A factory not working because of a missile strike seems pretty classic actually.

It's a big building with a lot of capital assets inside that are the means of production for a business…

Why not? It's a physical building with lots of equipment that produces products shipped to its customers.

Its products are sequences of electrons, instead of atoms. But so are power plants. And in the context of what happens when they're hit by missiles, a factory, data center, and power plant all behave the same.

When I first learned that there were AWS Middle East regions, my first thought was "wow they are more optimistic than I am ."

Google Cloud also has middle east locations. As does Azure, Oracle and Alibaba. Afaik, IBM Cloud does not. I think those five and AWS are the top 6 global public access clouds.

No, they are more aware of the customer demand for compute in the region.

And demand for data sovereignty.

Public cloud or cloud run by external organisations can never provide data sovereignty, by definition.

Absolutely, especially in the KSA.

Yes of course. But they also have to know that concentrated compute is an attractive target for marauding countries that decide on a whim to bomb you from outside.

I think you mean when the US and Israel decide to start an unprovoked war “on a whim”.

Yes, that is exactly what I mean.

Not really, although things may be trending in the wrong direction. Pick any “weird” current event and you can find much worse examples in relatively modern history. Just compare whatever you think of to the siege of Leningrad, for instance.

Not really. It's just been pretty damn quiet for years.