"We have a region nearby" and "we're in-country" are not the same sentence, and buyers here know it.
A cloud region an hour's flight away looks, on an architecture diagram, almost as good as one inside the border. Low latency, the same services, a reassuring dot on the map. To an engineer optimising for performance, near enough is near enough.
To a regulated buyer in the GCC, near is just outside. The distinction that matters isn't milliseconds. It's jurisdiction: whose laws reach the data, whose courts, whose disclosure regime, whose definition of an emergency. "Nearby" answers a performance question. "In-country" answers a sovereignty one, and increasingly the second question is the one that decides the deal.
It extends past where the data sits. Presence means a legal entity that can be contracted and held to account locally, support that runs in the right timezone and language, and people who can be in the room when it matters. A logo with no local footprint reads as a flight risk, however good the technology.
The mature-market instinct is to treat geography as a latency problem solved with proximity. Here it's a trust-and-jurisdiction problem, and proximity doesn't solve it.
Close to the border isn't the same as inside it. For a lot of workloads here, that gap is the whole decision.