Amazon data centers in the Gulf are facing risks amid rising Iran tensions, which highlights vulnerabilities in global cloud infrastructure and concerns about cybersecurity, regional stability, and the resilience of critical digital services.
The attack on Amazon comes just a day after Iran’s Revolutionary Guards threatened that American companies operating within the Middle East could be targeted by strikes.
According to the report by The Conversation, data centres are becoming key targets due to the increasing reliance of the US military on advanced artificial intelligence capabilities for decision support. Amazon's cloud business operations in Bahrain have sustained damage following an Iranian strike. According to a Financial Times report, several Amazon Web Services facilities have been hit during the recent attacks linked to Iran.
The computing infrastructure that powers these models usually resides in secure AWS cloud servers that are said to host secret government data and software tools.
Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has previously claimed that the strikes were aimed at data centres supporting ‘the enemy's’ military and intelligence activities. An Iranian news agency has also earlier explicitly labeled major tech company data centres in the region as "enemy technology infrastructure".
The strikes could be symbolic and aimed at rattling the global economy by causing disruptions to local banking systems and threatening major US technological investment in the Gulf region.
Just a week earlier, Amazon said that its Amazon Web Services in Bahrain had been ‘disrupted’ owing to the conflict in the Middle East. This marked the second time that the company's operations had been affected due to the war. An Amazon spokesperson told Reuters that the disruption was due to ‘drone activity’ in the area.
In the early phase of the war, Iran had hit two Amazon Web Services data centres in the United Arab Emirates and a third commercial facility in Bahrain.
Simply put, commercial data centers harbor the cloud. When anyone is watching Netflix, it is likely that an AWS data center is handling the streaming. When AWS data centers go down, outages affect all sorts of entertainment, news and government functions.
When Iran attacked the UAE’s data centers, it caused widespread disruption to the local banking system.
The initial list of major companies that Iran was planning to target did not include Amazon. It instead included names like Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, HP, Tesla, Nvidia, Oracle, Boeing, IBM, and Cisco.
Researchers at Just Security noted on March 12, 2026, that the United States requires cloud-computing service providers to store government and military data within the U.S. or on Department of Defense bases: “Moving such data to Amazon data centers in the Gulf region would require special authorization; we are unaware if that has been granted.”
With AI as a driver of economic growth, data centers are key forms of infrastructure. They support AI to perform tasks, as well as much of the underlying internet that governments and industry depend on.
Commercial data centers support most of the technology that runs the modern world, including AI systems. Given that AWS provides and operates many of the commercial data centers where the cloud is stored, it is likely that its data centers will continue to be targeted in conflicts.