Iranian drones damage three AWS sites in UAE, Bahrain
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- Iran launched drone strikes that damaged two AWS data centers in the United Arab Emirates and one in Bahrain, causing service outages for regional consumer and financial apps such as Careem and Alaan.
- Sam Winter‑Levy, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, warned that physical attacks on critical compute infrastructure will increase as AI becomes more significant and cautioned against building such facilities in the Gulf amid U.S.–Iran tensions.
- IDC reported that the attacks will spur additional investment in data infrastructure, prompting cloud providers to adopt “multi‑AZ” deployments that replicate data across separate sites in the Middle East.
- Ashish Nadkarni, head of IDC’s global infrastructure research, said Gulf governments will need to offer heightened security measures for data centers, likening their protection to that of top‑security government offices.
- Underground facilities such as Cold War nuclear bunkers in the United and Sweden, and Tencent’s cavernous data center in Guizhou, China, are already used to attract clients concerned about safety.
- Tech companies have focused on defending against cyberattacks and natural disasters, but the article notes that physical defense measures—like air‑defense systems and reinforced concrete—are costly and do not fully protect sprawling data‑center campuses.
Why it matters: The attacks interrupt services for regional apps like Careem and Alaan, exposing the vulnerability of cloud infrastructure and prompting providers and Gulf governments to allocate costly military‑grade security measures, which will raise operational expenses for both operators and their customers.
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