WireAugust 12, 2026 at 12:01 PM
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The race to control the data highways fueling the Gulf's artificial intelligence boom is accelerating, with firms pouring billions into infrastructure that actively avoids strategic chokepoints. Qatar's Ooredoo Group is leading a critical push with its Fibre in the Gulf (FIG) subsea cable system, a project explicitly designed to route Asia-Europe traffic away from the volatile Red Sea.
With over 90% of Europe-Asia data traffic currently funneling through Egypt and the Suez Canal region, the new $500 million-plus system represents a direct challenge to a brittle status quo. Houthi attacks have effectively frozen new subsea construction in the Red Sea since 2024, stalling projects from American tech behemoths like Google and Meta. The FIG system, scheduled for completion in late 2027, will span nearly 2,000 kilometers with a planned capacity of 720 terabits per second.
"FIG will be the first cable connecting Asia to Europe, but completely circumventing both the Suez Canal and the Bab-el-Mandeb strait and running from Oman through Iraq and Turkey into Europe," Aziz Aluthman Fakhroo, CEO of Ooredoo Group, stated. “There hasn’t been any new capacity built in the last five to seven years... And yet, every year, these data flows increase by about 30%.”
For the Gulf monarchies, securing data sovereignty is an economic imperative. This demand for reliable connectivity is driven by massive state-backed AI and cloud computing projects that require robust, nuclear and fossil-fuel-powered data centers. The supply chain burden falls heavily on domestic beneficiaries; while the U.S.-Iran war has complicated the FIG rollout by constraining access to the Strait of Hormuz for cable-laying ships, Ooredoo is rerouting its immediate focus to land-based routes in Iraq and Turkey to keep construction on track.
The investment ensures that foreign policy crises in the Middle East do not completely derail the national economic aspirations of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. By building and controlling its own landing stations and terrestrial fiber, Ooredoo is locking in an infrastructure advantage that American tech firms, hamstrung by geopolitical instability and their own slow-moving project timelines, currently cannot match.