Wealthy Gulf residents and family offices are building private data centers for homes and luxury yachts.

Demand has accelerated since Iranian drone attacks disrupted Gulf cloud infrastructure, including Amazon Web Services facilities in Bahrain and the UAE.

Rain Ibajo, Chief Technology Officer at Dubai-based Ragoa Technologies, told Arabian Gulf Business Insight that private systems cost between about $550,000 and $1.1 million.

Advances in AI are also making the systems more useful, allowing owners to analyze sensitive data locally while reducing reliance on external cloud providers.

Saudi Arabia is postponing its Red Sea International Film Festival, pushing the star-studded annual event to late 2027 as an escalating conflict with Yemen’s Houthis and continued disruption in the Strait of Hormuz deepen security concerns.

Organizers scrapped the red-carpet premiere scheduled for Dec. 3 in Jeddah, though they cited only the logistical demands of staging the international festival, The National reports.

Last year’s event drew Hollywood stars including Dakota Johnson, Uma Thurman, Queen Latifah and Vin Diesel. The decision to delay the Jeddah event comes just days after news that neighboring Dubai plans to revive its own international film festival in December 2027 after a decade-long break.

Despite the growing conflict with the Houthis, Saudi Aramco told several Asian refiners that oil shipments from the Red Sea port of Yanbu should resume soon. At least three processors received informal assurances from company executives, though no timetable was given, Bloomberg reports.

Loadings have largely stopped since drone attacks from Iraq shut the East-West pipeline on Sept. 10. The pipeline had carried about 4 million barrels a day to Yanbu, with Aramco now working to restore half its capacity.

GISEC Global brought cybersecurity executives, government AI officials and experts in combating hackers to Dubai this week at a time that the UAE says it’s confronting more than 600,000 cyberattacks a day and spending $2 billion to strengthen its defenses.

The three-day conference has drawn some 25,000 registrants from more than 180 countries to the Dubai Exhibition Centre., organizers said.

Rabiya Navais, a cybersecurity analyst at Dubai-based VaporVM, said GISEC is “more niche” than the mammoth GITEX conference scheduled for December. This week’s expo is focused on “cybersecurity and information security kind of stuff – which is also a good thing because it’s more concentrated towards what my field is,” he told The Circuit.

UAE Cybersecurity Council chief Mohamed Al Kuwaiti and the Dubai Electronic Security Center Amer Sharaf’s addressed the conference, focusing on how businesses and governments can defend against deepfake fraud, stolen identities and attacks generated by AI.

Among the companies participating are Visa, Huawei, Schneider Electric, Mastercard-owned Recorded Future and Israeli-founded cybersecurity startup Torq.

Dubai is planning to revive its glitzy International Film Festival after a nearly 10-year hiatus as it ramps up efforts to develop the local film industry.

The original festival ran annually from 2004 to 2017, hosting almost 2,000 screenings, including 500 films from the Arab world.

The event saw Dubai royalty and regional filmmakers rubbing shoulders with Hollywood stars, including Cate Blanchett, George Clooney, Patrick Stewart and Omar Sharif.

In its heyday, the festival opened in 2011 with the world premiere of “Mission: Impossible-Ghost Protocol,” in which Tom Cruise rappelled down the side of the Burj Khalifa.

Making the announcement at the Arab Media Summit on Thursday, Mona Al Marri, Director-General of the Government of Dubai Media Office, hinted at a refreshed format for the festival.

“Today we bring back the festival, but we don’t bring the past,” she said. “The region today is different and filmmaking is different.”

Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund L’Imad Holding is considering a bid for a stake in Atlas Air Worldwide, one of the world’s largest air cargo operators.

The Purchase, N.Y based company, which is owned by an Apollo Global Management-led investor group, could be valued at $10 billion or more, Bloomberg reports.

A deal would expand L’Imad’s transport and logistics holdings as the UAE develops trade routes that bypass the Strait of Hormuz.

Talks remain at an early stage, and L’Imad could decide not to bid, the news agency said.

U.S. hotel giant Hilton is seeing a rapid recovery in the Middle East and plans to push ahead with an aggressive expansion plan, which includes a pipeline of 85 new hotels in Saudi Arabia.

Hilton saw its regional revenues plunge by about 30% in the second quarter, following the outbreak of the Iran conflict, but the group expects a return to prewar levels next year, Simon Vincent, Hilton’s president for Europe, Middle East and Africa, told The National.

Vincent said the company is on track to more than double its regional portfolio to over 230 hotels. “There’s still appetite to build new hotels,” he told the newspaper on the sidelines of Arabian Travel Market in Dubai. 

Announcing two major tourism marketing initiatives, UAE Minister of Economy and Tourism Abdulla bin Touq told guests at ATM earlier in the week that the UAE had built the foundation for its recovery over the past 50 years.

“We saw the storm. We were in the middle of the storm, and we managed to maneuver ourselves perfectly,” Bin Touq said. “Whenever the storms hit our shores, we’re ready to take it on.”

McLaren Automotive is planning to invest $674 million in a new U.K. factory, as Abu Dhabi’s L’Imad sovereign wealth fund works to reboot the cash-strapped British supercar-maker and help launch its first SUV.

The move, which will create 1,000 new jobs by 2032, is a welcome boost for U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham amid thousands of job cuts at Jaguar Land Rover and wider cost pressures on Europe’s carmakers.

McLaren CEO Nick Collins told Bloomberg that an SUV would broaden the brand’s appeal beyond racing fans, following a similar path to luxury supercar makers like Ferrari and Lamborghini.

“In the way we’re going to do it, there’s absolutely space for another one,” he said.

L’Imad took control of McLaren from Abu Dhabi’s CYVN Holdings, which had purchased it from Bahrain’s Mumtalakat sovereign fund.

The UAE may temporarily overtake Saudi Arabia as the Gulf’s largest oil exporter after drone attacks shut a pipeline that had become Riyadh’s primary export route.

Saudi Arabia has halted the flow of oil through its East-West pipeline and is believed to have paused Red Sea exports entirely, potentially removing about 3 million barrels a day from the market, Arabian Gulf Business Insight reports.

Repairing damage from the drone strikes could keep the pipeline closed for six weeks, costing the kingdom tens of billions of dollars in oil revenue, Bloomberg reports.

The UAE national oil company ADNOC meanwhile, has restored production to about 3.6 million barrels a day and is expanding its pipeline network to its Fujairah port, allowing more crude to bypass the Strait of Hormuz.

Any lead is likely to be brief: Saudi Arabia has far greater production capacity and long-standing customer relationships that the UAE cannot easily displace once its export routes reopen, according to AGBI.