This Amazon data center, located on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi and directly across the water from the Iranian coast, has become a focal point in the escalating conflict between Iran and the United States. Stocked with high-powered computers running continuously, this facility represents the physical form of “the cloud.” Amazon operates six data centers across Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), but recent events have thrust these centers into the spotlight.
Last week, two of Amazon’s centers in the UAE were reportedly “directly struck” by Iranian drones, according to an Amazon status report. Additionally, there was “a drone strike in close proximity” to a location in Bahrain. The specific facilities affected remain undisclosed due to the secrecy surrounding the US war effort. Alongside Amazon, several other US-based companies like Microsoft and Google lease capacity from a variety of locally operated facilities, highlighting the region’s ambition to become an AI superpower.
Gulf States Under Fire
The UAE, known for its political stability and access to cheap energy, was poised to become a hub for the next wave of AI development. In May 2025, US President Donald Trump visited Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE, announcing more than $2.8 trillion in investment pledges. A $700 billion AI data center in Abu Dhabi, a collaboration with OpenAI, NVIDIA, Oracle, and Cisco, was the centerpiece of these plans, with the potential to serve half the world’s population.
However, the optimism surrounding AI development in the Gulf has been dramatically altered by a series of drone strikes. Jessie Moritz, a senior lecturer in political economy at the ANU, asserts that the region is no longer secure for building such infrastructure. “No country wants to put its data centers in an unstable environment,” she explains. The strikes are part of Iran’s strategy of “asymmetrical warfare,” targeting civilian infrastructure across the Gulf states to increase the conflict’s cost for its adversaries.
Already, the price of oil is rising, key shipping routes are at a standstill, and air travel is in disarray. Now, data centers have become strategic targets as well.
Big Tech Added to Iran’s List of Targets
The US Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, has been vocal about the US military’s shift towards becoming “AI-first,” emphasizing the need to “unleash experimentation” and “eliminate bureaucratic barriers.” The military’s use of AI to identify targets has made big tech firms, including Amazon, targets in the conflict with Iran. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard justified one of last week’s strikes on Amazon data centers by citing their military use. On Thursday, this dynamic intensified as Iran’s Revolutionary Guard published a list of “new targets,” including data centers and offices for several US-based tech companies.
A spokesperson for a state-affiliated media agency stated that, since the US had struck a bank branch in Tehran, these technology assets were now legitimate targets for retaliatory strikes.
War Raises Costs, Risks for Data Centers
The operation of a reliable data center is costly, even under normal circumstances, due to their significant consumption of water and electricity, the need for highly trained workers, and the necessity of securing them against cyber attacks. These costs escalate dramatically in a conflict zone. “Protecting it against missiles, drones, blast effects, shrapnel, fire, water damage, and cascading utility failures is another order of difficulty,” says Kristian Alexander, lead researcher at the Rabdan Security & Defence Institute in Abu Dhabi.
These strikes could drive up insurance premiums and make it harder to attract engineering talent, as Sam Winter-Levy, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, noted on Bloomberg TV. Data centers are notoriously difficult to conceal due to their massive structures and distinctive heat signatures visible in satellite imagery. Fortifying the largest data centers against these new threats could cost “low hundreds of millions of dollars” per facility, estimates Dr. Alexander.
Despite the redundancy built into these systems, the two centers hit in the UAE went down simultaneously, causing severe outages in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, affecting services such as banking, taxi, and food delivery apps. This kind of coordinated attack reveals the vulnerability of these systems, raising risks and costs even higher.
“If data centers become increasingly targeted in war,” says Zachary Kallenborn, a PhD researcher at King’s College London, “it is reasonable to expect tech companies to weigh that risk in deciding where they build future centers.”
The Internet’s Arteries Could Be Vulnerable
The Middle East’s major waterways are lined with a vast network of undersea cables. Damage to these cables could cause massive disruptions to global interconnectivity, as over 90 percent of data between Europe and Asia travels through cables under the Red Sea. Alternative technologies, like satellites, can handle only a fraction of this data.
These cables are densely located in strategic areas, such as the Bab al-Mandab Strait, off Yemen’s southeast coast, a site of several attacks by Iranian and Houthi forces. Experts warn that repairing undersea cables in conflict zones would be perilous. Recent Iranian drone strikes on oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz highlight the vulnerability of these cables, which connect several Gulf nations to the world.
The landing stations where these cables come ashore, such as in Fujairah, UAE, are also potential targets. Dr. Alexander notes, “Onshore infrastructure is a concern because landing stations are vulnerable to even unsophisticated sabotage.” When three cables in the Red Sea were damaged in 2024, the incident, reportedly collateral damage from a missile hitting a cargo vessel, caused disruptions felt as far away as the UK, South Africa, and China.
Whether targeting data centers, undersea cables, or other digital infrastructure, disruptions in the Middle East can have widespread consequences. Dr. Kallenborn’s discussions with US officials revealed that “infrastructure protection policy is very nationally focused” and often does not extend to foreign infrastructure, even when critical to national interests. He remains hopeful, however, as officials begin to recognize the “real, unaddressed problem” and consider what policies, programs, and regulations can best mitigate these risks.
