The Iran war has opened a new and deeply unsettling front: the deliberate targeting of data centres. When Iranian drone strikes hit Amazon Web Services facilities in the United Arab Emirates on March 1, followed by damage to an AWS site in Bahrain, the attacks sent shockwaves far beyond the battlefield. Banks went offline. Payment platforms stalled. Everyday apps that millions of people depend on simply stopped working. For the first time in history, a hyperscale cloud provider had been physically targeted in an armed conflict.
Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed the strikes were aimed at infrastructure supporting American military and intelligence operations. The US military has been using AI models hosted on AWS for intelligence analysis and operational support, making these facilities a deliberate and calculated target rather than collateral damage. The message was pointed: take out the digital backbone, and you degrade the enemy's strategic advantage.
The attacks have sent shockwaves through the technology industry. The Gulf region had been positioned as the next great frontier for AI infrastructure, with billions of dollars pouring in from Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Nvidia, and OpenAI. The UAE alone was projected to see its data centre market grow from $3.29 billion in 2026 to $7.7 billion by 2031. That trajectory now looks uncertain. Several infrastructure companies are already weighing whether to slow expansion in the region, while analysts warn that a prolonged conflict could fundamentally reshape where hyperscalers choose to build.
The broader implications run deeper still. Seventeen submarine cables threading through the Red Sea carry the majority of data traffic between Europe, Asia, and Africa. With Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz and Houthi threats resurging in the Red Sea, two of the world's most critical digital arteries are now simultaneously in active conflict zones. Experts say the world has never seen anything like it. And it almost certainly will not be the last time a data centre becomes a target.