More than 600 submarine cables are run by four American companies: where does the Gulf’s digital infrastructure sit in the oppressors’ calculations?

Behind the screens and data centres that receive billions of advanced computing operations, more than 600 active and planned submarine internet cables spanning over 1.5 million kilometres circle the globe. This hidden network, which functions as the true nervous system for data flow, is not managed in a distributed or neutral manner; four major U.S. technology firms, Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft, control roughly 75 % of its ownership and operation worldwide.

This structural concentration reshapes the relationship between AI policy, energy infrastructure and maritime passages; while the regulatory roots for opening the sector to independent companies trace back to the U.S. Telecommunications Act of 1996, today’s marine investments are experiencing a unprecedented surge since the internet entered the public domain in 1993. Cables are no longer merely commercial communication channels; they have become a cornerstone in the military and political decisions of major powers, and their geographical routes intersect directly with oil and gas pipelines and global supply chains.

The most striking shift appears in the forced overlap between data flow and strait security; regulatory measures, such as the Communications and Technology Transparency Act issued by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as a update to the 2019 law, have expanded equipment ban lists to include China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. This move coincided with tighter navigation through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital artery for oil transport and the submarine cable infrastructure that Washington has poured massive investments into. At the same time, tension is rising around the Bab al-Mandab Strait and the Red Sea coast to protect oil exports in which Beijing has invested four billion dollars for Saudi Aramco, while American firms such as Amazon, Microsoft and IBM, alongside China’s Alibaba, maintain a broad investment presence in the Gulf Cooperation Council states.

The convergence of energy and computing within a single geographic arena changes the rules of the game.Reliance on data centres is inseparable from natural-gas and hydrocarbon fuel networks that power computing and, in turn, use AI algorithms to improve drilling and exploration tools. In the Gulf, where Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates lead major data-centre and extraction projects, regional strategies have begun to break consumer dependence; Riyadh, which signed a $600 billion tech-and-defense investment commitment, launched through the Public Investment Fund the vertically integrated company “HUMAIN” to develop an Arabic language model on a full-scale computing infrastructure within its borders, and later announced a partnership with the U.S. firm “Turing” to deploy software agents, in an explicit move to become a technology source rather than merely a consumer.

Sovereignty does not start at the application and software layer, but at the landing points on the seabed.What changes in practice for technical officials and decision-makers in the Gulf, Egypt and the Arab Levant is not merely an assessment of model licences or user interfaces, but reliability calculations and the risk of physical bottlenecks. Any engineering team or banking institution that builds its digital infrastructure based on hybrid clouds is now governed by cable routes controlled by the four central companies and that pass through straits experiencing ongoing disruptions. The true cost no longer lies solely in inference bills, but also includes hedging against marine capacity outages and accelerating plans to localise data centres in order to protect legal jurisdiction over data and prevent the crippling of critical systems in any geopolitical friction.