Iran's Digital Cloud

That night, the world seemed to be awakened by a short sentence with a cold tone but a hot meaning: Iran targeted cloud infrastructure in Qatar suspected of supporting operations against it. The world was shocked. Not because of its rudeness, but because of its address. Until now, people thought war was a matter of land, sea, air. It turns out there is another one: the cloud. And that cloud apparently has coordinates. We start from here. Because Iran’s step is not just a military action, but the peak of a long building called digital independence. Iran is not the most advanced country in information technology (IT). But it is one of the few countries that deliberately builds an IT system to stay alive even when the world is turned off from it. Let us open its kitchen. On paper, Iran has around 73 million internet users, with penetration approaching 80 percent of the population. Mobile connections there even exceed the number of inhabitants — meaning one person can hold more than one access. Almost all their cellular networks are already at broadband level, with coverage penetrating more than 90 percent of the territory. This is not a small number. This is the foundation. Their telecommunications industry itself is worth more than $11 billion, with major players like the Mobile Telecommunication Company of Iran, MTN Irancell, and the Telecommunication Company of Iran. Cities like Tehran, Isfahan, and Shiraz become main hubs, where networks, business, and the state meet in the same cable. But Iran’s strength does not stop at “many users” or “wide network”. That is just the skin. The meat is in something rarely possessed by developing countries: a self-standing national network. They call it the National Information Network (NIN). A system that allows domestic data traffic to continue running even if global connections are cut. Imagine a country that can turn off the international internet door, but banks remain operational, government continues to function, and digital services stay active. In many countries, that would be doomsday. In Iran, it is procedure. The national intranet network is fully operational. Target for domestic traffic: 70% of content hosted locally. Domestic latency: can be faster than global access. Their internal bandwidth capacity has grown to tens of Tbps. This is what distinguishes Iran: not just internet, but internet that can be “cut off from the world” without shutting down the country. Their data centres number around 70–100 active facilities. They have 7–10 major Internet Exchange Points. Domestic hosting capacity is increasing. It is estimated that over 60% of national traffic is handled locally through fibre optic networks reaching villages. More than that, Iran not only builds the network, but also the content within it. They create local alternatives: the Digikala shopping platform with 40 million users, the Snapp transport app with 30 million users, messaging services Soroush, Bale, Rubika with millions of users. They even have their own search engines, like Yooz, Parsijoo. They are not dominant, but strategic. And not all excel, but sufficient to replace. And in geopolitics, “sufficient to replace” is often more important than “the best but dependent”. They design a system that keeps running even when the world is turned off from them. Moving to the next layer: data centres. The value of Iran’s data centre industry approaches $1 billion and continues to grow towards double that in a decade. Its capacity is not yet as large as America or China, but its growth is aggressive. From around 12 megawatts of active capacity, they target a surge to tens of megawatts in a few years.