Fujairah, United Arab Emirates

Fujairah is the only Emirati city facing the Gulf of Oman directly, on the eastern coast of the United Arab Emirates outside the Strait of Hormuz. It is the principal Indian Ocean-facing submarine cable landing for the UAE — and one of the most strategically located coastal stations on the Arabian Peninsula's eastern flank, since it provides a Persian Gulf country with an outbound landing that does not pass through the Strait. For traffic that needs to avoid Hormuz for routing-resilience reasons, Fujairah is the destination of choice.

Among the cables landing at Fujairah, the most regionally important in our monitoring set is the GBI Gulf Ring, a 5,270-km closed-ring cable connecting nine Persian Gulf and Indian-coast landings under a single self-healing topology. Fujairah is one of the ring's anchor stations, alongside Al Seeb, Al Hidd, Al Daayen, and the other Gulf-state landings. The ring's geometry means that any single cable cut between Fujairah and another Gulf landing leaves the path usable in the opposite direction, a redundancy that is unusual for regional submarine cable systems and that was an explicit engineering goal for the dense oil-traffic shipping environment of the Persian Gulf.

Fujairah is also one of the landings of SEA-ME-WE-4, the 20,000-km Asia-Europe consortium cable in service since 2005. Through SEA-ME-WE-4, Fujairah is connected to Chennai and Mumbai in India, Tuas in Singapore, and Marseille in France, among many other points along the corridor. SEA-ME-WE-5 and several other Asia-Europe systems also land at Fujairah, making the city one of the densest single-station cable landings on the Arabian coast.

For cloud and AI workloads originating in the UAE — where Microsoft, Oracle, and several other hyperscalers operate Abu Dhabi and Dubai regions — Fujairah is the physical egress point for a substantial fraction of the outbound traffic that doesn't route via terrestrial fibre to neighbouring Saudi or Omani landings. The Gulf-region peering economy in 2026 increasingly treats Fujairah as a competitive coastal asset: a stable Indian Ocean-facing position outside the Hormuz chokepoint with multiple international cables already on the ground.