The SAMENA Leaders’ Summit 2026 opened in Dubai on Wednesday with senior telecommunications regulators, operators and international policymakers framing digital infrastructure as a matter of national sovereignty and strategic survival, as the regional industry marks the council’s twentieth year of operation under conditions its founders could not have anticipated.
ITU Secretary-General Doreen Bogdan Martin set the stakes plainly in her address, noting that 2.2 billion people remain offline and that the digital networks carrying the global economy, including data centres, subsea cables, satellites, cloud platforms and telecom networks, now form deeply interdependent systems where a failure in one layer produces cascading effects across all others. “Resilience cannot be an afterthought,” she said, framing ITU’s role in 6G standards development as a decision point that will determine whether next-generation networks extend connectivity or repeat the exclusions of previous technology cycles.
Mohammed Al Kuwaiti, Head of Cybersecurity for the UAE, gave the session its sharpest operational edge, disclosing that the UAE is absorbing 600 to 700 cyberattacks per day, a figure he said is rising and being amplified by AI-enabled attack tools and social media-based misinformation campaigns. He described the UAE’s national cybersecurity posture as a practice rather than a policy document, built on early resilience measures, secure infrastructure and international partnerships.
Saif Bin Ghelaita, Deputy Chief of the UAE’s Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority, argued that the country’s infrastructure had not merely endured recent geopolitical pressure but had continued to deliver, attributing this to sustained investment and an integrated approach to digital transformation. “Resilience is not a feature you add later,” he said. “It is built into the foundation.”
SAMENA Council CEO Bocar Ba opened proceedings by posing the question of who governs the digital future, answering that the responsibility rests with institutions, regulators and industry rather than with technologies themselves. “Governance — agile, principled, forward-looking — determines whether intelligent networks serve humanity or outpace it,” he said.
The summit, now in its twentieth year, is convening against a backdrop of active conflict affecting Gulf digital infrastructure, with Iranian drone strikes on UAE telecom and cloud facilities in recent weeks giving the session’s resilience themes an immediate and non-theoretical context.
