Photograph: video obtained by Reuters/Reuters
It is believed to be a first: the deliberate targeting of a commercial datacentre by the armed forces of a country at war.
At 4.30am on Sunday morning, an Iranian Shahed 136 drone struck an Amazon Web Services datacentre in the United Arab Emirates, setting off a devastating fire and forcing a shutdown of the power supply. Further damage was inflicted as attempts were made to suppress the flames with water.
Soon after, a second data centre owned by the US tech company was hit. Then a third was said to be in trouble, this time in Bahrain, after an Iranian suicide drone turned to fireball on striking land nearby.
Iranian state TV has claimed that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps launched the attack “to identify the role of these centres in supporting the enemy’s military and intelligence activities”.
The network built by Jeff Bezos’s company could withstand one of its regional centres being taken out of action but not a second, let alone a third of their huge warehouses of technology.
The coordinated strike had an immediate impact.
Millions of people in Dubai and Abu Dhabi woke up on Monday unable to pay for a taxi, order a food delivery, or check their bank balance on their mobile apps.
Whether there was a military impact is unclear – but the strikes swiftly brought the war directly into the lives of 11 million people in the UAE, nine out of 10 of whom are foreign nationals. Amazon has advised its clients to secure their data away from the region.
Perhaps more significantly, the strikes on this ‘next generation’ war target are now raising questions about the prospects of the UAE building on its plans, and many billions of pounds worth of US and other foreign investment, to exploit what they hope 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 very strong conviction about this technology, probably stronger than any other government in the world, and if there’s going to start to be security questions around that, then they’re going to have to resolve those very quickly, somehow.”
A datacentre is a facility designed to store, manage, and operate digital data.
The growing demand by businesses for artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing – where firms have a pay-as-you-go relationship with the providers of servers, storage and software – is driving the need for centres that have significantly more computational power.
It requires a ready and consistent supply of very cheap electricity.
The UAE, as it seeks to diversify away from fossil fuels, has been able to point out that it has this in spades, along with a huge sovereign wealth fund ready to invest and subsidise projects.
According to Turner & Townsend’s Global Data Centre Index, the overall global cost increase of datacentre construction increased in 2025 by 5.5% – but the UAE ranks 44th in the league table of most expensive unit cost per watt out of 52.
The UAE’s geography also makes it a critical subsea cable landing point, providing access between Europe and Asia.
Then there are the geo-politics, with the US keen to keep the Gulf states away from Chinese technology.
A four-day tour by Donald Trump of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE last May coincided with the announcement of the construction of a vast new AI campus – a partnership between the UAE and the US – for the purpose of training powerful AI models.
As part of the deal, the Trump administration eased restrictions on advanced chips sales to the Gulf. OpenAI has said the planned UAE campus could eventually serve half the world’s population.
McGuire said that this week’s events could be pivotal. “If we’re going to have large scale datacentres built out in the Middle East, we’re going have to get pretty serious about how we protect them,” he said. ‘We think about how to protect it right now, and we’re saying, ‘Oh, it means you have guards and good cybersecurity’.
“If you’re actually going to double down the Middle East, maybe it means missile defence on datacentres.”
Sean Gorman, the chief executive of Zephr.xyz, a technology firm that is a contractor to the US air force, said that the Gulf states’ ambitions would have likely been in the thoughts of military planners in Tehran.
He said: “I believe the Iranians are building on tactics they’ve seen be effective in the Ukraine conflict. Asymmetric warfare that can target critical infrastructure creates pressure on adversaries by disrupting public safety and economic activity.
“UAE and Bahrain have both been positioning themselves as global AI hubs by investing heavily in datacentres and fibre infrastructure to connect them to the rest of the world.
“If they can disrupt that infrastructure, it puts their strategic position under risk while also disrupting operations that are important to the economy. In addition, there could be an adjacent impact of defence operations, but that would likely be more luck than the primary objective.”
Gorman said the UAE had a “long track record of managing regional instability without becoming party to it” but that there were a range of risks apart from that from the air.
He said: “The UAE also has one of the most diversified submarine-cable landing environments in the Middle East, but the diversity is geographically uneven.
“There are multiple landing stations and cable systems, but many of them concentrate on the east coast at Fujairah, which creates a partial geographic 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 datacentre and cloud operations than geography in the traditional sense.”
Gorman said the concern would be if Iran demonstrated any further capability to target Gulf digital infrastructure as part of its retaliation.
He said: “The UAE will need to show partners that its infrastructure is defensible. This is the question investors should be asking, not whether the broader AI ambition survives.”
Vili Lehdonvirta, senior fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, said there were significant costs to such defences but that the danger was real.
The former chair of the US National Security Commission on AI, Eric Schmidt, suggested last year that a country falling behind in an AI arms race could bomb their adversary’s datacentres.
Lehdonvirta said he suspected that no one actually believed that datacentres “would get bombed despite such scenarios being openly floated for some time”.
“If that’s the case then from now on we might perhaps see operators of prominent datacentres like AWS [Amazon Web Services] investing in air defence, similar to how shipping operators armed up against pirates,” he said.
Where might Iran fruitfully strike next?
“The Iranians will be well aware that the fibreoptic cables that connect these datacentres to the United States and to the rest of the world run through the strait of Hormuz,” Lehdonvirta said, “although they’ll be closely watched by the US and allied forces.”
