Iran bombed Amazon Web Services data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain earlier this month, turning a theoretical national security concern into a concrete one. Janet Egan, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, described data centers to The Atlantic as "large, juicy targets" - facilities covering up to 1 million square feet that are impossible to conceal, "Hvylya" reports, citing The Atlantic.
American hyperscalers had been planning to build far more data centers in the region. The Trump administration and the AI industry had actively courted Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Oman for funding and hosting. Those plans now face a two-way strain: the physical security of the facilities is more precarious, and the conflict is damaging the fiscal position of the Gulf states that were supposed to finance further expansion.
Chip Usher, the senior director for intelligence at the Special Competitive Studies Project, raised an even more immediate concern about domestic facilities. "What's to prevent Iran or a proxy group, or another hostile actor, from tomorrow launching an armed drone against a data center in Northern Virginia?" he told The Atlantic. "It could happen. Our defenses are not adequate."
State-sponsored cyberattacks - the kind Iran is known for - could also knock data centers offline without a single missile. Building physical defenses such as reinforced concrete and drone interception systems adds cost and time to facilities that are already expensive and slow to construct. Every additional layer of hardening pushes the economics of data centers further into the red.
The strikes undercut a central assumption of the AI build-out: that infrastructure could be placed wherever energy and investment were cheapest, regardless of geopolitical conditions. Sam Winter-Levy of the Carnegie Endowment noted that the Trump administration "staked a lot on the Gulf as their close AI partner, and now the war that they've launched poses a huge threat to the viability of the Gulf as that AI partner."
Also read: how Asia's US allies discovered a critical weakness the Iran war laid bare.