Not to be insensitive about the humanitarian and economic situation, but, I am curious why there are data centers in that region at all? It just seems horribly inefficient from a cooling and electricity standpoint. Not to mention water.
My pessimistic assumption is that Amazon said "yes" to handouts from regional government efforts to be relevant in tech, and that those data centers dont really matter to anyone but local politicians and monarchs who believe they have a seat at the table.
Middle East isn’t some 3rd world. If you can imagine futuristic cities, rich Middle East countries are already living in them with all the oil wealth.
They have phones, computers, digital services just like the US and Europe. Makes sense they want a data center in the region, close to them just like the US and Europe have data enters close to their users.
Americans seem to think the middle-east is some dystopian place where everyone is near poverty living in mudhuts, when places like Iran have a higher level of literacy than the USA, with more female college graduates.
There's definitely a lot of issues that need to be addressed at a cultural and social-economical level in places like Dubai exploiting migrant workers like slaves, the UAE, etc... but America has plenty of issues back home at a state by state case. Poverty, infrastructure falling apart, lack of education, lack of affordable health care, lack of job opportunity, high criminality, drug epidemics, etc... Some states feel like entirely different countries when compared to something like New Hampshire.
Even places like NYC and California which are economic hubs have this wide disparity of class, with entire communities of homeless populating the streets at crazy numbers that would make other nations blush (Cali has well over 100k).
I’m not really surprised. The US (and their allies) has made a concerted effort over a number of decades to turn them into to the third world. The current sitting US president has threatened to blast them into “oblivion” and “back to the Stone Ages, where they belong”. A lot of imagery of middle eastern countries seen in the west is of the places they’ve collectively destroyed.
As I understand it in most cases they have enormous wealth disparities, so like the rich in Dubai have pampered tourist experiences but there's also serious issues with like lacking basic sewer infrastructure for ordinary people.
Slight tangent, but to me futuristic cities are actually places like Amsterdam, with cozy streets and bike lanes everywhere, not places like Dubai with 16-lane freeways and a quasi-slave underclass staffing the tacky malls.
I said "independent to the degree possible", not absolutely.
I do not live in a binary world. I accept things in between.
Being part of group should be voluntary, not forced
What I definitely do not want is my life to be dictated by a few imbeciles at the top who are bought by large corps to pretend to be "by the people for the people".
The solution to that is widespread active low level constant community engagement in policy and monitoring the people you hire to debate policy (politicians) and the various silo's created to enact policy (military, civil service, legal, emergancy response, etc.).
Some people think it sufficient to pay no attention and let things slide indefinitely because "ultimately we can just rise up and shoot the government".
Isn't it expected that in a system that favors individualism over collectivism that a few people will be able to amass disproportionately more wealth and power than everyone else with no incentive or societally enforced responsibility to share that wealth and power, thus creating a society were your life is dictated by a few imbeciles at the top, not who are not bought by large corps, but who own the large corps?
A city whose citizens mostly drive is less independent than a city whose citizens mostly ride bicycles. Bicycling infrastructure is orders of magnitude cheaper to maintain than the same for heavier, motorized vehicles. It's not just the roadways: you need service stations, tire shops, parking lots and garages. Gasoline engine cars need gasoline distributed to stations all over the place and emissions testing. All of these things take up lots of space because motor vehicles are big.
All that bicycles really need are a (much narrower) right of way and some cheap pavement. Maintenance can be done all at home, even in a small apartment. The apparent independence available to motor vehicle drivers is an illusion afforded by massive private and public investment.
Maybe, but the "loneliness epidemic" articles and frankly, my own experience lead me to believe that independance is overated. Community is not though.
Independent? You say independent, I say parasitic. Just like any ruling class of the Middle East, especially the UAE. They’re not independent, they’re very much dependent on the semi slave labor they manage to exploit. Anything that makes life worth living is the result of collective labor. People coming together and building or learning upon previous knowledge. Hell, even your understanding of yourself comes from the social relationships you form during your formative years. This desire to be what amounts to an outcast is a defect, an abnormality imposed by the mode of production that organizes the world right now.
This is a hilarious comparison given Amsterdam's own history with regard to immigration. Not even historically but contemporarily too.. Just Eat, probably the largest employer of bargain bucket labour across Europe today is headquartered in Amsterdam
It was snippy and unclear, after the edit, its that and weak. I’d motion you just delete. Not sure literal slaves is comparable to a company that pays bargain basement salaries
It is hilarious, because it is blinded by our own self-imposed optics. It has been our policy to import droves of immigrant workers who have little hope but to take up gig economy jobs often illegally and remain fixed at the same (or worse) levels of economic status as the day they arrived in the country. Yes in Dubai they simply confiscate passports. At least they're honest about it
The kafala system confiscates your passport. You can't quit, can't switch employers, can't leave the country. People die in labor camps building these vanity projects. The UN classifies it as modern slavery.
A Just Eat rider in Amsterdam can quit tomorrow and sue their employer. Those aren't the same thing. You can criticize Europe's treatment of immigrant workers without pretending the difference is just honesty.
Indeed, but sprawling lead-smoke infested freeways is the stuff of the 1950s; bike lanes and playgrounds and grassy tram tracks is what some cities are starting to do just now! So actually more futuristic, objectively speaking :)
So... The future is Dubai? I am still to hear a better argument in favor of extinction.
This reminds me of a quote from "Stranger Than Fiction":
> Harold: "I don't want to eat nothing but pancakes, I want to live! I mean, who in their right mind in a choice between pancakes and living chooses pancakes?"
> Dr. Hilbert: "Harold, if you pause to think, you'd realize that that answer is inextricably contingent upon the type of life being led... and, of course, the quality of the pancakes"
Even 3rd world have those nowadays, unless you talking the more troubled of countries. TBH "3rd world" as a concept is quite outdated.
I'm a bit skeptical on how "futuristic" the cities are. There's a lot of money, sure, but from I can tell the projects are pharaonic in a lot of ways, including being out of touch with the practicality of such projects.
There's a fair amount of nearby customers. There's decent connectivity via undersea cables to Europe, East Asia, and Africa. UAE, Bahrain, Qatar and Saudi Arabia are very encouraging of outside investments in their countries.
I did some work with hosts on GCP in the region and you get fun things like hosts in Israel has bad routes to customers in nearby countries and vice versa, though. I don't know if AWS has access to better routing. Definitely a case where physical distance doesn't really correspond with network distance.
To provide some practical examples, Dubai is it's own region in some online games like Valorant. It has relatively good connectivity to the region and there are enough customers there
They have the cheapest oil in the world and in the future (and present) they will likely have cheap solar energy.
And until this fine misadventure, it was also possible they would get extremely cheap nuclear energy.
Given that the Gulf is fairly central, has tremendous flight connectivity, has tremendous capacity for business and business conference growth, Dubai was only looking to increase its share of global finance, law, and other major services, is a major center of shipping, is a region that has neutral to friendly relations with nearly every country, has 3rd world like cheap labor but first world like luxuries if you have the money, and a lot of money they were willing to spend on these data centers, it’s not the worst idea.
Of course, that whole plan has come crashing down now that having US bases has turned from an asset to a liability.
I imagine the same reason they have a data center in places like Sao Paulo. More locally centred businesses want the low ping, and AWS wants to be your cloud compute provider of choice no matter where your target audience is.
Data centers can run on closed loop cooling systems which doesn't need continuous water supply. Only bottleneck is Energy supply which the MEA area doesn't lack.
Hundreds of millions of people live in the Middle East and a lot of large corporations are based there. Likely they thought it would be profitable, and likely they saw some decent use.
I think the easy answer is: because there are customers there. It’s a region full of major commercial and industrial companies. I can imagine that you’d want data centers close to where those customer are.
Technically, I can see challenges in power and cooling, but those can be overcome. The real question is-
Are there enough customers in the region to support local data centers? I think that’s clearly yes.
If anyone here is involved in making decisions about where to locate such centers, I'd love to hear more about how geopolitical risk factors in, and whether you plan and price out contingencies (e.g. "This is near an unstable area, worst case is we write off $###M, but after Y years it breaks even. And the site is better in these other factors than alternative Z over there..."). Is it similar to factoring for geophysical instabilities (e.g. earthquake/tsunami zone) or other risks? Or would this type of event catch you completely offguard? I'm guessing insurance riders specifically exclude these types of risks.
Insurance. No need to write off anything or take a loss, just a slightly increased yearly cost. The cost of said insurance is likely going to be very high for a long time now though.
I insure a bunch of big datacenters (crypto mining, AI); there are really two main drivers of cost of insurance per $ of equipment:
1) Internal risks and controls within the datacenter (the company involved and their operating history, fires, flood, etc,) -- for a sufficiently "good" datacenter, you can assume it gets maxed out in quality, or at least to the point where it's no longer efficient to spend more. Most of these risks also cause service disruptions, so if you're building for high availability anyway, the rest of this stuff is usually handled as part of that. Essentially, if you're too cheap to build a good enough datacenter to max this out, you're not getting insurance anyway in most cases, so it's not a variable factor so bunch as binary or maybe a few broad risk bands (ISO tier for datacenters).
2) External risks. This is mostly natural catastrophe ("nat cat" or "cat risk"); usually there's one dominant driver of that ("severe convective storms" in Texas; floods and hurricanes in places like Florida; earthquakes in California). In some places it's multiple risks (Japan has both earthquake/tsunami and typhoon). This drives the majority of insurance premium.
War risk, geopolitical, political risk, terrorism, SRCC ("strikes, riots, and civil commotion") are in a third category -- often essentially not a factor (e.g. for a $200mm facility in rural Texas), but often handled through special programs at a national level or specialty insurance. A lot of normal policies exclude or let the client buy-back that part of the risk.
As my personal interests in war zones, drones, etc. and professional interests in crypto, AI, and datacenters seem to have converged, looking forward to seeing "quality of air defense artillery/integrated air defense system" as well as "comprehensive quick reaction force capable of dealing with national-level threats" as elements of insurance underwriting for $50B AI datacenters/"AI factories" in the future. I assume in most cases this kind of stuff will be handled by national, military, defense, or civil defense parts of the government, but could easily be contracted as well. I don't think Oracle Cloud is likely to stand up their own private army though.
Sure, but insurance is just outsourcing that calculation to a third party. AWS is big enough that I would think they largely self-insure, though I don't know if they do.
My impression is most commercial insurance policies specifically exclude acts of war (and similar). The extent of systematic damage that can occur in such scenarios would easily put them into insolvency. There are exceptions for life insurance, maritime shipping, aviation etc. but I gather they're uncommon, often limited-time in nature and come with high premiums. I've never heard of the equivalent for buildings and contents. Maybe someone can enlighten me.
I also agree with the sibling comment that suggests even if there were outsourced options available, hyperscalers might do better to self-insure.
But regardless whether the company eats it, or pays it through insurance premiums, I'm still curious how this type of risk is planned for (to whatever degree it is) and accounted. I assume it must have been contemplated in a deliberate manner, somewhere on a scale of "We knew this could happen, considered x, y and z, decided the venture was justified, and here's how we planned for such a contingency" to "That was dumb siting and someone will be fired". Obviously anywhere you put a building entails some level of local risk.
As years as a volunteer firefighter we do a lot of risk management at the tactical level and have to think through assessment and potential consequences. There are lots of guidelines we learn to help produce sound decisions. But at the end of the day to apply them you may need to make a judgement call, and you need to be prepared for things to go wrong. In a way I guess I'm asking about the economic and operational equivalent at the scale of hundred-million dollar data centers.
I was thinking the same thing about cooling. I guess a high pressure heat pump can work in any environment if it compresses a gas up to a temperature that’s higher than ambient. Couple that with abundant cheap energy — sunny, oily, and gassy! — and it doesn’t seem unreasonable at all.
Yes, and also pushed for by the Israeli and US governments. Tech investment is part of the Abraham Accords - i.e this is part of the prerequisites for normalization of ties with Israel.
Data governance compliance is a huge issue for some industries. "The days can't leave the country" will drive AWSs normal customers to demand bespoke regions setup and turned on
Water is used for cooling. You take in liquid water, release water vapor, and the phase transition takes away a lot of heat. Otherwise you need to pump that heat into dry air, which is much more difficult (energy-expensive). It's the same thing you do when you sweat.
Once Iran ramps up, its going to be a free-for-all
against all US data infrastructure. Iran has friends in low places so they don't have to do all of the dirty work themselves. This should be a wake-up call.
> local politicians and monarchs who believe they have a seat at the table.
Are you from another planet? They DO have a set at the table because gulf Sovereign Funds are one of the largest and most reliable LP pools available for VC funds for quite some time.
The current AI buildout is heavily dependent on Gulf money.
Oil is not forever and Sovereign Wealth Funds usually have goals that are not simply acruing direct investment returns, it makes sense that the folks deploying 100 billions tranches will have some say on where to put all those H100 their money will buy.
Nobody sane would predict Israel and the US would start this war.
So are the Azure data centers still up or do the Iranians just assume Azure will take itself offline eventually? Joking but I assume Microsoft (and Google) have a DC presence in the region too.
I do think there is some irony that the Iran war took down all the AWS datacenters in the middle east except the one (or 3 i guess) in Israel, which is still chugging along.
Like as a strategy its kind of weird. Iran plans to force Israel to stop by wrecking the economies of a bunch of countries that are basically frenemies of Israel? I suppose its meant to pressure USA, it just seems like a terrible strategy.
It's supposed to show to regional US allies that the American military cannot really protect them, pushing them to apply pressure to end the war in the short term, and to cool their relationship with the US and Israel in the long term.
It has had some effect; the emirates are desperate to find a way out of this conflict, and various figures have publicly said "the system of alliances [with the US] has worked but needs to be modernized" - i.e. we can't allow Americans to do what they want anymore.
It (normally) has an effect on the military calculus - e.g. if the US weren't allowed to have military bases in these countries, the possibility to take such action seems less plausible.
Correct, but that's not my point. My point is whether the Gulf States can realistically dictate what the US does. Perhaps they can affect US actions, but I doubt it's that cut and dried.
Nobody can realistically maintain bases in a country without some sort of agreement with the local government (and a certain level of tolerance from the population at large) or an expensive full-on occupation. As far as I know, there is a single US base on a territory where the local government does not want it (Guantanamo, Cuba), literally on the doorstep - anywhere else would be prohibitive to maintain long-term hostile occupation.
Everything else is maintained and operated in agreement with local authorities - which is why the US, at the moment, cannot use Spanish bases and Diego Garcia to wage war on Iran. Even Saudi bases have been blocked in the past (notably to invade Iraq).
Without long-term bases, it becomes extremely difficult to project power with continuity. Can you still do the occasional special op, like killing Osama? Sure, but you can't do things like ensuring free navigation (and hence the flow of resources and goods) and signal intelligence gets so much harder.
You need to think that all the way through. The answer is obviously yes. Yemen is a perfect example. Iran is obviously as well. Afghanistan another great case. It is certainly possible to resist US pressure. Iran is asking the gulf countries to do that. Imagine how much better they would all be able to resist the US together as well, better than each alone.
Of course it isn't. In reality, being able to resist requires power. Power that's gained more or less independently such as Iran's. Gulf states should be in a position of power to able to resist US presence. The power they have right now is mostly gained through the help of USA and its allies. It's not the same as Iran. Not even close.
> Of course it isn't. In reality, being able to resist requires power.
I gave examples of it actually happening. If sandal-wearing Houthis can resist, then well-funded oil states can as well. The Taliban beat the US. In fact, very few people have failed at ejecting the US from the country when they tried if you think back. The US tends to lose a lot.
Ironically Yemen (Houthis) are fighting not only with US but against other gulf sates like Saudi Arabia as well. It's not really an example that demonstrates unity in gulf.
> The Taliban beat the US.
Taliban, brought to you by US of A to combat Soviet Union's influence! Well, it seems they are done beating US and are now busy beating Afghan women.
> The US tends to lose a lot.
Do they really? After the war is over and US is beat, how does the life of an average American compare to someone's from your list. It is the people of Middle East who pay the biggest price. That's the real loss.
To keep a military base in a country you either need to be allowed to do so, or you have to do so by force, by occupying the country.
Occupation is doable, but very costly. The US did it recently in Afghanistan (which is barely a functioning country itself).
So yeah, it keeping military bases abroad via occupation is doable for some time, but not very feasible. It is more realistic to have a system of allied countries.
It's sort of a meme how people in the US imagine all middle eastern countries to be a bunch of mud huts in the world's largest gravel quarry.
> To keep a military base in a country you either need to be allowed to do so, or you have to do so by force, by occupying the country.
There are all sorts of levers US, China, Russia can pull to in order to put pressure on a country for such things. There's occupation, mutual benefits, long standing agreements post wars, soft power, sanctions, etc. Geopolitics is complicated.
And this is all is part of what "allowing" means. If a country is unwilling to allow for it, the only thing is left is either accepting is as a reality or trying to do so by force.
The gulf countries hate Iran and have for a very very long time, longer than even the concept of the west has existed. Iran throwing around ballistic missiles is far more like a temper tantrum than a viable military strategy. And its a strategic gift to Trump. Whether he/we can take advantage of that, IDK.
I'm not so sure it's a strategic gift for Trump. Before the war (oh, sorry, I meant the "special military operation") everything was largely fine for the Gulf states. Now, it's not.
"Videos verified by Storyful, which is owned by News Corp, the parent company of The Wall Street Journal, indicate that at least some of the launches came from Bahrain, the tiny kingdom just 125 miles across the Gulf from Iran."
The air bases are still being used as launch pads for drone strikes and chopper missions.
These other "randoms" are US allies which host bases and equipment used to attack them.
In more practical terms, wrecking shit up in places like Dubai that made their name off air travel and attracting "expat" douchebags, is a very effective way to get them to pressure the US to stop the war. So is blowing up oil infra and stopping transit in Hormuz for allied nations.
NY Times doesn't even know what NATO is, while writing a full-page article about it, so yeah this kind of ignorance about where USA has it hands and guns is not surprising, from some random on the internet. ;)
I think Israel is the dessert. First they need the Americans to back off.
In the end game, they are going to need some leverage over Israel, that is stuck there with them. If they destroy everything now, they will not have anything to threaten them with.
The data centers in Israel are protected by their AA systems that have more interceptors available than the Emirates. For weeks there are rumors about low stocks of interceptors in the Emirates and Saudi Arabia, while Israel manufactures their own while also getting more from US, so their stocks were probably way higher and replenishment better.
Also the Emirates are in range of short range cheapo drones and Iran build lot of these, while Israel is farther away.
it's a good strategy. There's no point in trying to stop Israel by harming them economically because they know perfectly well that like for them, this war is existential. The Gulf states are financial hubs and tourist destinations disguised as countries and so their wealth is a neuralgic point, the Gulf states and also by extension the US actually respond to having their economies wrecked.
> I do think there is some irony that the Iran war took down all the AWS datacenters in the middle east except the one (or 3 i guess) in Israel, which is still chugging along.
... For now.
> Like as a strategy its kind of weird. Iran plans to force Israel to stop by wrecking the economies of a bunch of countries that are basically frenemies of Israel? I suppose its meant to pressure USA, it just seems like a terrible strategy.
The gulf countries are enemies of Iran. In fact, they are a lot cozier to Israel.
I am anything but a legal expert, but my guess would be that this falls under the aspects of force majeure. Which doesn't mean, that in a couple of years they try to take this to court.
US gov is not going to reimburse a private company for war damage caused by a sovereign country.
Property insurance generally has war exclusions, insurance co will deny claims. Unless there is some affordable magic 100% war damage coverage policy sold in the middle east, which is doubtful, no insurer would be able to successfully underwrite anything like that.
The company eats the losses and the recovery efforts it wants to persue.
While Iran and Israel don't 'have the backbone to disagree & commit', while there's much 'earn trust' between Saudia/Bahrain/UAE & Iran to do, and while Amazon should 'insist on higher standards' from CENTCOM, it must also 'think big' military things as 'success and scale bring broad responsibility' and most certainly 'dive deep' in to new-age ew/autonomous tech and 'deliver results' through "AWS air & land" weapons systems of their own; and not forget to 'hire & develop the best' mercenaries who would show 'bias for action' & operate with ruthlessness hitherto unknown to humankind. Wouldn't that make Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie proud.
Not to be insensitive about the humanitarian and economic situation, but, I am curious why there are data centers in that region at all? It just seems horribly inefficient from a cooling and electricity standpoint. Not to mention water.
My pessimistic assumption is that Amazon said "yes" to handouts from regional government efforts to be relevant in tech, and that those data centers dont really matter to anyone but local politicians and monarchs who believe they have a seat at the table.
Middle East isn’t some 3rd world. If you can imagine futuristic cities, rich Middle East countries are already living in them with all the oil wealth.
They have phones, computers, digital services just like the US and Europe. Makes sense they want a data center in the region, close to them just like the US and Europe have data enters close to their users.
Americans seem to think the middle-east is some dystopian place where everyone is near poverty living in mudhuts, when places like Iran have a higher level of literacy than the USA, with more female college graduates.
There's definitely a lot of issues that need to be addressed at a cultural and social-economical level in places like Dubai exploiting migrant workers like slaves, the UAE, etc... but America has plenty of issues back home at a state by state case. Poverty, infrastructure falling apart, lack of education, lack of affordable health care, lack of job opportunity, high criminality, drug epidemics, etc... Some states feel like entirely different countries when compared to something like New Hampshire.
Even places like NYC and California which are economic hubs have this wide disparity of class, with entire communities of homeless populating the streets at crazy numbers that would make other nations blush (Cali has well over 100k).
I’m not really surprised. The US (and their allies) has made a concerted effort over a number of decades to turn them into to the third world. The current sitting US president has threatened to blast them into “oblivion” and “back to the Stone Ages, where they belong”. A lot of imagery of middle eastern countries seen in the west is of the places they’ve collectively destroyed.
As I understand it in most cases they have enormous wealth disparities, so like the rich in Dubai have pampered tourist experiences but there's also serious issues with like lacking basic sewer infrastructure for ordinary people.
Indeed.
It's much like the USofA in that regard.
Slight tangent, but to me futuristic cities are actually places like Amsterdam, with cozy streets and bike lanes everywhere, not places like Dubai with 16-lane freeways and a quasi-slave underclass staffing the tacky malls.
Its sad that people think the "future" is all about owning stuff for yourself and not what the city can provide to its population.
Why is it said? Being independent to the degree possible is the best state for human being I think.
Do you think we became the dominant species by being independent loners, or by forming complex interdependent groups?
I said "independent to the degree possible", not absolutely.
I do not live in a binary world. I accept things in between.
Being part of group should be voluntary, not forced
What I definitely do not want is my life to be dictated by a few imbeciles at the top who are bought by large corps to pretend to be "by the people for the people".
The solution to that is widespread active low level constant community engagement in policy and monitoring the people you hire to debate policy (politicians) and the various silo's created to enact policy (military, civil service, legal, emergancy response, etc.).
Some people think it sufficient to pay no attention and let things slide indefinitely because "ultimately we can just rise up and shoot the government".
Such people have clogged toilets.
Isn't it expected that in a system that favors individualism over collectivism that a few people will be able to amass disproportionately more wealth and power than everyone else with no incentive or societally enforced responsibility to share that wealth and power, thus creating a society were your life is dictated by a few imbeciles at the top, not who are not bought by large corps, but who own the large corps?
A city whose citizens mostly drive is less independent than a city whose citizens mostly ride bicycles. Bicycling infrastructure is orders of magnitude cheaper to maintain than the same for heavier, motorized vehicles. It's not just the roadways: you need service stations, tire shops, parking lots and garages. Gasoline engine cars need gasoline distributed to stations all over the place and emissions testing. All of these things take up lots of space because motor vehicles are big.
All that bicycles really need are a (much narrower) right of way and some cheap pavement. Maintenance can be done all at home, even in a small apartment. The apparent independence available to motor vehicle drivers is an illusion afforded by massive private and public investment.
In what crystal ball did you see me saying anything about bicycles? I am long time cyclist, EUC rider and have car for cases when it is needed.
I can't imagine the logic chain that made you come to that conclusion.
Maybe, but the "loneliness epidemic" articles and frankly, my own experience lead me to believe that independance is overated. Community is not though.
Independent? You say independent, I say parasitic. Just like any ruling class of the Middle East, especially the UAE. They’re not independent, they’re very much dependent on the semi slave labor they manage to exploit. Anything that makes life worth living is the result of collective labor. People coming together and building or learning upon previous knowledge. Hell, even your understanding of yourself comes from the social relationships you form during your formative years. This desire to be what amounts to an outcast is a defect, an abnormality imposed by the mode of production that organizes the world right now.
I guess it depends on if you were a Gibson fan or an Asimov fan as a teen
This is a hilarious comparison given Amsterdam's own history with regard to immigration. Not even historically but contemporarily too.. Just Eat, probably the largest employer of bargain bucket labour across Europe today is headquartered in Amsterdam
It was snippy and unclear, after the edit, its that and weak. I’d motion you just delete. Not sure literal slaves is comparable to a company that pays bargain basement salaries
It is hilarious, because it is blinded by our own self-imposed optics. It has been our policy to import droves of immigrant workers who have little hope but to take up gig economy jobs often illegally and remain fixed at the same (or worse) levels of economic status as the day they arrived in the country. Yes in Dubai they simply confiscate passports. At least they're honest about it
The kafala system confiscates your passport. You can't quit, can't switch employers, can't leave the country. People die in labor camps building these vanity projects. The UN classifies it as modern slavery.
A Just Eat rider in Amsterdam can quit tomorrow and sue their employer. Those aren't the same thing. You can criticize Europe's treatment of immigrant workers without pretending the difference is just honesty.
If you take futuristic to mean „looking like the future“, it think the second option is sadly more futuristic for some people
Indeed, but sprawling lead-smoke infested freeways is the stuff of the 1950s; bike lanes and playgrounds and grassy tram tracks is what some cities are starting to do just now! So actually more futuristic, objectively speaking :)
A lot of people don’t like bikes. I am down for salty licorice though.
And yet Amsterdam has a world famous seedy district
And yet Amsterdam has a world famous seedy district
What world-class city doesn't?
And if you think there aren't hookers in Dubai, then I don't know what to tell you.
Actually, there are probably not a lot of hookers in Dubai at this moment. Most are probably back to Europe (or stuck in the airport).
If you can imagine dystopian cities, rich Middle East countries are already living in them with all the oil wealth.
San Francisco feels the same s/oil/tech/g
I could never relax in such a place. Will always feel spooked
So... The future is Dubai? I am still to hear a better argument in favor of extinction.
This reminds me of a quote from "Stranger Than Fiction":
> Harold: "I don't want to eat nothing but pancakes, I want to live! I mean, who in their right mind in a choice between pancakes and living chooses pancakes?"
> Dr. Hilbert: "Harold, if you pause to think, you'd realize that that answer is inextricably contingent upon the type of life being led... and, of course, the quality of the pancakes"
Even 3rd world have those nowadays, unless you talking the more troubled of countries. TBH "3rd world" as a concept is quite outdated.
I'm a bit skeptical on how "futuristic" the cities are. There's a lot of money, sure, but from I can tell the projects are pharaonic in a lot of ways, including being out of touch with the practicality of such projects.
There's a fair amount of nearby customers. There's decent connectivity via undersea cables to Europe, East Asia, and Africa. UAE, Bahrain, Qatar and Saudi Arabia are very encouraging of outside investments in their countries.
I did some work with hosts on GCP in the region and you get fun things like hosts in Israel has bad routes to customers in nearby countries and vice versa, though. I don't know if AWS has access to better routing. Definitely a case where physical distance doesn't really correspond with network distance.
To provide some practical examples, Dubai is it's own region in some online games like Valorant. It has relatively good connectivity to the region and there are enough customers there
There are customers there, some of whom are large enough to create significant demand just by insisting on their compute and storage being local.
They have the cheapest oil in the world and in the future (and present) they will likely have cheap solar energy.
And until this fine misadventure, it was also possible they would get extremely cheap nuclear energy.
Given that the Gulf is fairly central, has tremendous flight connectivity, has tremendous capacity for business and business conference growth, Dubai was only looking to increase its share of global finance, law, and other major services, is a major center of shipping, is a region that has neutral to friendly relations with nearly every country, has 3rd world like cheap labor but first world like luxuries if you have the money, and a lot of money they were willing to spend on these data centers, it’s not the worst idea.
Of course, that whole plan has come crashing down now that having US bases has turned from an asset to a liability.
I imagine the same reason they have a data center in places like Sao Paulo. More locally centred businesses want the low ping, and AWS wants to be your cloud compute provider of choice no matter where your target audience is.
Data centers can run on closed loop cooling systems which doesn't need continuous water supply. Only bottleneck is Energy supply which the MEA area doesn't lack.
Hundreds of millions of people live in the Middle East and a lot of large corporations are based there. Likely they thought it would be profitable, and likely they saw some decent use.
Electricity? It's probably one of the best places in the world to have a solar+battery installation?
I think you are overfitting to temperature as a variable in this decision making equation.
I think the easy answer is: because there are customers there. It’s a region full of major commercial and industrial companies. I can imagine that you’d want data centers close to where those customer are.
Technically, I can see challenges in power and cooling, but those can be overcome. The real question is- Are there enough customers in the region to support local data centers? I think that’s clearly yes.
If anyone here is involved in making decisions about where to locate such centers, I'd love to hear more about how geopolitical risk factors in, and whether you plan and price out contingencies (e.g. "This is near an unstable area, worst case is we write off $###M, but after Y years it breaks even. And the site is better in these other factors than alternative Z over there..."). Is it similar to factoring for geophysical instabilities (e.g. earthquake/tsunami zone) or other risks? Or would this type of event catch you completely offguard? I'm guessing insurance riders specifically exclude these types of risks.
Insurance. No need to write off anything or take a loss, just a slightly increased yearly cost. The cost of said insurance is likely going to be very high for a long time now though.
I insure a bunch of big datacenters (crypto mining, AI); there are really two main drivers of cost of insurance per $ of equipment:
1) Internal risks and controls within the datacenter (the company involved and their operating history, fires, flood, etc,) -- for a sufficiently "good" datacenter, you can assume it gets maxed out in quality, or at least to the point where it's no longer efficient to spend more. Most of these risks also cause service disruptions, so if you're building for high availability anyway, the rest of this stuff is usually handled as part of that. Essentially, if you're too cheap to build a good enough datacenter to max this out, you're not getting insurance anyway in most cases, so it's not a variable factor so bunch as binary or maybe a few broad risk bands (ISO tier for datacenters).
2) External risks. This is mostly natural catastrophe ("nat cat" or "cat risk"); usually there's one dominant driver of that ("severe convective storms" in Texas; floods and hurricanes in places like Florida; earthquakes in California). In some places it's multiple risks (Japan has both earthquake/tsunami and typhoon). This drives the majority of insurance premium.
War risk, geopolitical, political risk, terrorism, SRCC ("strikes, riots, and civil commotion") are in a third category -- often essentially not a factor (e.g. for a $200mm facility in rural Texas), but often handled through special programs at a national level or specialty insurance. A lot of normal policies exclude or let the client buy-back that part of the risk.
As my personal interests in war zones, drones, etc. and professional interests in crypto, AI, and datacenters seem to have converged, looking forward to seeing "quality of air defense artillery/integrated air defense system" as well as "comprehensive quick reaction force capable of dealing with national-level threats" as elements of insurance underwriting for $50B AI datacenters/"AI factories" in the future. I assume in most cases this kind of stuff will be handled by national, military, defense, or civil defense parts of the government, but could easily be contracted as well. I don't think Oracle Cloud is likely to stand up their own private army though.
Sure, but insurance is just outsourcing that calculation to a third party. AWS is big enough that I would think they largely self-insure, though I don't know if they do.
My impression is most commercial insurance policies specifically exclude acts of war (and similar). The extent of systematic damage that can occur in such scenarios would easily put them into insolvency. There are exceptions for life insurance, maritime shipping, aviation etc. but I gather they're uncommon, often limited-time in nature and come with high premiums. I've never heard of the equivalent for buildings and contents. Maybe someone can enlighten me.
I also agree with the sibling comment that suggests even if there were outsourced options available, hyperscalers might do better to self-insure.
But regardless whether the company eats it, or pays it through insurance premiums, I'm still curious how this type of risk is planned for (to whatever degree it is) and accounted. I assume it must have been contemplated in a deliberate manner, somewhere on a scale of "We knew this could happen, considered x, y and z, decided the venture was justified, and here's how we planned for such a contingency" to "That was dumb siting and someone will be fired". Obviously anywhere you put a building entails some level of local risk.
As years as a volunteer firefighter we do a lot of risk management at the tactical level and have to think through assessment and potential consequences. There are lots of guidelines we learn to help produce sound decisions. But at the end of the day to apply them you may need to make a judgement call, and you need to be prepared for things to go wrong. In a way I guess I'm asking about the economic and operational equivalent at the scale of hundred-million dollar data centers.
https://xkcd.com/1737/
Ps. Like the original commenter said, I'm in no way meaning to be insensitive to the larger human and regional consequences.
I was thinking the same thing about cooling. I guess a high pressure heat pump can work in any environment if it compresses a gas up to a temperature that’s higher than ambient. Couple that with abundant cheap energy — sunny, oily, and gassy! — and it doesn’t seem unreasonable at all.
You can use a heat pump for any realistic output temperature but the efficiency goes down the higher the temperature difference has to be.
As long as sun and wind aren’t the main energy sources there, it might be economical but I wouldn’t exactly call it reasonable.
Yes, and also pushed for by the Israeli and US governments. Tech investment is part of the Abraham Accords - i.e this is part of the prerequisites for normalization of ties with Israel.
My guess.
Edge compute. Data (coughlaugh) residency. Obsession with low latency on our 42Mb web pages.
Data governance compliance is a huge issue for some industries. "The days can't leave the country" will drive AWSs normal customers to demand bespoke regions setup and turned on
Yes, I'm surprised no one else has commented on this. Some regulations require that at least some backups be located in the same country or region.
Why would water for data center be an issue there? They dont need to drink it.
It was business for those contries. Just like finance, travel and wgat have you.
Water is used for cooling. You take in liquid water, release water vapor, and the phase transition takes away a lot of heat. Otherwise you need to pump that heat into dry air, which is much more difficult (energy-expensive). It's the same thing you do when you sweat.
Once Iran ramps up, its going to be a free-for-all against all US data infrastructure. Iran has friends in low places so they don't have to do all of the dirty work themselves. This should be a wake-up call.
Because there are customers there
Closed-loop water cooling systems are common and use very little water, despite what you may hear from alarmists.
Sovereign data requirements for government and business.
It's extremely efficient from an evaporative cooling perspective.
> local politicians and monarchs who believe they have a seat at the table.
Are you from another planet? They DO have a set at the table because gulf Sovereign Funds are one of the largest and most reliable LP pools available for VC funds for quite some time.
The current AI buildout is heavily dependent on Gulf money.
Oil is not forever and Sovereign Wealth Funds usually have goals that are not simply acruing direct investment returns, it makes sense that the folks deploying 100 billions tranches will have some say on where to put all those H100 their money will buy.
Nobody sane would predict Israel and the US would start this war.
>Nobody sane would predict Israel and the US would start this war.
Israel predicted and started the war unless you consider they're insane [1].
[1] Iran is a distraction [video]:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47640560
So are the Azure data centers still up or do the Iranians just assume Azure will take itself offline eventually? Joking but I assume Microsoft (and Google) have a DC presence in the region too.
Perhaps the Iranians understand that the continued existence of Microsoft is the best damage they can do to their enemies.
Gonna have to update my boto3 code to deal with a new value for instance.state['Name'], "bombed".
Pretty sure this is old news being repackaged
Seems like it, the dates on the AWS outage board are all a month old: https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status
I do think there is some irony that the Iran war took down all the AWS datacenters in the middle east except the one (or 3 i guess) in Israel, which is still chugging along.
Like as a strategy its kind of weird. Iran plans to force Israel to stop by wrecking the economies of a bunch of countries that are basically frenemies of Israel? I suppose its meant to pressure USA, it just seems like a terrible strategy.
It's supposed to show to regional US allies that the American military cannot really protect them, pushing them to apply pressure to end the war in the short term, and to cool their relationship with the US and Israel in the long term.
It has had some effect; the emirates are desperate to find a way out of this conflict, and various figures have publicly said "the system of alliances [with the US] has worked but needs to be modernized" - i.e. we can't allow Americans to do what they want anymore.
Do Americans do what they want because they are “allowed” by gulf states?
It (normally) has an effect on the military calculus - e.g. if the US weren't allowed to have military bases in these countries, the possibility to take such action seems less plausible.
Correct, but that's not my point. My point is whether the Gulf States can realistically dictate what the US does. Perhaps they can affect US actions, but I doubt it's that cut and dried.
Nobody can realistically maintain bases in a country without some sort of agreement with the local government (and a certain level of tolerance from the population at large) or an expensive full-on occupation. As far as I know, there is a single US base on a territory where the local government does not want it (Guantanamo, Cuba), literally on the doorstep - anywhere else would be prohibitive to maintain long-term hostile occupation.
Everything else is maintained and operated in agreement with local authorities - which is why the US, at the moment, cannot use Spanish bases and Diego Garcia to wage war on Iran. Even Saudi bases have been blocked in the past (notably to invade Iraq).
Without long-term bases, it becomes extremely difficult to project power with continuity. Can you still do the occasional special op, like killing Osama? Sure, but you can't do things like ensuring free navigation (and hence the flow of resources and goods) and signal intelligence gets so much harder.
You need to think that all the way through. The answer is obviously yes. Yemen is a perfect example. Iran is obviously as well. Afghanistan another great case. It is certainly possible to resist US pressure. Iran is asking the gulf countries to do that. Imagine how much better they would all be able to resist the US together as well, better than each alone.
> The answer is obviously yes.
Of course it isn't. In reality, being able to resist requires power. Power that's gained more or less independently such as Iran's. Gulf states should be in a position of power to able to resist US presence. The power they have right now is mostly gained through the help of USA and its allies. It's not the same as Iran. Not even close.
> Of course it isn't. In reality, being able to resist requires power.
I gave examples of it actually happening. If sandal-wearing Houthis can resist, then well-funded oil states can as well. The Taliban beat the US. In fact, very few people have failed at ejecting the US from the country when they tried if you think back. The US tends to lose a lot.
> I gave examples of it actually happening.
Ironically Yemen (Houthis) are fighting not only with US but against other gulf sates like Saudi Arabia as well. It's not really an example that demonstrates unity in gulf.
> The Taliban beat the US.
Taliban, brought to you by US of A to combat Soviet Union's influence! Well, it seems they are done beating US and are now busy beating Afghan women.
> The US tends to lose a lot.
Do they really? After the war is over and US is beat, how does the life of an average American compare to someone's from your list. It is the people of Middle East who pay the biggest price. That's the real loss.
*edit: typo
> Do they really?
Vietnam. Afghanistan. Iraq (it's an Iran proxy now). Korea was a stalemate.
Pretty much every time the US goes alone against a medium-sized country, it doesn't end in victory.
> Do they really?
Yes, really. The US has rarely achieved its objectives.
You are very wrong.
To keep a military base in a country you either need to be allowed to do so, or you have to do so by force, by occupying the country.
Occupation is doable, but very costly. The US did it recently in Afghanistan (which is barely a functioning country itself).
So yeah, it keeping military bases abroad via occupation is doable for some time, but not very feasible. It is more realistic to have a system of allied countries.
It's sort of a meme how people in the US imagine all middle eastern countries to be a bunch of mud huts in the world's largest gravel quarry.
> To keep a military base in a country you either need to be allowed to do so, or you have to do so by force, by occupying the country.
There are all sorts of levers US, China, Russia can pull to in order to put pressure on a country for such things. There's occupation, mutual benefits, long standing agreements post wars, soft power, sanctions, etc. Geopolitics is complicated.
And this is all is part of what "allowing" means. If a country is unwilling to allow for it, the only thing is left is either accepting is as a reality or trying to do so by force.
The gulf countries hate Iran and have for a very very long time, longer than even the concept of the west has existed. Iran throwing around ballistic missiles is far more like a temper tantrum than a viable military strategy. And its a strategic gift to Trump. Whether he/we can take advantage of that, IDK.
Who is “we”, just for reader clarity?
I guess US oil producers make a lot of money right now. I think those must be the "we make a lot of money" Trump refers to.
I'm not so sure it's a strategic gift for Trump. Before the war (oh, sorry, I meant the "special military operation") everything was largely fine for the Gulf states. Now, it's not.
It's not that they don't want to hit the ones in Israel, it's that they're better defended, and further away.
Bahrain to Iran is ~140 miles. Dubai is ~100 miles. Israel is closer to ~600.
No doubt. But it still seems like a bizarre strategy. They can't shoot the people they want so they just shoot these other randoms.
These randoms not only host U.S. bases supplying logistics for the attacks on Iran, but were are launch pads for missiles https://www.wsj.com/world/iran-war-land-missile-strikes-22ca... until Iran ensured the launch sites were destroyed
"Videos verified by Storyful, which is owned by News Corp, the parent company of The Wall Street Journal, indicate that at least some of the launches came from Bahrain, the tiny kingdom just 125 miles across the Gulf from Iran."
The air bases are still being used as launch pads for drone strikes and chopper missions.
AWS isn't an "other random", it's a core piece of American infrastructure, and Bahrain hosts the US Fifth Fleet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Support_Activity_Bahrain
Same for Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, etc.; all host US bases. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-military-facili...
>"They can't shoot the people they want so they just shoot these other randoms."
Same as sanctions. There are many places where they can not tell governments what to do, so they suffocate general population
These other "randoms" are US allies which host bases and equipment used to attack them.
In more practical terms, wrecking shit up in places like Dubai that made their name off air travel and attracting "expat" douchebags, is a very effective way to get them to pressure the US to stop the war. So is blowing up oil infra and stopping transit in Hormuz for allied nations.
NY Times doesn't even know what NATO is, while writing a full-page article about it, so yeah this kind of ignorance about where USA has it hands and guns is not surprising, from some random on the internet. ;)
I think Israel is the dessert. First they need the Americans to back off.
In the end game, they are going to need some leverage over Israel, that is stuck there with them. If they destroy everything now, they will not have anything to threaten them with.
The data centers in Israel are protected by their AA systems that have more interceptors available than the Emirates. For weeks there are rumors about low stocks of interceptors in the Emirates and Saudi Arabia, while Israel manufactures their own while also getting more from US, so their stocks were probably way higher and replenishment better.
Also the Emirates are in range of short range cheapo drones and Iran build lot of these, while Israel is farther away.
Or Israel just has a very dense and effective air defense network, and the weapons didn't make it through?
Iron dome.
it's a good strategy. There's no point in trying to stop Israel by harming them economically because they know perfectly well that like for them, this war is existential. The Gulf states are financial hubs and tourist destinations disguised as countries and so their wealth is a neuralgic point, the Gulf states and also by extension the US actually respond to having their economies wrecked.
> I do think there is some irony that the Iran war took down all the AWS datacenters in the middle east except the one (or 3 i guess) in Israel, which is still chugging along.
... For now.
> Like as a strategy its kind of weird. Iran plans to force Israel to stop by wrecking the economies of a bunch of countries that are basically frenemies of Israel? I suppose its meant to pressure USA, it just seems like a terrible strategy.
The gulf countries are enemies of Iran. In fact, they are a lot cozier to Israel.
That's going to put more pressure on RAM chip availability.
So can Amazon file a claim with the Us government for compensation? Does their insurance cover this? Or do they just eat the loss?
I am anything but a legal expert, but my guess would be that this falls under the aspects of force majeure. Which doesn't mean, that in a couple of years they try to take this to court.
US gov is not going to reimburse a private company for war damage caused by a sovereign country.
Property insurance generally has war exclusions, insurance co will deny claims. Unless there is some affordable magic 100% war damage coverage policy sold in the middle east, which is doubtful, no insurer would be able to successfully underwrite anything like that.
The company eats the losses and the recovery efforts it wants to persue.
No the US government legitimately sells this kind of insurance (and reinsurance):
https://www.dfc.gov/what-we-offer/our-products/political-ris...
No, I’d say they’ll get it back with free Iranian oil in a few weeks.
Would you bet on it?
Does this count as offensive cyber?
While Iran and Israel don't 'have the backbone to disagree & commit', while there's much 'earn trust' between Saudia/Bahrain/UAE & Iran to do, and while Amazon should 'insist on higher standards' from CENTCOM, it must also 'think big' military things as 'success and scale bring broad responsibility' and most certainly 'dive deep' in to new-age ew/autonomous tech and 'deliver results' through "AWS air & land" weapons systems of their own; and not forget to 'hire & develop the best' mercenaries who would show 'bias for action' & operate with ruthlessness hitherto unknown to humankind. Wouldn't that make Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie proud.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47632503