Before dawn on March 1, 2026, Iranian Shahed drones struck two Amazon Web Services data centres in the United Arab Emirates and a third commercial data centre in Bahrain. This marks the first time a country has deliberately targeted commercial data centres during wartime.
Iran's state media issued a statement on March 31 that it will target American companies, including Microsoft, Google, Apple, Meta, Oracle, Intel, HP, IBM, Cisco, Dell, Palantir and Nvidia.
Data centres have been targets of espionage and cyberattacks in the past, but these strikes in the Persian Gulf region were physical attacks, with drones damaging buildings.
Advances in artificial intelligence have increased the importance of data centres, and Iranian forces could be targeting the infrastructure that Iran's leaders believe is supporting strikes on Iran.
However, experts believe that the attacks may have been part of a broader effort to punish the United Arab Emirates for its ties with the US.
The attacks are forcing nations to recognise that data centres are targets of war, even if they don't directly support military operations.
Commercial data centres are key forms of infrastructure, enabling most of the technology that runs the modern world, including AI systems.
Disrupting them is key to disrupting a country's military and society, and given that AWS provides and operates many of the commercial data centres where the cloud lives, it is likely that its data centres will continue to be targeted in conflict.
