Iran's New Chokepoint: Gulf Cables and Data Centers Under Threat

The Chokepoint Just Got Bigger

Iran is adding a new front to any potential war with the United States — one that has nothing to do with油 and everything to do with the fiber-optic cables running beneath the Gulf. On October 11, Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, told state media that a renewed conflict would place countless undersea cables, data centers, and AI facilities across the region within Iranian strike range. He put a price tag on the target: $2 trillion worth of digital infrastructure.

The threat marks a significant escalation. For years, Iran’s most credible weapon has been the Strait of Hormuz — a narrow waterway through which roughly 20 million barrels of oil pass daily. Blockading it or attacking tankers raises the price of crude and sends shockwaves through global energy markets. But the Gulf’s digital economy is now just as concentrated, and just as vulnerable.

The Geography of Global Data

It is easy to imagine the internet as a cloud — weightless, everywhere at once. In reality, nearly all transcontinental data flows through a handful of undersea fiber-optic cables. Europe and Asia alone route more than 90 percent of their data capacity through cables that pass near or through the Red Sea and the Gulf, according to Telegeography, a U.S. market-research firm.

The southern Red Sea at Bab el-Mandeb is especially critical. The strait is barely 26 kilometers wide at its narrowest point — less than half the distance between Busan and Tsushima. Al Jazeera reports that roughly one-fifth of global internet traffic funnels through cables passing this chokepoint. The Houthi seizure of territory controlling the strait since last month already demonstrated how quickly these routes can become contested.

Iranian hardliners are now explicitly targeting the same logic. Hossein Shariatmadari, editor of the conservative Kayhan newspaper and deputy to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, argued publicly that Iran should treat the seven major international undersea cables crossing the Persian Gulf and Hormuz as strategic pressure tools. That is not fringe rhetoric — it mirrors the same coercion playbook Iran has used for decades, just aimed at a different nervous system.

What Happens When a Cable Breaks

Repairing a severed undersea cable takes months, not days. When a cable goes down, telecom operators reroute traffic through surviving lines. If those backup routes lack capacity, latency spikes, connections slow, and countries with thin cable redundancy can lose overseas access entirely.

The Gulf is not thin on redundancy — yet. But it is growing dense fast. The region is now hosting some of the world’s largest new AI infrastructure builds, many of them backed by American technology giants and Gulf sovereign wealth.

OpenAI, Nvidia, and the UAE AI company G42 are constructing what they call Stargate UAE near Abu Dhabi, a data center and AI campus planned to draw 5 gigawatts of power — roughly the output of four to five large nuclear reactors. Microsoft committed more than $10 billion across Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE by 2030. Qatar’s sovereign fund invested $3 billion with Blue Owl in data center development last year. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund launched Humain under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s chairmanship to build data centers and develop an Arabic-language AI model.

All of that capital sits in a neighborhood where cables cross narrow straits and drone attacks on data centers have already occurred. In March, during the opening phase of the current Middle East conflict, drones struck AWS data centers in the UAE and Bahrain. AWS said last month it had “exhausted every option” to restore services, and some data was permanently unrecoverable.

A Coercion Strategy With Global Ripple Effects

Analysts see Iran’s threat as deterrence by escalation — a calculation that raising the cost of war for Washington means targeting infrastructure the United States cannot afford to lose. Andreas Krieger, a senior lecturer at King’s College London, told Al Jazeera that the threat will not overturn the Gulf states’ AI strategies fundamentally, but it will rewrite the economics and geography of where those investments make sense.

That rewrite could be substantial. The Gulf has positioned itself as a stable oasis for American tech expansion in an unstable region. If that stability premium evaporates, investors will price in the risk — or redirect capital elsewhere. Data centers are not easily relocated. They require vast tracts of land, massive power connections, and deep undersea cable landing stations. Every new facility that breaks ground in the Gulf locks in exposure to Iranian threats for decades.

Who Wins, Who Loses

Iran gains leverage without firing a shot. The threat alone raises insurance costs, slows investment, and forces Washington to defend infrastructure that has nothing to do with oil. If the United States responds with military force, Iran can point to every damaged cable or offline data center as proof that American action destabilizes the region further.

The Gulf states lose first. Their AI bets depend on physical security that no sovereign wealth fund can fully insure against. The more expensive the threat becomes to sit in the Gulf, the less competitive the region looks compared with alternatives — Texas, Finland, Morocco, even India.

Global users lose last, but still. The internet is not a single pipe. When one corridor tightens, traffic shuffles. Some regions feel it immediately; others absorb the shift. But the deeper the world’s economy moves into cloud-dependent services, AI inference, and real-time data exchange, the more a sustained cable disruption in the Gulf becomes a genuine global supply-chain event — one that could slow everything from financial transactions to telemedicine to autonomous logistics.

What Comes Next

The Trump administration’s negotiations with Iran remain stalled. Until they move — or until kinetic strikes resume — the threat will hang over the Gulf like weather: persistent, unpredictable, and expensive to hedge against. Gulf governments will likely accelerate cable diversity projects, adding new landing stations and alternate routes through the Arabian Sea and the Caucasus. Private operators will tighten security and raise premiums. Iran will keep the threat alive as long as it raises America’s war costs.

The Strait of Hormuz was always about oil. The Gulf’s undersea cables are about everything else. Iran’s latest warning makes clear it intends to treat them the same way.