[solatic]

But most of the Middle East and Africa aren't wired up well enough to begin with let alone have strong entrepreneurial cultures to push for local cloud adoption. Israel has a booming startup culture, they just all must use European clouds if they decide to go with a cloud infrastructure (and the vast majority of them do).

Fast connections there are also few and far between in the Middle East and Africa. In Israel, LTE is ubiquitous in urban areas, most residences have either DOCSIS 3.0 or Fiber-to-the-curb, and a nationwide FTTH infrastructure is being built out currently. Domestic connections are great - the problem is just that almost nothing is hosted domestically.

Eastern Europe / Western Russia sounds like a good idea to me, although I'm not familiar with their local Internet topologies.