Before dawn on March 1, 2026, Iranian drones Shahed hit two Amazon Web Services data centers in the United Arab Emirates. A third commercial data center in Bahrain got hitalthough it is less clear whether it was deliberately targeted. Iran has also indicated that it is considering commercial data centers to be objectives.
This is the first time a country has deliberately targeted commercial data centers during wartime. Data centers have been targets of espionage and cyber attacks in the past, particularly when Ukrainian hackers destroyed data stored in a data center linked to the Russian military in 2024. However, this was a physical attack. Drones damaged buildings.
Advances in artificial intelligence have increased the importance of data centers. The US military, in particular, has made heavy use of AI systems for decision support in its attacks on Iran and Venezuela. Given how important data centers are, Iranian forces could target infrastructure that Iran’s leaders believe is supporting attacks on Iran.
It is not entirely clear that these particular data centers were used by the US military. Instead, the attacks may have been part of a wider effort to punish the UAE for its ties to the US.
In my experience as a PhD candidate at Georgia Tech studying how technology is driving changes in international security, I don’t think the attacks signal any significant change in the nature of war. But they are forcing nations to recognize that data centers are war targets — even if they don’t directly support military operations.
Data centers and the cloud
The United States military is increasingly incorporating advanced AI capabilities in its decision support systems. From surgery to the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro to support military strikes against IranThe US has used AI, particularly Anthropic’s Claude, for intelligence analysis and operational support.
Artificial intelligence is unlocking faster ways to conduct operations in war, but the AI tools the military uses often aren’t on a plane or ship. When a service member uses Claude, the computing infrastructure that powers its model and analysis typically runs in a secure Amazon Web Services cloud that hosts secret government data and software tools.
Commercial data centers are where the cloud lives. The next time you open Netflix and watch your favorite shows, you’re likely streaming from a data center. probably AWS. When AWS data centers go down, outages influence all kinds of entertainment, news and government functions.
With AI as a driver of economic growth, data centers are the main forms of infrastructure. They ensure that AI can continue to function, as well as much of the underlying Internet that governments and industry rely on. When Iran attacked UAE data centers, it caused widespread disruption the domestic banking system.
Commercial data centers enable most of the technology that drives the modern world, including AI systems. Disrupting them is the key to disrupting a country’s military and society.
Given that AWS provides and operates many of the commercial data centers where the cloud lives, it is likely that its data centers will continue to be targeted in conflict.
Going after US allies
Researchers in Safety is simply noted on March 12, 2026, that the US requires cloud computing service providers to store government and military data within the US or on Department of Defense bases: “Moving such data to Amazon’s data centers in the Gulf region would require special authorization; we are not aware if this has been granted.”
However, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed the attacks were against data centers supporting “enemy” military and intelligence activities. And 10 days after the initial attack on the data centers, an Iranian news agency claimed that major data centers of technology companies and other physical assets in the region were considered “enemy technology infrastructure.”
Instead of military reasons, Iran may have targeted the United Arab Emirates shock the global economy and attract attention. Given the importance of the Gulf as a major beneficiary of American technology investmentthe attack may also have been a symbolic attack aimed at the heart of US-Greece cooperation.
AI infrastructure like commercial data centers is a growing part of American leadership in the regionand this war could jeopardize the future of AI infrastructure in the Gulf.
Increasing importance, easy targets
Although data centers are increasingly important to national security, the economy and society at large, it may be tempting to suggest that these attacks represent a fundamental shift in the nature of warfare.
While this is a possibility, it is important to remember that Iran launched thousands of missiles and drones at targets in the United Arab Emirates. Although the vast majority were intercepted, the two that hit data centers are a small fraction of those that reached civilian targets on UAE territory, including strikes at airports and hotels.
The relative vulnerability of commercial data centers – they are large, relatively fragile and lack dedicated air defenses – suggests that those in the UAE may have been targets of opportunity or convenience. In other words, they were hit because they could be hit.
However, it seems likely that as the use of AI tools and other cloud-based resources continues to grow in importance for countries around the world, commercial data centers will be targets in future conflicts.
Dennis Murphy is a doctoral student in international affairs, Georgia Institute of Technology
This article was reprinted from Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read on original article.
