Author：Wall Street CN
On April 3, several foreign media outlets, including the Financial Times, cited sources familiar with the matter as saying that Amazon's data center in Bahrain had been attacked by missiles.
The day before the attack, entities and related assets of Silicon Valley giants operating in the Middle East, including 18 U.S. companies such as Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Meta, were warned of potential risks.
In early March, two other Amazon data centers in Bahrain and the UAE were also attacked.
The fact that hyperscale data centers have been attacked in war and conflict means that they have become highly "tempting" strategic targets—according to publicly available data, the total investment in a 1GW data center exceeds $50 billion.
It is important to note that the destruction of data centers is not just a matter of physical damage or the loss of hundreds of billions of dollars in assets. As critical infrastructure, attacks on them can also impact the development of the internet and artificial intelligence in a country or region.
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The most direct result of a data center being bombed is the disruption of related services.
In early March, Amazon's UAE AWS data center Availability Zone was attacked for the first time, with two of its three data centers simultaneously going offline, causing widespread disruption to local internet services.
Online services at Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank and Emirates National Bank were disrupted, payment platform Hubpay was unavailable, and food delivery app Careem was paralyzed. Millions of users who rely on these digital services found their wallets, ride-hailing apps, and business operations rendered unusable by the data center shutdowns.
Although AWS has always emphasized that its data centers have redundant designs—if one data center has a problem, the backup can automatically take over—this time, with multiple facilities being attacked simultaneously, the redundancy mechanism was basically ineffective.
It's worth noting that physical damage includes structural collapse, power outages, fires, and secondary water damage caused by the activation of fire suppression systems. Amazon explains on its Service Health page that the reconstruction and recovery process for data centers can be "very lengthy," with some services taking weeks to be restored.
For operators and owners of data center assets, physical damage is directly linked to economic losses.
The estimated cost of building a traditional data center is between $7 million and $12 million per MW. However, for an AI data center equipped with the latest Blackwell and Rubin chips and sophisticated power and cooling equipment, the cost per GW, as mentioned above, can reach $50 billion.
Data released in February by ConstructConnect, a US-based construction analytics firm, showed that data centers that break ground in 2025 will cost an average of $633 million.
Including the recently attacked Bahrain data center, the direct physical losses, equipment replacements, and revenue reductions at AWS's four facilities are conservatively estimated to be in the billions of dollars.
In addition, Amazon stated in an email to affected users that it would waive their usage fees for March, a move that could potentially dilute the company's profits in the short term.
Critical infrastructure within range
Compared to the capital expenditures of tech giants, the losses from a single data center attack are "negligible".
Public data shows thatAmazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft plan to spend a total of $630 billion by 2026.This represents a 62% increase from $388 billion in 2025, with Amazon alone allocating $200 billion. Of this...Approximately 75% of the total expenditure (about $450 billion) will be directly used for AI infrastructure..
A large portion of these funds were originally intended for the Middle East.
From 2021 to 2024, the Middle East has been a popular region for cloud vendors to expand.By early 2025, Saudi Arabia alone had secured over $21 billion in data center investment commitments..
Among these initiatives, Microsoft plans to invest $15.2 billion in the UAE between 2023 and 2029, of which $7.3 billion has already been spent on cooperation with G42 and infrastructure; Google, in conjunction with the Saudi Public Investment Fund, has pledged $10 billion to build a global AI center; Amazon also plans to invest an additional $5.3 billion in Saudi Arabia to build a new region including an "AI Zone"; and Oracle has also invested $1.5 billion to expand Saudi Arabia's cloud footprint and has formed a deep partnership with Nvidia to support sovereign AI projects.
The US tech giants' infrastructure investments in the Middle East are partly to align with local AI development plans and partly to curry favor with Middle Eastern capital, such as Gulf sovereign wealth funds.
Trump is also actively promoting the expansion of US data centers in the Middle East.
In May 2025, Trump led a delegation of tech giants, including Amazon CEO Andy García and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, to the Middle East in an attempt to secure over $2 trillion in data center investment commitments through a vision of “turning chaos into business.”
A model of the UAE's largest data center under construction; this project is the Middle Eastern version of the "Stargate Project".
The most eye-catching of these is the "Stargate" mega-AI data center project in Abu Dhabi. This project aims to utilize the Middle East's cheap energy and land to build the largest AI infrastructure outside the United States.
When data centers are given such high strategic value, they inevitably become targets of attack.
Ioannis Kalpouzos, a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, believes thatWhether a data center should be a target depends on the facts at the time of the incident, not its past use.
Karpzos explained, "If the facility is currently used to train large language models of strategic value, such as by fine-tuning specific features, then this could make it a potential target."
This "double-use" attribute transforms data centers from quiet power consumers into strategic "bottlenecks." This also means that future data centers may require more than just security guards and fences; they will need specialized protection systems and unmanned equipment countermeasures.
As Professor Vili Lehdonvirta of Aalto University stated, whenAs national powers increasingly incorporate commercial cloud and AI into their strategic operations, adversaries will perceive them as critical infrastructure.This makes data centers legally "transparent" and vulnerable; once deemed to have effectively enhanced an adversary's strategic capabilities, the entire physical entity could be considered a legitimate target under international law.
The Middle East's computing power faces uncertainty
Will the price of computing power rise after the attack on Amazon's data centers? The short-term impact is limited.
Knight Frank's "Global Data Center Research Report 2024-2025" previously pointed out that although the Middle East (especially the Gulf countries) has strong capital and energy advantages, it currently accounts for only about 1% of the global market share of operational third-party data center capacity.
in other words,The damage at this stage is not enough to fundamentally impact the global computing power supply..
Meanwhile, on Amazon's Service Health page, the company encourages users to migrate some of their workload to servers in Europe, North America, and the Asia Pacific region to alleviate the pressure caused by regional shutdowns to some extent.
However, in the medium to long term, computing power prices do face upward pressure, mainly from three channels.
The cost of physical defense is at the top of the list, which will not be discussed in detail here.
The second is multi-regional backup. In the context of war and conflict, redundancy within a single geographical area is no longer sufficient to cope with risks. If enterprises are forced to adopt disaster recovery solutions that span regions or even continents, the cost of using cloud services will increase significantly.
The third is energy and insurance costs. Energy accounts for approximately 60% of data center operating costs. Conflicts in the Middle East will drive up oil and natural gas prices, and fluctuations in liquefied natural gas prices will be directly reflected in electricity bills. At the same time, insurance rates for data centers in high-risk areas may also increase.
Alok Mehta, director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, said: "This attack has changed the way companies think about security. To maintain business continuity, businesses are forced to adopt more expensive backup solutions. This investment in 'digital resilience' is essentially a hidden price increase for computing power."
It is worth noting that Knight Frank also predicted in the report thatBy 2030, the data center capacity in the Middle East is projected to triple, reaching 3.3GW or even higher. The higher this capacity, the greater the potential losses from attacks..
Despite market institutions' optimistic outlook on future growth, the risk of war will also change the computing models of data center investors, and future incremental investments will face more rigorous cost-benefit assessments.
Patrick J. Murphy, executive director of the geopolitics department at Hilco Global, and others believe that...The focus of the next wave of computing power construction may shift to regions where the security situation is more predictable.
In conclusion
From the UAE to Bahrain, data centers serving as civilian facilities have been attacked multiple times within a month, a situation linked to their critical infrastructure nature.
Data centers host almost everything from personal everyday applications to business systems. When these facilities are attacked, the economy, daily life, and everything that runs on them will be directly affected, as will the related industries, groups, and services.
To some extent, the complex geopolitical environment has also taught technology companies a lesson—while investing hundreds of billions of dollars to expand computing infrastructure, they must also reassess the physical security costs behind it, the value of which may soon exceed that of the chips themselves.
On this topic, I thought of Musk's previously promoted space data center and Microsoft's underwater data center. Without considering feasibility and construction period, is this unconventional construction approach the best solution to security concerns?
The answer may also be no.
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