A militia in Yemen now sits on Perim Island and Yemen’s western Red Sea coast. That is not a local story. It is a story about oil tankers, AI campuses in the desert, and the garden-hose cables that still carry most of the internet.

The backup oil route just got a new landlord

The Houthis have taken Perim — also called Mayun — after Yemeni government forces pulled back. Combined with the fall of Mocha and the rest of the western shoreline, they now sit on both sides of the Bab al-Mandeb Strait. That strait is the southern gate of the Red Sea. As the fight over Hormuz forced Saudi Arabia to push more crude onto Red Sea routes, this was the backup. The backup now has a new landlord.

In July I wrote on X that Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab were the two most dangerous shipping lanes on the map, and that dragging both into the same war would not stop at oil. It would hit the supply chain. I was not being poetic. I was looking at a strait. The two most dangerous shipping lanes.

A 5 GW campus does not like missiles

Same war, different industry: the United Arab Emirates is quietly redrawing one of the largest AI data-center projects outside the United States. Reuters reports that the planned 5-gigawatt campus outside Abu Dhabi — involving G42, Nvidia, Oracle, OpenAI and others — is shifting toward a spread-out network, with more air defenses and talk of underground or mountain-shielded sites. The reason is not power bills. It is Iranian missiles and drones aimed at U.S.-linked infrastructure in the Gulf.

The internet still lives in a hose on the seabed

Then there is the part most oil charts ignore. Fourteen to seventeen major submarine cables thread the same narrow water. Systems such as AAE-1, EIG and SEA-ME-WE 5 carry on the order of 17–18 percent of global internet traffic and a large share of Europe–Asia data. They do not belong to the Houthis. They do lie on the seabed next to territory the Houthis now hold. We already know what a dragging anchor from a hit ship can do to those lines. Control of the coast is not the same as a kill switch. It is close enough to make insurers, cable operators and anyone who likes a working cloud sit up.

If a Zoom call from Stockholm to Singapore feels a little more political than it did on Thursday, that is not paranoia. That is geography catching up.

What do you think breaks first if this drags on — freight, data, or the idea that “the cloud” lives nowhere in particular?