Air defense for data centers: what attacks on Amazon's AI infrastructure in the Middle East will lead to

Commercial data centers (CDCs), on which companies are now spending billions of dollars and which have become scarce during the artificial intelligence revolution, have been the target of Iranian attacks. Three Amazon centers in the UAE and Bahrain were affected. Will this change AI investment in the Middle East?

Back in 1941, anticipating that a new destructive weapon would soon be created on the basis of atomic fission, the American science fiction writer Robert Heinlein wrote the story "The Worthless Solution". In it, he tried to understand how to control a weapon potentially capable of killing millions? With the world fragmented and divided into hostile blocs that do not trust each other? Such a challenge had never before been faced by mankind.

Heinlein, however, believed that it would not be a bomb, but some radioactive dust, but such a small thing does not change the essence of the matter. In the end, he came to a conclusion that he himself did not like, hence the title of the book. Control over superweapons should be taken (if necessary, by force) by some global supra-governmental committee, which manages the Peace Patrol Service. And all governments should be forbidden to have them, on pain of immediate destruction by the Patrol.

Superweapons were indeed invented - in August 1945, the United States used them for the first time, dropping two atomic bombs on Japan. As Heinlein had foreseen, then began the arms race and the Cold War. But no Committee was created, nor, fortunately, was there a global nuclear catastrophe.

What stopped the escalation in the real world? A concept that U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara developed in 1962 is believed to have done so. He called it the "flexible nuclear response." In essence, it was to stockpile and covertly deploy so many nuclear weapons that even in the event of a first strike by the USSR, the U.S. response would still be catastrophically destructive.

This policy became known as Mutual Assured Destruction, MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction. Interestingly, the term was coined by its fierce Hudson Institute critic, Donald Brennan, who argued that you can't base a policy on killing millions and the U.S. Defense Department should be thinking about how to protect Americans, not how to kill more Russians. "This is almost literally insane!" - he wrote (hence the name of the policy - mad, which translates to "insane" in English).

Nevertheless, MAD worked: the USSR acted similarly, stockpiling warheads, so no one ever launched a nuclear first strike.

Now a new race has begun in connection with the AI revolution - now the US, China and other countries are competing to create artificial superintelligence.

A famous phrase from the popular Fallout franchise implies that technology changes, but people don't. They continue to feud and will always find reasons to fight each other. The events of recent years and even days, alas, clearly confirm this.

Of course, it would be strange if governments didn't try to use the new AI technology for military purposes. The U.S. Department of Defense is actively investing in military AI tools, fearing that China and Russia are doing the same.

AI is already helping the military gather intelligence, select targets, plan bombing raids and assess battle damage, manage inventories of everything from ammunition to spare parts, and choose the best weapons for each mission, The Wall Street Journal lists.

The U.S. Army's 18th Airborne Corps, using software from Palantir Technologies as part of a series of exercises called "Scarlet Dragon," has repeated its own record for targeting, set in Iraq. Except that thanks to AI, the corps achieved this result using only 20 people, while more than 2,000 people worked in Iraq, the WSJ cites.

Anthropic's Claude AI is actively used in real-world combat operations. For example, in the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and in strikes against Iran in the ongoing war in the Middle East. Anthropic has a conflict with the Pentagon over this.

But this is just the beginning, experts believe that AI could potentially become as powerful a weapon as nuclear weapons. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Scale AI CEO Alexander Wang and Dan Hendricks, director of the Center for AI Security in 2025, even published an article in which they discuss in detail the politics of the superintelligence era.

They describe a strategy with an equally colorful name - MAIM ("mutilation"). This is Mutual Assured AI Malfunction. In their opinion, in order to avoid "aggressive attempts to achieve unilateral AI superiority" of the enemy, states will resort to cyberattacks, espionage, sabotage, and, in extreme cases, even to "kinetic strikes", i.e. bombardment of data centers where AI "lives". However, kinetic strikes are unlikely, the authors optimistically wrote.

And you didn't.

Almost exactly one year after the article was published, on March 1, 2026, Iranian Shahed 136 drones attacked two Amazon data centers in the UAE, causing destruction and fires, and the buildings had to be de-energized. Another drone exploded near the company's data center in Bahrain.

This is the first time the army of a belligerent country has deliberately attacked commercial data centers, The Guardian believes.

Last year's October failure on Amazon's servers showed how big a role data centers play in our lives. At that time, many businesses stopped working and millions of people lost access to familiar services around the world.

"Data centers have become the new infrastructure for the economy. If you think about how people would build infrastructure, it used to be railroads and steam locomotives. Now it's data centers and fiber optic networks," Business Insider quoted James Lewis, senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, as saying.

The strikes in the UAE demonstrated this once again. "On Monday, millions of residents in Dubai and Abu Dhabi woke up unable to pay for cabs, order food deliveries or check their bank account balance on mobile apps," The Guardian wrote.

According to Amazon, the cluster in Bahrain is "damaged" and the one in the UAE is still down.

A few days later, Iran's state-run Fars news agency confirmed that the strikes were not accidental. "This operation was carried out as part of revealing the role of such centers in supporting the enemy's military and intelligence activities," the agency wrote (ChatGPT translation).

This suggests that Iran is also aware of the military potential of AI, and is using this knowledge at least for propaganda - say, data centers are not civilian, but military infrastructure. Frankly, I highly doubt that the US Army or Israel would deploy their combat AI on Amazon's commercial servers in Arab countries.

According to Sean Gorman, CEO of Zephr.xyz, a technology contractor for the U.S. Air Force, strikes on data centers could have an indirect impact on defense operations, but that is likely to be luck rather than Iran's primary objective. It also consists of putting pressure on adversaries, through disruption of public safety and economic activity, The Guardian quoted him as saying.

The problem is that in recent years, the UAE and Saudi Arabia have made a serious bet on the development of AI technologies, and for this purpose they have started to actively build data centers. Bloomberg estimates that more than a third (70) of the 204 data centers in the Middle East are located in these two countries.

Saudi Arabia, for example, last year launched Humain, a new company to create a full AI ecosystem, from data centers to models.

The conflict threatens to derail Saudi Arabia and the UAE's ambitions to become regional centers for cloud and AI services.

"Data centers can't be hidden, but you can put air defense systems on them," Bloomberg quoted Noah Sylvia, an analyst at the British defense think tank RUSI, as saying.

While "securing the data center" used to mean physical security and cybersecurity, it may now be necessary to add air defense to the mix, at least in the Middle East, The Guardian agrees.

"Ma we may see big data center operators like AWS [Amazon Web Services] investing in air defenses in the future, similar to the way shipping companies arm themselves against pirates," Vili Lehdonvirta, a professor of technology policy at Aalto University in Finland, told the newspaper.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor