Before dawn on March 1, 2026, Iranian Shahed drones struck two Amazon Web Services data centres in the United Arab Emirates. A third commercial data centre in Bahrain was hit, though it is less clear whether it was deliberately targeted. This is the first time a country has deliberately struck commercial data centres during wartime.
Iran’s state media said on March 31 it would target American companies including Microsoft, Google, Apple, Meta, Oracle, Intel, HP, IBM, Cisco, Dell, Palantir and Nvidia. The Financial Times reported an additional Iranian drone struck an Amazon data centre in Bahrain on April 1, and Iranian state media claimed forces attacked an Oracle data centre in Dubai on April 2. Iran has also been on the receiving end: a data centre in Tehran operated by state-run Bank Sepah was struck by a missile—apparently fired by US or Israeli forces—on March 11, according to The Jerusalem Post.
Data centres have long been targets for espionage and cyberattacks—Ukrainian hackers destroyed data in a Russian military-affiliated data centre in 2024—but the Gulf strikes were physical attacks. Drones damaged buildings and disrupted services.
Advances in artificial intelligence have raised the strategic value of data centres. The US military has increasingly used AI systems for decision support in operations including actions against Iran and Venezuela, often relying on commercial cloud services. When an operator uses a model like Anthropic’s Claude, the compute and storage that power that model are usually hosted in secure Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure that can store secret government data and tools.
Commercial data centres are where the cloud “lives.” They host streaming services, news, banking systems and government tools. When AWS data centres fail, outages ripple through entertainment, commerce and official functions. With AI a major economic driver, data centres are critical infrastructure: they power AI, the broader internet and services governments and industries rely on. Iran’s strikes in the UAE reportedly caused widespread disruption to local banking.
Given this importance, disrupting data centres can hinder a country’s military and society. Because AWS operates many commercial data centres, its facilities may remain attractive targets in future conflicts.
But it is not clear these particular Gulf data centres directly supported US military operations. The US requires cloud providers to keep government and military data within the United States or on Department of Defense bases; moving such data to AWS sites in the Gulf would require special authorization, and public reporting does not confirm that. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed the strikes were against data centres supporting “the enemy’s” military and intelligence activities, and Iranian media later characterised major tech company infrastructure in the region as “enemy technology infrastructure.”
Beyond any immediate military rationale, Iran may have aimed to punish the United Arab Emirates for ties with the United States, to rattle global markets, and to draw attention. The Gulf is a major recipient of US technological investment; striking AI infrastructure there can be symbolic, targeting the heart of US–Gulf cooperation and potentially jeopardising future regional AI investment.
These strikes do not necessarily signal a fundamental shift in the nature of warfare. Iran launched thousands of missiles and drones at the UAE and Bahrain, most intercepted; the handful that struck data centres were a small fraction of the weapons that reached civilian targets such as airports and hotels. Commercial data centres are relatively large, fragile, and typically lack dedicated air defences, making them vulnerable targets of opportunity—hit because they could be hit.
Nevertheless, as AI and cloud-based resources grow more central to national security, economies and daily life, commercial data centres are likely to be seen and treated as legitimate targets in future conflicts. In my experience as a PhD candidate at Georgia Tech studying how technology drives changes in international security, these attacks force nations to recognise that data centres are part of the warfighting landscape, even if they do not directly host military operations.
