  We study the effect of nuclear matter in Upsilon production in dAu collisions
at RHIC and pPb collisions at the LHC. We find that the nuclear modification
factor, R^Upsilon_dAu, measured at RHIC is not satisfactorily reproduced by the
conventional effects used in the literature, namely the modification of the
gluon distribution in bound nucleons and an --effective-- survival probability
for a bound state to escape the nucleus. In particular, we argue that this
probability should be close to 1 as opposed to the J/psi case. We note that, at
backward rapidities, the unexpected suppression of R^Upsilon_dAu observed by
PHENIX hints at the presence of a gluon EMC effect, analogous to the quark EMC
effect -- but likely stronger. Further nuclear matter effects, such as
saturation and fractional energy loss, are discussed, but none of them fit in a
more global picture of quarkonium production. Predictions for Upsilon(nS) for
the forthcoming pPb run at 5 TeV at the LHC are also presented.
