Strait of Hormuz and Red Sea; The two scissor edges of the Internet arteries of the UAE and Saudi Arabia

The war in the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea threatens the Internet arteries of the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

According to Ambassador Arjan's report, he wrote: Based on the data of TeleGeography and the analyzes of research institutions, the damage to the Internet cables in the Strait of Hormuz will affect the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia in a different way, but very seriously. Both countries are among economies whose survival depends on the uninterrupted flow of data, and analysts have warned that damage to even one major cable could disrupt banking networks and internet services that support more than 95 percent of the region's digital traffic. However, geographical location and network architecture make the vulnerability of each one different.

The United Arab Emirates has a geographic advantage: most of its submarine cables land in Fujairah, a city facing the Gulf of Oman and outside the Persian Gulf. TeleGeography describes this position as a "reliability advantage" because the cables landed in Fujairah connect directly to open waters and are not exposed to direct hazards within the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. However, this is not an absolute advantage. The UAE is still connected to the global network through cables that pass through the Strait of Hormuz.

In addition, the UAE's digital infrastructure has been vulnerable to direct attacks; Iran's attacks on Amazon Web Services data centers in the UAE and Bahrain show that the threat to the UAE's digital infrastructure is not limited to submarine cables. Therefore, although the UAE is better positioned than its neighbours, it remains vulnerable to a simultaneous campaign against cables and data centres, and there is no guarantee of maintaining full connectivity in a worst-case scenario.

Saudi Arabia has a completely different situation. According to TeleGeography data, only a limited number of Saudi submarine cable landing points are located on the Persian Gulf coast, and most of the country's international bandwidth is provided by cables that land on the Red Sea coast. At first glance, this architecture seems to be an advantage, because it keeps Arabia away from the Strait of Hormuz. But this advantage is only an illusion. The Red Sea route itself has become another critical bottleneck: Yemeni conflicts and Houthi attacks have made it "extremely difficult" for repair ships to pass through and obtain permits to repair damaged cables, and grounded some systems "indefinitely".

In other words, Saudi Arabia has moved from one bottleneck to another. Even if the cables in the Strait of Hormuz are damaged, Saudi traffic will have to pass through the Red Sea route, which is exposed to military threats and long-term damage. This dual dependence puts Saudi Arabia in a position where none of its two main routes are completely safe, and simultaneous or consecutive damage to both routes can severely disrupt the country's international connectivity.

The reliance of both countries on alternative land routes is not a definitive solution either. Although the UAE and Saudi Arabia have land connections to neighboring countries, the capacity of the land networks may not be sufficient to fully relocate traffic in the event of damage to the Persian Gulf's submarine systems, and these networks themselves are not "immune" to damage caused by military conflicts.

Analysts have emphasized that land routes are "not a perfect substitute for undersea systems" and that any widespread rerouting would slow down the region's internet speeds due to "stretched capacity". New projects such as Saudi SilkLink (with an $800 million contract to connect land to the Mediterranean Sea via Syria) and UAE land corridors are also in their infancy, and "no fiber optic land route between the Persian Gulf and Europe has yet changed the region's dependence on undersea cables." The experts themselves doubt that "all these cables will actually be built" and projects may be stopped or revised due to "competition for influence" and "continued military conflict".

As for Starlink, the situation is disappointing for both countries. The UAE has only issued a license limited to marine satellite internet services for ships and offshore platforms, with domestic and commercial use on land still "pending regulatory approval". Saudi Arabia also issued its license in May 2025, but its initial focus was on aviation and maritime, and full details of the expansion to public broadband have not been released. More important than the regulatory restrictions is the inherent capacity limitation: Starlink offers maximum download speeds of 100 to 400 Mbps, while the needs of financial infrastructure, data centers and the digital economy of the UAE and Saudi Arabia reach tens of terabits per second.

Therefore, Starlink can serve as an "emergency backup layer" for critical institutions or remote areas, but it can never compensate for the macroeconomic traffic burden of these two countries, and in the scenario of widespread cable outages, there is practically no viable alternative solution to maintain Internet connectivity on a national scale. Although the UAE and Saudi Arabia each have relative advantages, they remain vulnerable to widespread damage to the Strait of Hormuz cables. With the cables landing in Fujairah, the UAE is far from the direct threat of the strait, but it is still dependent on transit cables and its data centers have been the target of attacks.

By relying on the Red Sea, Saudi Arabia has moved away from the Strait of Hormuz, but it has moved to another bottleneck, which is involved in a bigger crisis. Land routes do not have enough capacity and alternative projects are years away from completion. Starlink is also not an infrastructure solution due to license and capacity limitations. In the event of widespread cable disconnection, both countries will face severe communication disruptions, slow financial services, and halt parts of the digital economy, with no immediate and complete alternative solutions at their disposal.