The Iranian drone strikes that hit Amazon Web Services facilities in the Middle East have thrust a new question to the forefront of the tech industry: Should data centers be defended like military assets?
The attacks — the first known military strikes at an American hyperscaler’s infrastructure — damaged two AWS sites in the United Arab Emirates and one in Bahrain, disrupting services across the region and underscoring how critical data infrastructure is emerging as a potential target in modern warfare.
“[Physical attacks] are only going to become more common moving forward as AI becomes more and more significant,” Sam Winter-Levy, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank, told Rest of World.
Now suddenly, protecting data centers is like protecting top-security government offices.”
Winter-Levy warned against building critical compute infrastructure in the Gulf in an opinion piece in The Washington Post in July, citing risks from growing U.S.-Iran tensions. “As more and more parts of the economy rely on these data centers, they correspondingly become increasingly attractive targets,” Winter-Levy said.
