‘It means missile defence on datacentres’: drone strikes raise doubts over Gulf as AI superpower

Iran’s targeting of commercial datacentres in the UAE and Bahrain signals a new frontier in asymmetric warfare It is believed to be a first: the deliberate targeting of a commercial datacentre by the armed forces of a country at war. At 4.30am on Sunday morning, what is thought to have been an Iranian Shahed 136 drone struck an Amazon Web Services datacentre in the United Arab Emirates, setting off a devastating fire and forcing a shutdown of the power supply. Further damage was inflicted as attempts were made to suppress the flames with water. Soon after, a second data centre owned by the US tech company was hit. Then a third was said to be in trouble, this time in Bahrain, after an Iranian drone turned to fireball on striking land nearby. Iranian state TV has claimed that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps launched the attack “to identify the role of these centres in supporting the enemy’s military and intelligence activities”. The network built by Jeff Bezos’s company could withstand one of its regional centres being taken out of action but not a second. The coordinated strike had an immediate impact. Millions of people in Dubai and Abu Dhabi woke up on Monday