Iranian Data Strikes Shake Global Digital Infrastructure

23 Mar 2026 01:49 PM

By targeting data centres in the Gulf, Iran has created global uncertainty about the resilience, sovereignty and security of digital infrastructures.

Before sunrise on Sunday 1 March, Iranian Shahed drones directly struck two Amazon Web Services data centres in the United Arab Emirates. That same morning, debris from a nearby strike damaged a third AWS data centre in Bahrain. Impacts to the facilities created significant disruption to financial, enterprise and consumer digital services in the UAE and the wider region. In the wake of the strikes, calls to treat data centres as strategic assets and critical infrastructure have grown louder.

Data centres and the digital services operating on them are critical to the economy and society, but also to defence. As we have written previously, Ukraine’s Delta battlefield management system is hosted on the public cloud, the US’s Maven Smart System (created by Palantir) is hosted by AWS, and Israel has leveraged cloud-hosted AI capabilities in its war on Gaza. Where data centres are dual-use – hosting both civilian and military workloads – targeting them to disrupt military capabilities can make strategic sense.

Nevertheless, this is the first time that kinetic capabilities have been used against public cloud infrastructure. And where Iran has stepped, others will likely follow. It is therefore necessary to better understand why Iran may have targeted these facilities and what are the possible strategic impacts.

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