Data centers: The new casualties of war

Iranian drone strikes on data centers in the Middle East signal “how wars will be fought in the future,” said John Herrman in New York. Tech companies are used to defending their systems against hackers. Now they need to worry about physical attacks too. Early in the Iran war, two Amazon Web Services facilities in the United Arab Emirates were “directly hit” by Iranian drones, while another in Bahrain sustained damage from a drone strike nearby. Even these relatively small attacks led to internet disruptions that affected banks, financial tech companies, rideshare providers, and other popular services, raising questions about the vulnerabilities of massive Middle Eastern server farms. Our digital lives are increasingly cloud-based, but there is still a large, physical footprint required to make that happen. With a “remote-controlled drone that costs less than a new car,” a hostile actor can now cripple our “multibillion-dollar digital infrastructure.”

Iran has openly declared war on U.S. tech firms, said Dana Alomar in Wired. Last week, it published a list of offices and infrastructure run by U.S. companies, including Google, Microsoft, Palantir, IBM, Nvidia, and Oracle, and named them “potential targets.” Warfare has become “increasingly dependent on digital systems, from satellite data to AI-powered intelligence analysis.” So the infrastructure underlying those systems holds “strategic significance.” Companies were already thinking about ways to protect their data centers, said Rachyl Jones in Semafor. Some are building server farms “in underground, nuclear-hardened bunkers.” But this “introduces a new level of complexity”—not to mention added costs for projects that are already eye-wateringly expensive. For now, “the cheapest way to protect data is to duplicate it” and store copies in safe regions.

The Middle East sold itself as exactly that, said Indranil Ghosh in Rest of
World—“a safe harbor for the world’s data.” But the Iran war “has upended that pitch.” Less than a year ago, the region was being hailed as the next great AI hub after President Trump’s four-day visit to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE yielded more than $2 trillion in investment pledges. The security arrangements around those deals were mostly designed to keep advanced AI chips out of China’s hands. “Not one of them contemplated the possibility that a regional adversary would launch missiles at the physical buildings where those chips were meant to run.” This was an “obvious blunder,” said Rana Foroohar in the Financial Times. Tech companies were “desperate to take advantage of huge subsidies and cheap energy offered by Gulf countries.” But putting massive, energy-draining, water-dependent facilities in a geopolitically vulnerable desert was “nuts.” Now, “the geopolitical and the geo-economic chickens coming home to roost.”