The UAE already treats its data infrastructure as critical – a “Critical Information Infrastructure” category sits alongside power, water, and telecoms in national policy, with data localization as a core requirement. What’s changed is the stakes attached to that label. As AI compute becomes strategic national infrastructure in its own right, comparable to electricity grids and ports, the question shifts from who hosts it to who owns it. This issue’s cover story picks up from there: why governments across the region – the UAE and its neighbors alike – are racing to own the chips, data centers, and energy behind AI, and what it means when computing power becomes a matter of sovereignty rather than procurement.
That same instinct shows up elsewhere in this issue too. Security teams defending against machine-speed attacks are learning that accountability has to move as fast as the threat does. Gulf capital’s push into tech investment and post-oil energy positioning is a version of the oldest sovereignty question there is: who benefits when the resource runs out. And enterprises turning AI pilots into production systems are discovering that a working demo and a system you can actually rely on are two very different investments.
Our fintech and identity stories take the same idea down to a smaller scale – AI agents opening bank accounts, machines needing verifiable identities of their own – where the practical question becomes how you verify and secure something that increasingly acts without asking first.