Iranian Attacks on GCC Data Centers Put Tech Infrastructure Investment Risks into Sharp Focus

A person with a beard speaking into a microphone at a conference, with an audience in the background.
I. Patel

Summary Bullets:

• Military strikes by Iran damaged AWS data centers in the UAE and Bahrain, highlighting vulnerability of the region’s data centers.

• Foreign investors, local tech decision makers, and insurance firms are now revisiting the calculus of risk in the data center boom.

Earlier this week, AWS data centers – two Availability Zones (AZ) in the UAE and another in Bahrain, all part of the AWS ME-Central-1 Region – suffered physical damage in escalatory strikes by Iran. The attacks disrupted 73 core services in the Bahrain AZ; at the time of writing, as per information shared by the AWS Health Dashboard, AWS stated that only 33 services were resolved. In the UAE, of the 112 impacted AWS services, only three have been resolved while others still face severe disruption or degradation. AWS strongly advised customers to enact disaster recovery plans and migrate workloads to unaffected AWS Regions in Europe, APAC, and the US.

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RingCentral Strengthens Two Contact Center Offers, Courtesy of OpenAI

A smiling man with glasses, wearing a light-colored shirt, with a warm expression.
G. Willsky

Summary Bullets:

• The infusion of OpenAI Frontier models into AIR and AVA marks a meaningful step for RingCentral in the contact center space.

• The announcement suffers some blemishes despite the positives. RingCentral should deliver functionality faster and provide adequate supporting detail.

RingCentral is infusing OpenAI Frontier models including GPT-5.2 into two voice-centric contact center offers: RingCentral AI Receptionist (AIR) and RingCentral AI Virtual Assistant (AVA). OpenAI Frontier is an enterprise platform introduced in February 2026 that enables organizations to build, deploy, and manage AI agents that access internal systems, share context, and execute inter-departmental workflows.

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AMD and Meta’s Deal is One of the Most Significant AI Infrastructure Partnerships This Year, but Will It Deliver?

A professional woman with brown hair, wearing a black blazer and a teal top, against a light blue background.
B. Valle

Summary Bullets:

• On February 24, 2026, AMD and Meta announced a partnership to deploy AMD Helios racks, optimized for Meta’s workloads.

• The shipments, starting in H2 2026, will cover successive generations of silicon over several years and be equivalent to 6 gigawatts of power.

AMD and Meta are deepening their collaboration to align their GPU and CPU silicon, systems, and software roadmaps with Helios rack clusters running on ROCm software. As part of the agreement, AMD is also giving Meta warrants that could convert into a 10% stake in the company. Meta can only cash the warrants if it buys all the agreed chips, and AMD’s share price triples. For AMD it’s a massive validation of its AI computing roadmap and for the wider industry it has broad implications as it can mean lessening overreliance on a single supplier, potentially accelerating innovation. It gives Meta greater bargaining power as it gains pricing leverage and potentially reduces the risk of supply bottlenecks. In other words, Meta avoids being completely locked into NVIDIA’s CUDA ecosystem.

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MWC26: Telcos Vie for Limelight in Digitization Space

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C. Dunlap
Research Director

Summary Bullets:

• Telcos are increasingly repositioning themselves as cloud and AI providers, targeting the digital transformation opportunity from an infrastructure-led perspective.

• Strategic partnerships between telcos and hyperscalers are likely to drive the most successful business transformations.

Telcos have an important agenda during this week’s high-profile technology conference, Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. They are going after the digital transformation space from an infrastructure perspective, addressing enterprises’ desperate need for improved operational provisioning, an issue largely ignored by cloud platform providers.

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Cloud Wars Shift to AI Wars: Archaic Code is a New Target of Opportunity

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C. Dunlap
Research Director

Summary Bullets:

• Google will release a broadly backed commerce protocol this quarter that threatens Amazon’s behemoth e-commerce marketplace

• Anthropic Claude Code includes new features that help developers bypass the complexities of COBOL, threatening IBM’s massive mainframe business.

The cloud wars have quickly morphed into the AI wars among leading platform services rivals, which have invested heavily in LLMs in recent years. By leveraging agentic AI, platform services providers are elevating their competitive threat in their quest for dominance in both e-commerce markets and among enterprise developer communities.

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Slow Your Roll on AI

S. Schuchart

AI has been the rage for at least three years now, first just generative AI (GenAI), and now agentic AI. AI can be pretty useful, at GlobalData we’ve done some very cool things with AI on our site. Strategic things, that serve a defined purpose and add value. The use of AI at GlobalData hasn’t been indiscriminate – it has been thought through with how it could help our customers and ourselves. Even this skeptical author can appreciate what’s been done.

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DXC Helps Enterprises Scale AI with AdvisoryX

S. Soh

Summary Bullets:

  • DXC has created AdvisoryX, a global advisory and consulting group to help enterprises scale their AI deployment and create business values.
  • Besides leveraging AI to drive innovation with customers, DXC is also adopting AI internally to gain productivity and embedding AI into its services.

DXC has made significant progress expanding its AI capability throughout 2025. The company recently launched AdvisoryX, a global advisory and consulting group designed to help enterprises address their most complex strategic, operational, and technology challenges. This is a positive move that can help enterprises accelerate their AI journey and achieve better outcomes. While enterprises are eager to implement AI, most of them do not have a well-thought-out strategy and operating model, or the necessary expertise to deploy AI successfully. What happens typically is departments working on siloed projects, without organization-wide collaboration, resulting in inefficiencies and governance issues. DXC’s AdvisoryX helps to overcome key challenges from getting started to the full lifecycle management.

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Boomi Enables Agentic Transformation by Connecting Applications, Data, and AI Agents Through a Single Platform

S. Soh

Summary Bullets:

  • Boomi has developed a platform to help connect systems, manage data, and deploy AI agents more effectively.
  • Boomi is expanding its customer base and partner base in Asia-Pacific; adding global systems integrators will help to drive penetration in the large enterprise segment.

Boomi highlighted at its Boomi World Tour event in Sydney (Australia) that without connectivity, context, and control, there will be no business impact. This epitomizes the challenge for businesses as they continue to pursue agentic transformation, especially with the recent focus on various AI technologies to drive new operating and business models. As enterprises shift their focus toward agentic AI, they often look at the tasks they can automate with AI agents.

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Twilio Drives CX with Trust, Simple, and Smart

S. Soh

Summary Bullets:

  • The combination of omni-channel capability, effective data management, and AI will drive better customer experience.
  • As Twilio’s business evolves from CPaaS to customer experience, the company focuses its product development on themes around trust, simple, and smart.

The ability to provide superior customer experience (CX) helps a business gain customer loyalty and a strong competitive advantage. Many enterprises are looking to AI including generative AI (GenAI) and agentic AI to further boost CX by enabling faster resolution and personalized experiences.

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Verizon Mobile Security Index: In the AI Era, the Human Element Remains the Weak Link


Amy Larsen DeCarlo – Principal Analyst, Security and Data Center Services

Summary Bullets:

  • To protect an expansive mobile environment attack surface in the face of a very dangerous threat environment, organizations are ramping up their security investments, with 75% of the 762 polled in a recent Verizon study reporting they had increased spending this year.
  • But concerns still loom large threat actors using AI and other technologies and tactics to breach the enterprise; and only 17% have implemented security controls to stave off AI-driven attacks.

Mobile and IoT devices play an essential role in most organizations’ operations today. However, the convenience and flexibility they bring comes with risk, opening new points of exposure to enterprise assets. Organizations that were quick to embrace bring your own device (BYOD) strategies often didn’t have a solid plan for safeguarding this environment when so many of these devices were under-secured. Enterprises have made progress in layering their defenses to better protect mobile and IoT environments, but there is still room for progress.

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