In the ongoing Iran War amongst the targets hit by Iranian drone and missile strikes were cloud facilities in the Gulf region, including two Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centres in the United Arab Emirates and a Bahrain facility that suffered damage from a nearby strike. The attacks disrupted services and forced operators to reroute workloads across other cloud regions due to the power disruptions, fire-related water damage, and prolonged outages affected regional customers, including financial institutions. For the first time, core cloud infrastructure, once seen as abstract and largely as commercial technology, has been directly struck in a military conflict.

For most of the digital age, data centers were treated as background infrastructure, the quiet commercial machinery behind the abstraction called “the cloud.” The cloud was never some weightless digital mist. It was always a physical system built from land, concrete, transformers, cooling systems, cables, and electricity. Targeting the cloud threatens more than just military capability as the cloud hosts financial systems, communications networks, logistics software, and, increasingly, the computing power behind artificial intelligence (AI).

The New Strategic Infrastructure

As governments, corporations, and militaries grow more dependent on concentrated cloud infrastructure, the facilities housing that computing power are now strategic assets. Data Centres are no longer just anonymous commercial properties invisible behind the digital economy. They are becoming part of the strategic rear: fixed, valuable, energy-hungry infrastructure whose disruption can impose immediate economic and operational costs. With countries focused on building digital capacity and AI, including using AI tools during combat these centres built to enable economic productivity and warfighting are a new fixed target that needs hardening and protection. The comforting belief that the cloud sits is above the battlefield no longer holds.

The damage to Data Centres is a preview of what future targeting will look like in future wars. Amazon Web Services reported that two of its regional facilities sustained direct hits while a third site in Bahrain was affected by a fire from a nearby strike. It reported structural damage, disruptions to power delivery and fire-suppression measures that caused additional water damage to equipment.

Adversaries increasingly understand that digital infrastructure carries coercive value. Disable it, even temporarily, and the effects can spread quickly across finance, communications, logistics, governance, and military command-and-control. The future of war still requires missiles, drones, and code, but it will also be fought through the physical infrastructure that keeps modern societies online.

Why Data Centres Became Targets

Many people view the cloud as diffuse, virtual, and naturally resilient. In reality, it rests on concentrated physical systems. That concentration is precisely what gives data centres strategic relevance. The greater the economic activity and AI capacity are routed through a relatively small number of high-value computing hubs, the more attractive those hubs become as targets in wartime.

Data Centres are enormous facilities designed to house tens of thousands of servers and the networking equipment needed to connect them to global internet backbones. These buildings contain large server halls, cooling plants, power distribution systems, fibre switching equipment, and backup generation. They are often organized into large campuses occupying hundreds of acres.

And it is increasingly concentrated. The digital economy likes to talk in the language of speed, code, and abstraction. But its physical backbone is still industrial.

That matters because scale creates vulnerability. The same clustering that improves commercial efficiency also creates a tempting target. A concentrated cloud architecture may make sense in peacetime because it’s efficient. But in wartime, this is a liability. While countries are racing to build AI capacity, they are also building a new class of strategic assets, whether they realize it or not.

Modern warfare increasingly depends on data rather than ammunition alone. The same hyperscale computing infrastructure that powers civilian services now support intelligence processing, logistics coordination, satellite data fusion and increasingly AI-enabled decision-making tools used by militaries.

Telecommunications and Energy as Strategic Infrastructure in Wartime

The strategic logic behind targeting infrastructure is familiar. Oil refineries, ports, rail hubs, and power plants have long been considered legitimate wartime targets as they sustain economic activity and military capability. Data infrastructure now seems to belong to that category. Its commercial significance stretches into financial transactions, communications, logistics platforms, government services, military operations, and growing volumes of AI computing, all of which depend on large commercial cloud systems. Once those systems become central to societal function, the facilities that house them lose their neutrality and look more like critical nodes for being targeted both kinetically and non-kinetically.

In the early stages of Russia – Ukraine war there were attempts to disable Ukrainian government and telecommunications systems. But the campaign quickly expanded beyond cyberspace underscoring a basic wartime reality: when digital systems matter enough, adversaries do not limit themselves to malware and network intrusion. They also go after the buildings and infrastructure that keep them running.

Russia also repeatedly attacked Ukraine’s power grid with missiles and drones. In March 2024, one of the largest such strikes damaged energy facilities across multiple regions, with the attacks leaving more than one million people without electricity which forced Ukraine to increase imports from neighboring systems. Digital resilience is inseparable from power resilience.

The fact is that disabling digital infrastructure does not require destroying the server hall itself. The more efficient path is often to strike the enabling systems around it, especially electricity networks, substations, cooling systems, and fibre links. The cloud relies heavily on power-intensive, highly physical infrastructure whose failure can produce immediate cascading effects that effects both the economy and military.

The broader lesson is that the systems that support digital connectivity have become a critical centre of gravity in the battlespace and attacking them can generate coercive effects well beyond the immediate military front.

Technological change is also lowering the barriers to attacking digital infrastructure. Drones capable of carrying explosive payloads are cheaper, more accessible, and often harder to intercept cost-effectively than traditional missile systems. That make it easier to threaten fixed, high-value infrastructure that was never designed with persistent aerial attacks in mind. In practical terms, the spread of relatively low-cost strike systems narrows the distance between commercial infrastructure and the battlespace.

The Fallout of the Strikes in the Gulf 

The Gulf boasted of political stability and access to cheap energy.  As a result there are approximately 35 Data Centres in the UAE, with 42 % considered to be large facilities with up to 5,000 servers, according to 2025 numbers from data analysis firm Mordor Intelligence.

In May 2025, US President Donald Trump toured Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE and announced more than $2.8 trillion in investment pledges.

The centre piece was a $700 billion AI data centre in Abu Dhabi, to be built in partnership with Open AI, NVIDIA, Oracle and Cisco. OpenAI claimed the facility could eventually serve half the world’s population. In October 2025, Australia’s AirTrunk also announced a separate $4.2 billion deal to build a data centre in Saudi Arabia.

The future of AI in the Gulf has changed in the space of three drone strikes. The region no longer seems secure place to build this kind of infrastructure. No one would want to locate their data centres in an unstable environment.

Data Centre Security

Recognizing the strategic relevance of Data Centres requires more than stronger cybersecurity. If computing infrastructure is becoming contested infrastructure, then the strategy surrounding their resilience becomes a strategic concern.

Overcoming this challenge is now imperative.  To defend Data Centres becoming military targets, there is an urgent need to prioritise geographic dispersion, treat them as critical infrastructure, and move beyond a cybersecurity-only approach.

Data centers have long focused at physical security. But most measures like high fences topped with barbed wire, carefully controlled access and security cameras are aimed at preventing sabotage by individuals on ground, not aerial attacks.

Geographic dispersion must therefore become a higher priority. Concentrating enormous computing capacity in a small number of hyperscale hubs may be commercially efficient, but it creates systemic wartime risk. More distributed architectures, with workloads able to shift rapidly across regions and jurisdictions, can reduce the consequences of attacks on any single cluster.

The task of running a reliable Data Centre is expensive, even under normal circumstances. But once these centres are in the crosshairs during conflicts their costs rise. Protecting them against missiles, drones, blast effects, shrapnel, fire, water damage, and cascading utility failures adds to the dimension and can drive up insurance premiums.

They are also massive structures and difficult to hide as they emit a large heat signature which can be picked up by satellite imagery.

In view of this major Data Centres must be treated as critical national infrastructure as their disruption carries national-security consequences.

The other option is creating agreements that would make it illegal to attack Data centres during war. But the truth is most view these as dual use technologies and countries investing into AI capacity have now created assets that adversaries can put at risk.

Conclusion

As the war reaches multiple doorsteps in myriad manners governments and giant tech companies need to come to terms with the fact that the ‘cloud’ is not detached from geography and warfare as disruptions in the Middle East ripple outwards.

As countries tie their economic competitiveness, public services, and AI ambitions to concentrated computing infrastructure, they are creating a new class of strategic assets for future adversaries to target. The cloud was initially abstract and borderless. However, war has a way of finding asymmetric advantages to exploit enemy weaknesses.

The irony is that AI was helping to choose targets in war now it’s a target too. Sometimes a small-seeming event like targeting a Data Centre is more than a tactical footnote in a conflict but speaks volumes about bigger things in future that can lead to unprecedented disruption.