Before dawn on March 1, 2026, Iranian Shahed drones struck two Amazon Web Services data centers in the United Arab Emirates. A third commercial data center in Bahrain was hit, though it is less clear whether it was deliberately targeted. Iran has also indicated that it considers commercial data centers to be targets.
This is the first time that a country has deliberately targeted commercial data centers during wartime. Data centers have been targets of espionage and cyberattacks in the past, notably when Ukrainian hackers destroyed data stored in a Russian military-affiliated data center in 2024. This, however, was a physical attack. Drones damaged buildings.
