Six months after Iranian drone strikes hit its me-central-1 (UAE) and me-south-1 (Bahrain) data centers, AWS confirms that some data hosted exclusively in those zones is unrecoverable — a first for a global cloud provider. Audit your data placement now and replicate any critical workload out of the region.

Open-weight models accounted for 60% of OpenRouter’s US token consumption in August, most of them Chinese. The marketplace has now made US in-region routing generally available, guaranteeing that requests are decrypted, processed, and served entirely on American soil — or rejected.

Announced at LEAP in Riyadh, AWS’s first infrastructure region in Saudi Arabia will go live in December 2026, bringing the global network to 40 regions on a planned investment of over $5.3 billion. For teams serving the Gulf, it is the long-awaited answer to data-residency requirements, doubled with a 50 MW AI Zone planned for 2028.