of major technology projects in the region being abandoned. Approvals will remain stricter than they were in February, and the roles approved first will be those that protect revenue and keep systems running. If the ceasefire breaks down again, I would expect the same pattern to repeat more severely: essential technical hiring continuing, expansion hiring stopping. Either way, the premium for AI and infrastructure skills is unlikely to narrow this year, and resilience will stay on the agenda of every technology leadership team in the region long after the shipping lanes reopen.
For employers, the practical implication is that the strongest candidates will be weighing their options with the events of March in mind. Engineers and technology leaders who stayed through the spring have shown commitment to the region, and those considering a move here will ask harder questions about continuity planning, remote working arrangements and what an employer did when the alerts sounded. Those answers now form part of the offer.
The Gulf spent a decade presenting stability as a feature of its technology market, and March showed that stability cannot be guaranteed. What the region can still offer is something more demanding and, in the long run, more valuable: infrastructure designed to keep working when something breaks. Concrete, power and chips can be bought. The ability to keep systems running when a region goes dark has to be hired.
Sources
- DatacenterDynamics, AWS UAE suffers AZ outage after “objects strike data center” and cause fire, amid Iran attacks, March 1, 2026.
- Gartner, Gartner Forecasts MENA IT Spending to Reach $169 Billion in 2026, August 4, 2025.
- Gartner, Gartner Forecasts Worldwide IT Spending to Grow 13.5% in 2026, Totaling $6.31 Trillion, April 22, 2026.
- Gulf News, New update on Stargate UAE: First phase of 200MW to complete by 2026, October 16, 2025.
- DatacenterDynamics, Humain breaks ground on two data centers, with first facilities expected to go live in Q2 2026, August 26, 2025.
- EnterpriseAM, Prolonged regional conflict could drag UAE growth to 1.4% as BMI slashes GCC outlook, April 17, 2026.
- Coeur d’Alene Press, The US fights to reopen the Strait of Hormuz as the UAE comes under attack in a test of Iran truce, May 4, 2026.
- Kuehne+Nagel, US-Iran deal sets Friday, 19 June, reopening for Strait of Hormuz, June 15, 2026.
- S&P Global, UAE PMI, July 3, 2026.
- The National, UAE and Gulf jobs market sees selective hiring amid war-driven tourism slump, April 28, 2026.
- PwC Middle East, AI Jobs Barometer UAE 2026, June 17, 2026.