Gulf data centers emerge as strategic targets in widening regional conflict

Retaliatory strikes launched by Tehran following the US-Israel offensive against Iran have impacted data centers operated by US technology firms across the Gulf.

According to reports from Bloomberg, drone strikes have damaged three facilities operated by Amazon in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.

Data from Holistic Resilience, a non-profit organization that maps airstrikes, indicates that data centers within Iran have also been targeted. Israel and the US struck at least two facilities in Tehran, including one linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Daniel Efrati, CEO of NED Data Centers—an Israeli firm specializing in fortified data infrastructure—warned that targeting such facilities could “paralyze banks, government agencies, and critical sectors, where a single minute of downtime costs organizations millions of dollars.”

While it remains unconfirmed whether Iran specifically targeted Amazon facilities, computing capacity has clearly emerged as a strategic imperative.

Server farms, which house data and provide essential digital services, are increasingly viewed not as neutral commercial entities, but as potential nexus points of state power.

Defense technology increasingly relies on artificial intelligence and cloud services for surveillance, drone navigation, and real-time analysis of video and satellite imagery.

For instance, Russia has repeatedly struck Ukraine’s information technology infrastructure. Henry Sutton, founder of the trade group Gulf Data Centre Association, characterizes data centers as “natural targets.”

In recent years, American tech giants have flooded into the Persian Gulf region, drawn by the advantages of abundant, low-cost energy and favorable real estate conditions.

Much of their activity is conducted through partnerships with local data center firms, making it difficult at times to discern which facilities are directly linked to US corporations.

According to researchers at DC Byte, only a small fraction of the approximately 230 data centers built or under development across six Arab countries in the Gulf are fully owned and operated by the US tech giant Amazon. Among those, three were the facilities struck in the recent attacks.

It remains unclear whether these facilities are utilized for military operations. However, Amazon—alongside Google—has entered into a $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli government to provide cloud services and artificial intelligence to various organizations, including the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

Consequently, Ed Galvin, founder of DC Byte, posits that it is no coincidence that the attacks specifically struck Amazon’s centers.

“Targeting AWS would be easier than other US technology services hosted in local operators’ data centers,” Galvin says.

US corporations are not the largest operators in the region. That distinction belongs to Khazna Data Center, established by the Abu Dhabi state fund Mubadala and partnered with Microsoft.

Meanwhile, Center3—a subsidiary of Saudi Arabia’s largest telecommunications company—has constructed nearly half of the country’s data centers.

Microsoft, Google, and other US firms frequently lease data center capacity from local operators to deliver cloud services in the region. Some of these firms have signed contracts with the US military, which risks attracting unwanted attention to their partners.

Amazon declined to comment on the drone strikes but released a statement advising customers to “implement disaster recovery plans, recover from remote backups stored in other regions, and update applications” to ensure that their data remains unaffected by the conflict.

The threat of multiple data centers being attacked simultaneously during wartime is compelling corporations to reconsider their strategies.

Securing data centers previously meant protecting against cyberattacks and preventing unauthorized physical access. Defense against missiles or drones was not on the agenda.

If a single center is taken offline, well-prepared operators can shift workloads to other facilities with limited downtime, though this is not always guaranteed.

Another concern is that the conflict will drive up insurance premiums or security costs for facilities, at least within the Gulf region.

Furthermore, the conflict threatens the ambitions of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to become regional hubs for cloud and artificial intelligence services.

“You cannot hide data centers,” says Noah Sylvia, an analyst at the British think tank RUSI. “But you can install air defense systems on them.”