Yet recent strikes that damaged facilities operated by Amazon Web Services (AWS) in then Gulf have raised a new question for the digital infrastructure industry: are hyperscale data centres emerging as strategic targets in modern warfare?
Over the weekend, several AWS facilities in the Middle East were affected by drone strikes linked to the escalating conflict between Iran, the United States, and Israel.
According to the company’s service updates, a facility in Bahrain was damaged by a nearby drone strike, while two data centres in the United Arab Emirates were directly struck. The incidents caused structural damage, power disruptions and some water damage after firefighters responded to small fires.
The company said some applications experienced “elevated error rates and degraded availability” as a result of the incidents. AWS advised customers to back up their data, consider migrating workloads to other regions and redirect traffic away from Bahrain and the UAE while recovery efforts continue.
In itself, physical damage to infrastructure during a regional conflict is not unprecedented. What has drawn attention in this case is the claim from Iranian state media that the Bahrain facility was targeted because of its alleged links to US military operations.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) reportedly launched the strike to investigate what it described as the role of the centres in supporting “military and intelligence activities”, according to statements carried by Fars News Agency.
AWS has declined to comment on the claim, and it has not been independently verified. Nonetheless, the suggestion that a hyperscale data centre could be targeted because of the workloads it hosts highlights how cloud platforms are now sitting at the intersection of civilian, commercial and national security systems.
Over the past decade, hyperscale providers including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud have become critical platforms for governments and public sector organisations. Cloud environments host everything from administrative systems to data analytics and AI tools used across defence, intelligence and emergency services.
For operators and infrastructure investors, that raises the possibility that large data centre campuses could increasingly be viewed as dual-use infrastructure: civilian assets that nonetheless support state functions.
The incidents in the Gulf also underline the physical reality behind the “cloud”. Hyperscale platforms depend on large, highly visible campuses housing multiple data halls, power infrastructure and connectivity links. Many are located near major transport corridors, energy hubs or subsea cable landing points in order to optimise connectivity and power access.
Those characteristics make them efficient for network design, but they can also place facilities close to other forms of critical infrastructure that may become targets during conflict.
The disruption to AWS services following the strikes also highlights the operational risks. While hyperscale platforms are designed with regional redundancy, outages affecting a specific region can still create service degradation, latency issues or the need for customers to rapidly shift workloads to alternative locations.
For the data centre industry, this will likely prompt renewed discussion about geopolitical risk and physical security planning. Historically, resilience strategies have focused primarily on technical redundancy, power reliability and natural disasters such as earthquakes or flooding. Armed conflict has rarely featured prominently in site selection models for commercial cloud infrastructure.
That may begin to change as hyperscale facilities become ever more central to economic and government operations. As cloud platforms continue to host sensitive workloads for both public and private sector organisations, their strategic importance will inevitably grow.
Whether the recent incidents represent deliberate targeting or collateral damage from broader strikes remains unclear. But for the first time, the prospect that hyperscale data centres could be drawn directly into geopolitical conflict is no longer just theoretical.
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