Big Tech Data Centers Become Wartime Targets After Drone Strikes on Amazon Sites

The attacks occurred on Sunday and forced AWS to evacuate staff from at least one location. Internal documents reviewed by Business Insider indicate that access to one facility was closed after the strike caused “structural damage” and flooding. The two data centers in the UAE were reportedly directly hit by drones, while the Bahrain facility suffered damage from a strike “in close proximity,” per Business Insider.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps later claimed responsibility for targeting one of the Amazon facilities, according to Iran’s state media. The outlet said the site was chosen because of Amazon’s support for US military activities, though Business Insider reported that the claim could not be independently verified. The IRGC also asserted that it had targeted a Microsoft data center in the region.

Microsoft denied that any of its facilities were affected. A spokesperson said the company had no evidence of an attack and confirmed its regional data centers were operating normally. Service status pages for Microsoft and Google also showed no outages linked to their infrastructure during the same period, according to Business Insider.

The incidents mark what appears to be the first known case of major technology company data centers being directly targeted by military strikes. The development reflects the increasing strategic importance of digital infrastructure as countries and companies rapidly expand computing capacity to support artificial intelligence and cloud services.

The Middle East currently hosts about 4.5 gigawatts of data center capacity, with another 1.7 gigawatts under development, according to data center intelligence firm DC Byte, per Business Insider. Much of the new construction is concentrated in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. For comparison, a single gigawatt of power is roughly enough electricity to supply a midsize city such as San Francisco.

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As of Friday, services at the affected AWS facilities remained offline or severely disrupted. Amazon advised customers to activate contingency plans and shift operations where possible, according to Business Insider. The outages exposed the reliance of many businesses on cloud infrastructure.

Mudassir Sheikha, CEO of the Dubai-based ride-hailing and delivery company Careem, said some of the company’s services were “impacted by an external AWS UAE outage” earlier in the week but were later restored. Several banking applications in the region also experienced disruptions.

Amazon directed users to the AWS Service Health Dashboard for ongoing updates. A spokesperson for Google did not respond to requests for comment, according to Business Insider.

While data centers are typically designed with redundancy and distributed workloads to reduce the risk of outages, experts say the attacks illustrate how these facilities have become critical assets in both the global economy and national security.

“Data centers have become the new infrastructure for economies,” said James Lewis, senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “If you think about how people are going to build infrastructure, before it was railroads and steam engines. Now it’s data centers and fiber optics.”

The events have intensified concerns that the massive investments being poured into AI and cloud infrastructure could increasingly intersect with geopolitical tensions.

Source: Business Insider