In the Gulf’s digital economy, the threat is the weapon

The IRGC’s spokesman says seven cables beneath the Strait of Hormuz carry the world’s internet and its commercial data. TeleGeography’s research director says less than one percent of international bandwidth passes through the strait. Both claims are on the record, and the distance between them, I’d argue, is the entire story. Tehran isn’t getting ready to flip a switch on the global internet. What it wants is to make the Gulf uninsurable for the people who have wagered hundreds of billions on it, so this is a weapon pointed at investors far more than at servers. Brig. Gen. Hossein Mohebi, the spokesman, put the purpose plainly enough: “we are reminding them of this so that the enemy knows.”

Nothing about it is idle. Drones hit two Amazon Web Services facilities in the UAE in March, and a strike near a third, in Bahrain, did physical damage. The IRGC then published a list of 17 American firms, Google, Meta and Apple among them, plus the Emirati AI company G42. Banking apps and payment platforms across the Gulf went dark for days. By September AWS was admitting it could not bring several Bahraini sites back, or one in the UAE. This month Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, warned that cables, data centres and AI facilities worth some $2 trillion would fall within Iran’s reach if war resumed. Worse followed. Two senior Iranian security officials told Reuters that Tehran holds detailed plans to hit Gulf cables, and one of them said the aim would be to block repairs and stretch the outage out.

Do the sums. Undersea cables carry about 99 percent of global internet traffic, yet so little of it runs through Hormuz that a cut there would wound the Gulf much more than the wider world. The Red Sea is a different animal: roughly 3 percent of global international demand, around 10 percent of traffic between regions, and more than 90 percent of the data capacity linking Europe and Asia. In September the Iran-backed Houthis seized the port of Mocha and Mayyun Island, which splits Bab al-Mandeb; Yemen’s government says it has retaken positions near the strait, and the Houthis deny it. Tehran has said nothing in public about targeting cables there. Silence, here, is a message too.

Andreas Krieg of King’s College London told Al Jazeera the aim is to “make reliability itself a geopolitical bargaining chip.” So what does the IRGC actually have to choose from? I count four options, climbing in what they cost Iran itself. Cheapest is to publish the list and wait; Alex Vatanka of the Middle East Institute reads the threats as designed to frighten Gulf governments and American firms about their investments and push them to lean on Trump. Next comes the demonstrative drone strike, as in March, which feeds on an asymmetry. Gulf militaries can intercept most of what flies at them, Krieg notes, but a handful of successes can cause outsized economic harm, and a facility can be crippled by hitting its power, cooling or telecoms rather than its servers. Third is cyber. An Iranian-linked group wiped tens of thousands of devices at the American medical-technology firm Stryker in March (estimates vary) by turning a legitimate administrative tool against its owner, and CyberProof logged a 168 percent year-on-year jump in global DDoS activity in the first quarter. Fourth, and gravest, is cable damage paired with repair denial. Fixing a cable in a war zone takes permits and safety guarantees, and three cables damaged in the Red Sea in 2024 took months to mend.

Still, each rung on that ladder costs something. Tasnim itself admitted that the southern Gulf leans far harder on maritime internet routes than Iran does, so the pressure cuts both ways. Gulf capitals now being asked to restrain Washington would, after a genuine strike, have every reason to side with it instead. Diversification is moving too. Iraq has signed a deal with Qatar’s Ooredoo for an overland route to Europe, and Google and Meta have reportedly started sending some traffic through Iraq; Microsoft plans to put more than $400 million into subsea and terrestrial connectivity across the Middle East by 2030. Every threat speeds up the redundancy that blunts it.

Readers in Karachi and Lahore need no lecture on any of this. When two cables were cut near Jeddah in September 2025, the slowdown rippled across the Middle East and South Asia, and no cause has been confirmed. That’s the point. In the age of artificial intelligence, the scarcest thing the Gulf sells is predictability, and predictability can be damaged by announcement long before a single cable is touched. The IRGC’s best play is the one it has already made: keep the list public, keep the plans “detailed,” and let insurers and chief executives finish the job. Its worst is to carry the threat out, because the day it does, leverage becomes damage and the Gulf’s capitals stop asking Washington for restraint.