Why Amazon data centers in the Gulf are facing Iranian military strikes? Report says…

Amazon's cloud business operations in Bahrain have sustained damage following an Iranian strike on Wednesday. According to a Financial Times report, several Amazon Web Services facilities have been hit during the recent attacks linked to Iran.

The report also cites a post by Bahrain's interior ministry, which states that the Civil Defence forces were “extinguishing a fire in a facility of a company as a result of the Iranian aggression”. The ministry said that relevant authorities are taking measures at the site but did not reveal any further details.

Notably, the attack on Amazon comes just a day after Iran’s Revolutionary Guards threatened that American companies operating within the Middle East could be targeted by strikes.

However, the initial list of major companies that Iran was planning to target did not include Amazon. It instead included names like Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, HP, Tesla, Nvidia, Oracle, Boeing, IBM, and Cisco.

Just a week earlier, Amazon had said that its Amazon Web Services in Bahrain had been ‘disrupted’ owing to the conflict in the Middle East. This marked the second time that the company's operations had been affected due to the war. An Amazon spokesperson told Reuters that the disruption was due to ‘drone activity’ in the area.

In the early phase of the war, Iran had hit two Amazon Web Services data centres in the United Arab Emirates and a third commercial facility in Bahrain.

Why are data centres becoming targets?

As per a report by The Conversation, data centres are becoming key targets due to the increasing reliance of the US military on advanced artificial intelligence capabilities for decision support.

Notably, previous reports have suggested that the US military used AI tools, especially Anthropic's Claude, for analysis and operational support during critical missions during the Trump regime, including the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and military strikes against Iran.

The computing infrastructure that powers these models usually resides in secure AWS cloud servers that are said to host secret government data and software tools.

Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has previously claimed that the strikes were aimed at data centres supporting ‘the enemy's’ military and intelligence activities. An Iranian news agency has also earlier explicitly labelled major tech company data centres in the region as "enemy technology infrastructure".

The report also noted that the US requires cloud-computing providers to store government and military data within the US or on Department of Defense bases, meaning it was not clear if the targeted Gulf facilities were actually hosting military operations.

However, the strikes could be symbolic and aimed at rattling the global economy by causing disruptions to local banking systems and threatening major US technological investment in the Gulf region.