This is believed to be the first case of a commercial datacenter being deliberately targeted by the armed forces of a country at war.
At 4.30 am on Sunday, an Iranian Shaheed 136 drone attacked an Amazon Web Services datacenter in the United Arab Emirates, causing a devastating fire and knocking out power supplies. Attempts to suppress the flames with water caused further damage.
Soon after, a second data center owned by a US tech company was affected. Then a third was said to be in trouble, this time in Bahrain, after an Iranian suicide drone burst into a ball of fire while attacking land nearby.
Iranian state TV claimed that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps carried out the attack “to identify the role of these centers in supporting the enemy’s military and intelligence activities.”
The network built by Jeff Bezos’ company could withstand one of its regional hubs being put out of action, but not another one, let alone a third of their vast warehouses of technology.
The coordinated strike had an immediate effect.
Millions of people in Dubai and Abu Dhabi woke up on Monday unable to pay for taxis, order food delivery or check their bank balances on their mobile apps.
Whether there was any military impact is unclear – but the attacks quickly brought war directly into the lives of 11 million people in the UAE, nine in 10 of whom are foreign nationals. Amazon has advised its customers to keep their data safe away from the area.
Perhaps more importantly, attacks on this ‘next generation’ warfare target are now raising questions about the UAE’s prospects for building on its own plans and multibillion-pound US and other foreign investment in what it hopes will be the ‘new oil’: artificial intelligence (AI).
“The UAE really wants to be a major AI player,” said Chris McGuire, an AI and technology competition expert who served as a White House National Security Council official in Joe Biden’s administration.. “Their government has a very strong belief about this technology, probably stronger than any other government in the world, and if security questions start to arise around it, they will have to resolve them very quickly somehow.”
A datacenter is a facility designed to store, manage, and operate digital data.
The growing demand from businesses for artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing – where firms have pay-as-you-go relationships with providers of servers, storage and software – is driving the need for centers that have significantly more computational power.
This requires a ready and continuous supply of very cheap electricity.
The UAE, as it seeks to diversify away from fossil fuels, is able to point out that it has plenty of it, as well as a huge sovereign wealth fund ready to invest and subsidize projects.
According to Turner & Townsend’s Global Data Center Index, the total global cost of datacenter construction is set to increase by 5.5% in 2025 – but the UAE ranks 44th out of 52 in a league table of the most expensive unit costs per watt.
The UAE’s geography also makes it an important submarine cable landing point, providing access between Europe and Asia.
Then there is also geopolitics, with the US keen to keep the Gulf countries away from Chinese technology.
Donald Trump’s four-day tour of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE last May coincided with the announcement of the construction of a huge new AI campus – a partnership between the UAE and the US aimed at training powerful AI models.
As part of the deal, the Trump administration eased restrictions on the sale of advanced chips to the Gulf. OpenAI has said the planned UAE campus could eventually serve half the world’s population.
McGuire said this week’s events could be significant. “If we’re going to build large-scale datacenters in the Middle East, we have to be very serious about how we protect them,” he said. ‘We think about how to keep it safe right now, and we’re saying, ‘Oh, that means you have guards and good cybersecurity.’
“If you’re really going to double down on the Middle East, it probably means missile defense on the datacenter.”
Shawn Gorman, chief executive of US Air Force contractor Zephr.xyz, said Gulf ambitions were likely in the thoughts of military planners in Tehran.
He said: “I believe the Iranians are employing strategies they have seen effective in the Ukraine conflict. Asymmetric warfare that can target critical infrastructure puts pressure on adversaries by disrupting public security and economic activity.
“Both the UAE and Bahrain are positioning themselves as global AI hubs by investing heavily in datacenter and fiber infrastructure to connect them to the rest of the world.
“If they can disrupt that infrastructure, it puts their strategic position at risk, as well as disrupting operations critical to the economy. Additionally, defense operations could have an imminent impact, but that would be more luck than primary objective.”
Gorman said the UAE “has a long track record of managing regional instability without getting involved in it” but there were other risks besides air risks.
He said: “The UAE has one of the most diverse submarine-cable landing environments in the Middle East, but the diversity is geographically uneven.
“There are many landing stations and cable systems, but many of them are concentrated on the east coast of Fujairah, which creates a partial geographical chokepoint.
“In addition, there is a specific risk from Iranian cyber operations targeting US-aligned digital infrastructure in the Gulf, which presents a more concrete near-term threat to datacenter and cloud operations than geography in the traditional sense.”
Gorman said the concern would be if Iran demonstrated any further ability to target Gulf digital infrastructure as part of its retaliation.
He added: “The UAE will need to demonstrate to partners that its infrastructure is defensible. That is the question investors should be asking, not whether broader AI ambitions survive.”
Willy Lehdenvirta, senior fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, said there were significant costs to such a defense but the threat was real.
Eric Schmidt, former chairman of the US National Security Commission on AI, suggested last year that a country lagging behind in an AI arms race could bomb its rival’s datacenters.
Lehdenvirta said he suspected that no one really believed that the datacenter would be bombed “despite such scenarios having been floated openly for some time”.
“If that is the case then from now on we could probably see operators of major datacenters like AWS (Amazon Web Services) investing in air defence, just as shipping operators took up arms against pirates,” he said.
Where might Iran launch its next successful attack?
“The Iranians will be well aware that the fiberoptic cables connecting these datacenters to the United States and the rest of the world pass through the Strait of Hormuz,” Lehdenvirta said, although they will be closely monitored by U.S. and allied forces.
