Data centers become military targets in Iran war
This report is from this week’s The Tech Download newsletter. Like what you see? You can subscribe here.
Banking, payments, enterprise and consumer services in the UAE experienced outages earlier this week as AWS (Amazon Web Services) data centers in the country were hit by Iranian drone strikes on Sunday.
Many of the apps have since come back online after companies scrambled to migrate servers, but the downtime of services that many use daily highlights how digital infrastructure has become a strategic target.
After the U.S. and Israel launched joint strikes on Iran last weekend, Tehran’s wave of retaliatory attacks across the Middle East targeted military bases, oil and gas production facilities and data centers.
There are over 200 of these across the Middle East, according to some estimates, and cheap energy and land have drawn U.S. hyperscalers to pour resources into building out capacity in the region in recent years.
“Iran and proxies have targeted oil fields in the past, but their attacks this week on UAE data centers shows they are now considered critical infrastructure,” Patrick J. Murphy, executive director of the geopolitical unit at advisory firm Hilco Global, told me.
Guests look at a model of the largest data center in the UAE under construction in Abu Dhabi as the Stargate initiative, a joint venture between G42, Microsoft, and OpenAI, during the Abu Dhabi International Petroleum Exhibition & Conference (ADIPEC) in Abu Dhabi on November 3, 2025. (Photo by Giuseppe CACACE / AFP) (Photo by GIUSEPPE CACACE/AFP via Getty Images)
Giuseppe Cacace | Afp | Getty Images
Critical infrastructure
On Monday, AWS said that two of its facilities in the UAE had been directly hit by drones, with one in Bahrain also damaged by a nearby strike.
The latter was targeted by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps for the company’s support of the U.S. military, Iranian state media said on Wednesday.
Companies using AWS servers in the UAE were advised to migrate to alternative regions as they raced to limit disruption. AWS was still reporting services in the country as “disrupted” on Friday morning.
Governments have been increasingly acknowledging the strategic importance of data centers in recent years. The U.S. recognizes them as part of its 16 critical infrastructure sectors; the U.K. designated them as critical national infrastructure in 2024; and the EU also gives them special status. Many other nations across Europe and further afield also classify data centers as critical.
But the rise of drone warfare in recent years has brought new scrutiny to the security of the infrastructure that powers digital life across the globe.
Iran targeting data centers in the Middle East could see more governments “bring them into national security planning frameworks alongside energy facilities, telecommunications networks, water treatment plants and transportation hubs,” said Hilco Global’s Murphy.