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The US-Israel war on Iran shows that datacenters are a new frontier in warfare
Iran is bombing datacenters in the Persian Gulf to blow up symbols of the Gulf states’ technological alliance with the United States. Added bonus: they will be extremely costly to rebuild, being among the most expensive buildings in history. My colleague Daniel Boffey reports:
It is believed to be a first: the deliberate targeting of a commercial datacenter by the armed forces of a country at war.
At 4.30am on Sunday morning, an Iranian Shahed 136 drone struck an Amazon Web Services datacenter 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 datacenter owned by the US tech company was hit. Then a third was said to be in trouble, this time in Bahrain, after an Iranian suicide 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 centers in supporting the enemy’s military and intelligence activities”.
The coordinated strike had an immediate impact. Millions of people in Dubai and Abu Dhabi woke up on Monday unable to pay for a taxi, order a food delivery or check their bank balance on their mobile apps.
Whether there was a military impact is unclear – but the strikes swiftly brought the war directly into the lives of 11 million people in the UAE, nine out of 10 of whom are foreign nationals. Amazon has advised its clients to secure their data away from the region.
Read more: ‘It means missile defence on datacentres’: drone strikes raise doubts over Gulf as AI superpower
The Guardian view on AI and war
Anthropic’s feud with the US military over AI safeguards coincides with AI’s unprecedented use in the Iran crisis, signalling profound changes in the way the world wages war. The Guardian editorial board writes:
The paradigm shift has already begun. Anthropic’s Claude has reportedly been vital to the massive and intensifying offensive which has already killed an estimated thousand-plus civilians in Iran. This is an era of bombing “quicker than the speed of thought”, experts told the Guardian this week, with AI identifying and prioritising targets, recommending weaponry and evaluating legal grounds for a strike.
Even without considering questions of AI inaccuracy and biases – the impacts are obvious to its users. In 2024, one Israeli intelligence source observed of its use in the war on Gaza: “The targets never end. You have another 36,000 waiting.” Another said he spent 20 seconds assessing each target, stating: “I had zero added-value as a human, apart from being a stamp of…
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