Iran's attacks on Amazon data centers in UAE, Bahrain signal a new kind of war as AI plays an increasingly strategic rol

[cbabe]

https://fortune.com/2026/03/09/irans-attacks-on-amazon-data-centers-in-uae-bahrain-signal-a-new-kind-of-war-as-ai-plays-an-increasingly-strategic-role-analysts-say/

Iran’s attacks on Amazon data centers in UAE, Bahrain signal a new kind of war as AI plays an increasingly strategic role, analysts say

By Jeremy Kahn
Editor, AI
March 9, 2026, 1:05 PM ET

The tech industry often talks about “the cloud” as though it were something abstract and untouchable. But the cloud runs on data centers, those data centers have an address, and that address can be hit by a drone.

Last week, three data centers operated by Amazon Web Services (AWS), two in the United Arab Emirates and one in Bahrain, were struck by Iranian drones or missiles. The attacks forced the facilities offline and led to service outages affecting banking, payments, delivery apps, and enterprise software across the region.

The U.S. military also uses AWS to run some of its workloads, including running Anthropic’s AI model Claude for some intelligence functions, and Iran’s Fars News Agency said on Telegram that the Bahrain facility had been deliberately targeted “to identify the role of these centers in supporting the enemy’s military and intelligence activities.” AWS has declined to comment on the Iranian claim, and it is not known whether the attacks impacted U.S. military computing workloads.

Still, the attack is believed to be the first time data centers have been deliberately targeted for air strikes in a conflict. Experts say it almost certainly won’t be the last. Data centers are rapidly emerging as vital strategic assets—and vulnerable targets.

The boundary between commercial cloud computing and military operations has largely vanished. The Pentagon’s Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability and its Joint All-Domain Command and Control networks run on the same commercial infrastructure that serves banks and ride-hailing apps. Meanwhile, several news organizations have reported that the U.S. military used Anthropic’s AI model Claude—which runs on AWS—for intelligence assessments, target identification, and battle simulations during the Iran strikes.
That dual-use reality means that attacks on commercial data centers can have immediate military consequences—and vice versa. “If data centers become critical hubs for transiting military information, we can expect them to be increasingly targeted by both cyber and physical attacks,” Zachary Kallenborn, a PhD researcher at King’s College London, told Fortune.

… more …

[OC375]

1. The cloud is just someone else's hardware and garage

There’s value add, of course, but at the end of the day it’s a risk and reward like any other.