The Middle East is in the midst of one of the fastest data-center build-outs anywhere in the world. Fueled by cloud expansion, AI adoption, sovereign digital-economy mandates, and a surge in hyperscale investment, the region is transforming into a global hub for compute power. Yet beneath the excitement lies a challenge that is becoming impossible to ignore: the region’s data-center growth is colliding with unprecedented energy and cooling pressures.
In a region where summer temperatures routinely exceed 50°C, where water scarcity is a national priority, and where governments are pushing aggressively toward net-zero commitments, the question is no longer whether data centers can scale — but whether they can scale sustainably. The next decade will be defined not by how much capacity the Middle East can build, but by how efficiently it can operate.
Across the ecosystem, from cooling specialists and storage innovators to compute leaders and engineering firms, the message is consistent: sustainability is no longer a side initiative. It is the foundation of future data-center design, investment, and competitiveness.
Cooling in a 55°C Climate: The First Frontier of Sustainability
Few regions test the limits of cooling technology like the Middle East. For Daikin MEA, this challenge is central to its mission. Laila Sahaf-Amin, Director for Sustainability & ESG, explains that traditional cooling strategies simply cannot keep pace with the region’s climate and the rising thermal load of AI-driven workloads. Daikin is responding with high-efficiency, AI-ready cooling systems engineered specifically for GCC conditions, where ambient temperatures can push cooling infrastructure to its limits.
She emphasizes that the company’s approach goes beyond hardware. Real-time optimization, predictive maintenance, and the use of low-GWP refrigerants are becoming essential tools for operators seeking to reduce energy consumption while maintaining thermal resilience. Daikin’s systems are designed to reduce Power Usage Effectiveness and support operators as they scale, ensuring that sustainability and performance advance together rather than in conflict.
Sahaf-Amin notes that the region’s rapid digital transformation is creating a new urgency. As governments push for greener infrastructure, Daikin is helping partners transition from legacy cooling systems to modern, efficient, and scalable technologies through education, technical enablement, and phased migration roadmaps. The company’s lifecycle model ensures that sustainability is not a one-time upgrade but a continuous operational commitment.
Storage Density as a Sustainability Strategy
While cooling often dominates sustainability conversations, storage efficiency is emerging as a powerful lever for reducing energy consumption. Western Digital’s Regional Lead and Sales Director for the Middle East, Turkey, Africa and the Indian Subcontinent, Owais Mohamed, explains that increasing storage density is one of the most effective ways to reduce power and cooling requirements without compromising performance.
He points out that moving from 26TB to 32TB drives can reduce rack counts by nearly 20 percent for the same petabyte of storage. This reduction translates directly into lower energy consumption, reduced cooling demand, and improved total cost of ownership. In a region where data gravity is increasing rapidly — driven by AI, IoT, and cloud adoption — the ability to store more data using fewer drives is becoming a sustainability imperative.
Mohamed highlights innovations such as Helium sealing, UltraSMR, and next-generation recording technologies like HAMR as key enablers of this shift. By increasing areal density and delivering more bytes per drive, Western Digital is helping operators reduce their physical footprint while supporting scalable growth. He emphasizes that this system-level approach aligns with regional sustainability goals and regulatory frameworks, ensuring that data-center expansion does not come at the expense of environmental responsibility.
Flash Efficiency and the End of Rip-and-Replace Cycles
Pure Storage’s VP for METCA, Omar Akar, believes that sustainability must be embedded at every layer of the data-center stack. He argues that energy-efficient servers, flash storage, and intelligent networking are essential to reducing power consumption, but the real transformation comes from rethinking how infrastructure is built, maintained, and upgraded.
Akar explains that Pure Storage’s technology is engineered to take up less space and use significantly less power, reducing data-center footprint by up to 77 percent and cutting energy use by as much as 85 percent. Data-reduction techniques such as compression and deduplication further minimize the amount of physical storage required, reducing both power draw and cooling needs.
One of Pure Storage’s most impactful contributions to sustainability is its Evergreen architecture, which eliminates disruptive rip-and-replace cycles. Instead of discarding entire systems, customers can upgrade components incrementally, extending product lifespans and reducing e-waste. Akar notes that this approach not only supports sustainability goals but also improves operational efficiency and long-term cost management.
Pure Storage also provides carbon footprint reporting tools that help customers analyze and reduce emissions associated with storage operations. As sustainability reporting becomes mandatory across more jurisdictions, this visibility is becoming a critical part of data-center governance.
Intelligent Data Management and the Fight Against Dark Data
NetApp’s Senior Manager for Solutions Engineering-MEA, Walid Issa, believes that sustainability is as much about data management as it is about hardware. He explains that eliminating unused “dark data,” automating tiering, and improving visibility into energy use can significantly reduce environmental impact across hybrid data estates.
NetApp’s intelligent data infrastructure combines analytics, automation, and cloud optimization to help customers reduce power draw and cooling demand. Issa highlights the BlueXP sustainability dashboard as a key tool for improving visibility and enabling measurable improvements. He notes that NetApp’s own emissions reductions — a 6 percent year-over-year decrease in Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions — demonstrate that smarter design and operational practices can deliver meaningful results even as workloads grow.
As governments across the Middle East push for greener infrastructure, NetApp is helping organizations transition from legacy systems to modern, energy-efficient architectures. Issa emphasizes that science-based emissions reduction targets and advisory services are essential to guiding customers through consolidation, modernization, and long-term sustainability planning.
Liquid Cooling and the Rise of AI-Optimised Data Centers
The rise of AI is reshaping data-center design globally, and the Middle East is no exception. Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Chief Technologist for HPC & AI Global Sales, Mohammad Al-Jallad, explains that the region’s extreme heat makes precision cooling and real-time telemetry indispensable. As AI workloads intensify, traditional air-cooling methods are becoming insufficient.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise is deploying advanced cooling methods such as adaptive cascade cooling and direct liquid cooling, including 100 percent fanless DLC architectures. These systems dramatically reduce energy use and cooling overhead, enabling higher compute densities and improved performance. Al Jallad notes that HPE’s modular AI Mod POD systems, which support densities up to 400 kW per rack, illustrate how liquid cooling and modular design can transform data-center efficiency.
Digital twins are also becoming a critical part of HPE’s strategy. By simulating thermal behavior before hardware is installed, operators can optimize efficiency and avoid costly design errors. Al-Jallad emphasizes that transparency is essential, and HPE proactively reports on metrics such as PUE, CUE, and WUE to give organizations a complete view of their environmental impact.
Engineering for Extreme Environments
Engineering firms like AESG are rethinking data-center design from the ground up. Nicholas Byczynski, Director of Building Services, notes that the Middle East remains one of the toughest environments globally for efficient operations, with average PUEs still significantly higher than global norms. He argues that sustainability begins with systems thinking — accurate IT load forecasting, optimized airflow, and cooling strategies that work with the environment rather than against it.
Byczynski highlights the growing importance of water stewardship. Research shows that cooling-related water demand in the Middle East and Africa could exceed 426 billion liters by 2030 as capacity expands. Low-water and water-positive cooling solutions are becoming essential to meet national water-security goals.
He also emphasizes the importance of off-site strategies such as waste-heat recovery, district-cooling integration, and renewable-energy adoption. With the UAE’s rapidly expanding solar capacity, integrated renewables are becoming a powerful tool for reducing carbon impact while maintaining resilience.
AI Factories and the Future of High-Density Compute
NVIDIA’s Regional Director for Enterprise-META, Marc Domenech, believes that accelerated computing and liquid-cooled architectures are essential to overcoming power and cooling constraints. He explains that NVIDIA’s platforms deliver up to 30 times higher performance per watt than CPU-only systems, and that liquid-cooled Grace Blackwell systems can support 120 kW racks while reducing energy use by up to 25 times.
Domenech notes that operating at 45°C coolant temperatures enables closed-loop dry coolers with no water use — a critical advantage in water-scarce regions. NVIDIA is collaborating with Middle Eastern partners such as Khazna, HUMAIN, and Ooredoo to design Blackwell-ready AI factories optimized for liquid cooling and renewable energy. Digital-twin planning tools and validated reference architectures are helping operators migrate from legacy systems to modular, high-efficiency sovereign AI platforms.
Maximizing GPU Utilization to Reduce Energy Waste
Storage performance is also evolving to meet AI’s demands. DDN CTO Sven Oehme explains that maximizing GPU utilization is one of the most effective ways to reduce energy waste. When GPUs sit idle waiting for data, they consume power without delivering performance. By ensuring that GPUs stay fully fed with data, operators can avoid unnecessary hardware expansion and reduce heat output.
Oehme points to deployments like Yotta’s sovereign AI cloud as proof that high-performance, software-defined architectures can deliver both sustainability and scale. He emphasizes that unified, scalable platforms purpose-built for AI can help organizations modernize incrementally, reducing operational waste and aligning with national sustainability goals.
A Region Redefining the Future of Sustainable Compute
Across the Middle East, a clear pattern is emerging. Sustainability is no longer a compliance exercise — it is a competitive advantage. Governments are pushing for greener infrastructure, and operators are responding with smarter cooling, denser storage, liquid-cooled compute, intelligent data management, and holistic design strategies.
The region’s data-center leaders are proving that high performance and environmental responsibility are not opposing goals but interconnected pillars of the digital future. As AI accelerates demand for compute power, the Middle East has an opportunity to lead the world in building data centers that are not only powerful and scalable but also efficient, resilient, and sustainable.
The next decade will determine whether the region becomes a global benchmark for sustainable digital infrastructure. If the momentum seen today continues, the Middle East may well define what the future of responsible, high-density computing looks like.
