With the spread of artificial intelligence (AI), the internet and cloud technology, data centres have become critical infrastructure of the modern world. Much of banking, hospitals, telecoms, power supply and government services depend on them. And as AI is used more in military operations, data centres are now an important part of war too, and are becoming targets of military attack in conflicts around the world.
When the United States and Israel attacked Iran earlier this year, Tehran retaliated by striking energy infrastructure in the Gulf. That caused great turmoil in world energy markets, which is still being felt. But another side of Iran’s attacks drew less attention at the time: strikes on data centres.
Since then, Russia and Ukraine have also struck each other’s data centres. Experts say these attacks point to a new arena of war, in which the facilities that form the technological base of modern economies and key industries are becoming military targets.
Why are data centres so important?
The rapid spread of AI has sharply raised demand for computing power, data storage and cloud services. To meet it, huge numbers of data centres are being built in the United States and around the world, and technology companies are investing hundreds of billions of dollars a year in AI infrastructure.
A data centre is a specialised facility housing servers and other computer equipment to store and process vast amounts of data. Many internet services, the running of AI models and much of organisations’ digital work depend on them.
Kirk Cameron, founding director of the Institute for Advanced Computing at Virginia Tech in the United States, told Time that data centres are now vital to modern digital infrastructure. If an important data centre were destroyed, he said, the economy could be thrown into disarray, and disruption to GPS could cause problems for public and private transport. Health care, emergency services, government work and the running of power grids could also be harmed. In other words, the effects of an attack on a data centre are not confined to information technology; they can spread to a country’s economy, communications and many areas of public life.
The role of data centres in war
As the use of AI in modern warfare has grown, so has the military importance of data centres. Ukraine uses AI on the battlefield for tasks including drone targeting, battle planning and analysing Russian missile attacks.
The US technology company Palantir works closely with Ukraine’s armed forces, and uses the chance to test and develop technology on the battlefield in its work on AI-driven weapons systems. The US military also uses Palantir’s Maven system to identify targets.
According to Cameron, data centres give a strategic advantage in war. Destroying their capacity can seriously disrupt an enemy’s military operations. Such attacks can also become part of economic warfare, with long-term effects on a country’s competitiveness.
Where have the attacks happened?
Iran’s strikes in the Gulf. The first major attack on data centres came in March this year, when Iran struck two Amazon facilities in the United Arab Emirates. Another Amazon facility in Bahrain was damaged by a nearby drone strike.
The two UAE facilities have been largely out of action since. On 15 September, Amazon said it had still not been able to restore access to data and other resources stored in the data centres in those two regions.
This showed that the damage from an attack on a data centre can be long-lasting. When a facility is damaged, repairing the servers or the building is not enough to bring all services back quickly; restoring data and digital services can also be a major challenge.
Russia’s strikes in Ukraine. In late September, Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centres disrupted television broadcasts and internet services. Russia’s defence ministry said the data centres were targeted because they were used to process and share intelligence for Ukraine’s armed forces.
This suggests Russia sees these facilities not only as civilian technology infrastructure but as systems supporting Ukraine’s military operations.
Ukraine’s strikes in Russia. From 8 October, Ukraine began striking back at Russian data centres, with drone attacks on three data centres of the Russian technology company Yandex, often described as Russia’s Google.
According to Meduza, the first facility hit, in the Russian town of Sasovo, housed two of the three supercomputers Yandex uses to build its AI models.
The disruption there also hit several organisations that rely on Yandex’s cloud services, including Russian Railways, MegaFon, T-Bank and some news outlets.
After the first attack, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky defended the retaliation, saying Ukraine always answers in kind: Russia keeps attacking Ukraine’s data centres, so Ukraine struck back.
Technology companies change their plans
The string of attacks on data centres is forcing technology companies to rethink where and how such facilities are built.
After Iran’s attacks, the UAE is reconsidering plans for a 5-gigawatt AI data centre project. The original plan was for a vast complex covering about 10 square miles in Abu Dhabi, with US technology companies such as Oracle, Nvidia and Cisco as partners.
Officials involved said the new plan may spread data centres across different parts of the UAE, reducing the risk that an attack on one site would damage the whole project.
Is an attack on a data centre an attack on the United States?
Emily Harding, director of the Intelligence, National Security and Technology Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in the United States, believes data centres have become a new front line of war, and states may need to rethink their security strategies.
She asks: if Russia attacked a Microsoft data centre in Ukraine, would that count as an attack on Ukraine? Or on Microsoft, or on an American company, with consequences for the United States itself?
In Harding’s view, the United States has so far generally followed a policy that an attack on a private US company is not by itself treated as a direct attack on the United States. But the government may have to decide whether it needs a new policy to deter adversaries in order to protect data, as well as people’s lives and health.
The question matters because data centres are at once private company assets, civilian digital infrastructure and, in some cases, systems supporting military operations. Working out the legal and strategic consequences of attacking them is becoming ever more complicated.
Is the risk growing in the United States too?
The threat of attacks on data centres inside the United States may be lower than in the Gulf, Russia or Ukraine. But with demand for AI rising fast, US technology companies will also have to give security more weight when they build.
Harding said data centre owners realise these facilities are hard to protect fully, which is also raising questions about the conventional business model of cloud technology.
In her view, technology companies may have to make big changes. In future, customers might even choose one company over another because it is better at keeping the location and security of its data centres secret.
As technology companies race to build data centres to meet demand for AI, security has become an added challenge, because an attack on a data centre does not harm only the company concerned; it can affect a country’s communications, economy, government services and military capability.
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