This Amazon data centre sits on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi, directly across the water from the Iranian coast.
Stocked with high-powered computers that run day and night, this structure is where “the cloud” takes on physical form.
Amazon has six data centres across Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Last week, two of the US tech giant’s centres in the UAE were “directly struck” by Iranian drones, according to an Amazon status report. There was also “a drone strike in close proximity” to one Bahrain location.
We don’t know which three facilities were hit, due to the secrecy surrounding the US war effort.
In addition to the Amazon data centres, several other US-based companies like Microsoft and Google also rent capacity from a breadth of locally run facilities.
And there are plenty more in the pipeline; this is a region with ambitions to become the next AI superpower.
A coordinated strike on these assets — which Iran claims are contributing to the US war effort — threatens more than just military capability.
It’s also a strike on an industry that the region has pinned its hopes on for economic growth.
Following three strikes on data centres, Iran has signalled that technology infrastructure will continue to be in the firing line.
Gulf states under fire
Boasting political stability and access to cheap energy, the UAE was supposed to be ground zero for the next wave of AI development.
In the space of four days 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 centrepiece 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 nearby Saudi Arabia.
The future of AI in the Gulf seemed bright. But that all changed in the space of three drone strikes.
This region is no longer a secure place to build this kind of infrastructure, says Jessie Moritz, senior lecturer in political economy at the ANU. “No country wants to put its data centres in an unstable environment.”
The strikes were part of Iran’s strategy of “asymmetrical warfare,” says Dr Moritz.
Iran has launched attacks on civilian infrastructure across the Gulf states — from hotels to oil refineries to water desalination plants — in an attempt to make the conflict costly for its adversaries.
Already, the price of oil is rising. Key shipping routes have been brought to a standstill. Air travel is in disarray.
Now, data centres have become strategic targets, too.
Big tech added to Iran’s list of targets
The US Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, has been sounding a bit like a tech executive lately.
The US military will become “AI-first”, he said. It will “unleash experimentation” and “eliminate bureaucratic barriers”.
The US and Israeli militaries are also using AI to identify targets.
Big tech firms — including Amazon — have long worked with the US military, which has turned them into targets in the conflict with Iran.
Military use was cited by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard in justifying one of last week’s strikes on the Amazon data centres. On Thursday, that dynamic only deepened.
According to Al Jazeera, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard published a list of “new targets”, including data centres and offices for several US-based tech companies.
A spokesperson for a state-affiliated media agency said that, since the US had struck a bank branch in Tehran, these technology assets were now the legitimate targets of retaliatory strikes.
War raises costs, risks for data centres
The task of running a reliable data centre is expensive, even under normal circumstances. They consume significant amounts of water and electricity, require highly trained workers to be on-shift around the clock, and need to be secured against cyber attacks.
The costs will only rise when caught up in a conflict zone.
“Protecting it against missiles, drones, blast effects, shrapnel, fire, water damage, and cascading utility failures is another order of difficulty,” says Kristian Alexander, lead researcher at the Rabdan Security & Defence Institute in Abu Dhabi.
These strikes may “drive up insurance premiums, [and] may make it harder to attract engineering talent”, as Sam Winter-Levy, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Bloomberg TV.
Data centres are also notoriously difficult to hide. They are massive structures that emit a large heat signature and have a distinctive look in satellite imagery.
The costs of fortifying the largest data centres against these new threats could run into the “low hundreds of millions of dollars” per facility, estimates Dr Alexander.
It is wise to spread the risk around, and these systems are already built with redundancy in mind. Amazon has three data centres in each of the UAE and Bahrain, which should be able to gracefully handle the loss of a single facility in both.
But that still wasn’t enough to keep services running.
The two centres hit in the UAE went down at the same time and caused severe outages. There were disruptions to all sorts of services in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, including banking, taxi and food delivery apps.
This kind of coordinated attack reveals the vulnerability of these systems, even when considerable redundancy is built in — which only raises the risks and costs higher.
“If data centres become increasingly targeted in war,” says Zachary Kallenborn, a PhD researcher at King’s College London, “it is reasonable to expect tech companies to weigh that risk in deciding where they build future centres”.
And the threats to digital infrastructure in the Middle East don’t start and end with data centres either. There’s another piece of digital infrastructure, just as critical, that could also be put at risk.
The internet’s arteries could be vulnerable
The two major waterways in the Middle East are lined by a massive network of undersea cables.
If these cables were to be severed or damaged, it could cause massive disruptions to global interconnectivity.
More than 90 per cent of data flowing between Europe and Asia travels through cables under the Red Sea.
Alternative technologies, like satellites, can handle only a fraction of the data that travels through this network.
These cables are densely co-located in places like the Bab al-Mandab Strait, off the south-east coast of Yemen — the site of several attacks on oil tankers by Iranian and Houthi forces.
Experts warn that repairing undersea cables would be perilous in areas of conflict.
Oil tankers have also been struck by Iranian drones in the Strait of Hormuz in recent days.
The cables underneath this waterway connect several Gulf nations to the world.
The places where these cables come ashore are also potential targets, like the city of Fujairah in the UAE.
“Onshore infrastructure is a concern because landing stations are vulnerable to even unsophisticated sabotage,” says Dr Alexander.
When three of the cables running through the Red Sea were damaged back in 2024, they were collateral damage after a missile reportedly struck a cargo vessel.
It wasn’t a case of explicit sabotage, but there have been warnings about that possibility for years.
The reverberations were felt as far away as the UK, South Africa and China.
A telecom company in Hong Kong reported that the incident caused a 25 per cent disruption to its internet traffic.
Whether the targets are data centres or undersea cables or another kind of digital infrastructure, disruptions in the Middle East can ripple outwards.
Last year, Mr Kallenborn spoke with senior officials in the US about these risks.
He concluded that “infrastructure protection policy is very nationally focused”, and doesn’t often extend to foreign infrastructure, even when it is critical to that country’s interests.
Since publishing his research, though, he has been heartened to see officials recognising that “a real, unaddressed problem exists”.
“The open question is what comes next,” he says, “what specific policies, programs, and regulations can best reduce the risks?
“Honestly, I do not know.”
Data sources
- Data centre locations — Baxtel and Data Centre Map, visually verified by ABC News.
- Submarine cables — TeleGeography.
- Map data — OpenStreetMap.
Credits
- Development: Ashley Kyd
- Reporting: Julian Fell
- Design and research: Jarrod Fankhauser
- System design: Ben Spraggon
- Editing: Matt Liddy
