Article by Anna Desmarais: “Experts are sounding the alarm over fresh threats to Middle Eastern data centres, warning that this month’s inaugural reported strikes signal a dangerous new trend.
Amazon said two of its data centres in the United Arab Emirates were hit by drone strikes on March 1 and a third centre in Bahrain was damaged by debris from a nearby strike.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) claimed responsibility for the attacks, telling state media that the attacks were aimed at identifying the role of these centres in supporting the enemy’s military and intelligence activities.
Analysts say these may be some of the first known physical attacks on data centres, the buildings hold all the infrastructure to power everything from banking apps to cloud services, and artificial intelligence (AI) platforms.
Amazon declined to comment further on the attacks in the Middle East, referring Euronews Next to a health dashboard. As of March 11, several Amazon services are still unavailable or disrupted for customers in the UAE and Bahrain.
Why are data centres a target?
“It’s very likely that data centres will be targeted in the future,” said Vincent Boulanin, director of the governance of AI programme at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
Boulanin said he was not surprised that Iran had mounted attacks against data centres in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Data centres power AI by providing the computer power, storage and high-speed internet needed to train the models.
“Data centres are a critical building block of AI capabilities at the national level,” Boulanin said. “From that perspective, data centres can be considered a very critical infrastructure.”..(More)”.
