Commercial Bank of Qatar is racing against time to migrate its data back from cloud facilities amid the Iran war and threats against data centers in the Middle East. 

The $53 billion bank has been moving its data to Amazon Web Services’ and Microsoft Azure cloud for the past year, but the bank is rethinking those efforts following missile attacks that have hit AWS data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain since the start of the war in Iran on Feb. 28, a source with direct knowledge of the matter told FinAi News.

“We have been moving to the cloud for six to seven months now,” the source said. “This week we were told to bring everything back in two to three weeks.” 

Commercial Bank of Qatar (CBQ), based in Doha, was not affected by strikes on the AWS data center in the UAE, but was alarmed by the events and is developing a resiliency plan by bringing everything in-house, the source said. 

The bank had migrated nearly 30% to 40% of all its data and applications to the cloud over the years, the source said. 

A senior bank official countered the claims of FinAi News’ source, calling them “completely baseless.”

The bank works with data company Ooredoo and chip designer Nvidia for its AI needs, according to a May 2025 CBQ release. The company has deployed AI for documentation and customer engagement. 

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard issued a statement March 11 that all U.S. and Israeli economic infrastructure, including banks and data centers, are targets after what it called an attack March 10 on a bank in Tehran. 

Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle, IBM, Google and Palantir are among companies that were named as potential targets by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard.  

CBQ feels that having data in-house is safer than in data centers at this time, the source said. 

Digital sub-economy essential 

With the conflict in the Middle East, digital infrastructure has entered a “a strategic resurgence” due to its critical role in economic “mega trends,” Ian Massey, head of corporate intelligence for the EMEA at global corporate intelligence and cybersecurity consultancy S-RM, told FinAi News. 

“These trends include the energy transition, supply chain reconfiguration in the face of geopolitical instability, the accelerating digitalization of global business and the rapid adoption of AI,” he said. 

The Iran war has further highlighted the strategic importance of the infrastructure sector, including its digital sub-sector, Massey said.  

“Data centers, advanced networking infrastructure and other digital infrastructure assets are central to the functioning of modern economies,” he said. 

The digital sub-sector is of high importance, especially in “Gulf states, where countries such as the UAE have placed this sector at the heart of their economic diversification efforts,” Massey said. 

“In the long term, the focus on the sector in the region is unlikely to reduce, but the conflict could cause disruption to inbound investment for as long as it lasts,” he said. “Outbound investment into digital and AI infrastructure assets is less likely to be directly impacted by the conflict, although it may be disrupted by higher energy prices and weaker investor sentiment.”