On March 1, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps drone-bombed three Amazon Web Services cloud computing facilities in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Apps and banking services were disrupted, leading Amazon to “strongly recommend that customers with workloads running in the Middle East take action now to migrate those workloads to alternate AWS Regions.” The incident marked the first time a cloud center was targeted for destruction in war, opening a new chapter in military history.
For the general public, the turn of events was a wake-up call that warfare has gone digital, and there will be no going back. Big Tech already knew this, and the attacks represent a different kind of wake-up call. U.S. tech giants have worked closely with the Pentagon to facilitate remote-control wars of aggression from the skies, only to find their facilities exposed to counterattacks by cheaper deployments applying the same logic: to wage war remotely without incurring human casualties.
On March 11, the IRGC announced it would attack 29 offices and data centers operated by IBM, Palantir, Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia, Google and Oracle throughout the Middle East, and on March 31, it threatened to attack 18 (primarily U.S. tech) firms on April 1. While they have yet to carry out the strikes, American tech corporations could sustain billions of dollars in damages if the war escalates.
The integration of Big Tech into U.S.-Israeli military ventures is nothing new. Palantir serviced the Pentagon in Iraq and Afghanistan, where it tracked and analyzed “patterns of life” for military strikes and helped the Pentagon profile populations with biometrics. A wide variety of American tech giants have also assisted Israeli aggression and apartheid in Palestine, including its genocidal campaign in Gaza.
Even before the 21st century, modern American tech giants like Microsoft, HP and IBM scored contracts with U.S. and Israeli forces. This is to be expected, as war requires all sides to incorporate as much advanced technology into their militaries as possible to defeat the other side. Recent advances in artificial intelligence , however, have made digital technologies more critical than ever on the battlefield. Just this year, AI was used in the operation to kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and to select targets in Iran. According to experts, Palantir’s AI -based Maven Smart System likely misidentified the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab as a military target. The attack, which occurred on Feb. 28, the first day of the U.S.-Israeli bombings, killed at least 168 people, over 100 of them children. American tech corporations could sustain billions of dollars in damages if the war escalates. All of this led Iran to describe data centers as legitimate military targets. On April 1, the IRGC reportedly stated , “Since the main element in designing and tracking assassination targets is American ICT [integrated control technology] and AI companies, in response to these terrorist operations, from now on the main institutions effective in terrorist operations will be our legitimate targets.” It urged employees and nearby residents to “distance themselves from their workplaces.” Iran may have been bluffing, as it has yet to expand its attacks beyond its initial strikes on AWS. But it’s also true that the role of data centers in the Iran war is a cloudier affair than described in Iran’s statement. First, it is not clear how local data centers are being used in the war. According to reports, it is possible that cloud-based military operations are sourced from data centers outside the Persian Gulf region, which would be sensible given that data centers are out in the open and exposed to physical attacks.
Second, tech giants have developed technologies designed to safeguard the U.S. military from reliance on centralized clouds — a point that has not received much attention, if any, in popular accounts. For instance, Microsoft has noted that data collection and analytics at the “edge” — a technical term for a digital device that produces and consumes the information itself (e.g., a smartphone or local server) — is key to the battlefield. Imagine a small server in a drone that collects data itself without piping it back to a data center. “With those same analytics,” Microsoft said in 2019, “that same intelligence can live in a small box with the computing power of the cloud, like, for instance, inside that drone, then we can obtain those same insights. And, yes, it’s a real thing. And it’s happening today. That’s a lot of power that can provide a lot of protection for you and me, but also for that crucial tactical plan.”
While it is clear data centers play a key role in U.S. military campaigns, it’s less clear how the U.S. and its allies integrate edge computing into them.
Third, it’s been reported that large “hyperscale” data centers may be used by commercial and militaries, but little is known how much of this mixed use occurs. Amazon has an “AWS Top Secret” cloud service that appears to be physically separated from commercial data centers. This, again, seems sensible: It would be a monumentally stupid move if Iran could undermine U.S. military operations by simply drone-bombing commercial data centers out in the open in nearby countries. Journalists have done a poor job interrogating this point.
Fourth, we cannot be certain how much Iran or other future adversaries will care about the military role of American tech facilities when picking targets in the Middle East. While Tehran has couched its data center attacks and threats in military terms, the centers are also expensive units critical to the economic interests of their owners and the countries hosting them. Destroying a data center or regional office can exact economic costs in the millions or billions, much like energy or water infrastructure.
From oil to AI
Iranian attacks on data centers come at a time when Persian Gulf states are diversifying their economies by shifting investments into AI (including the use of AI for oil exploration and production). Sometimes deemed “family-owned gas stations,” these oligarchic satellites aim to reduce their long-term reliance on oil by collaborating with American tech firms. In the United Arab Emirates, Microsoft invested $1.5 billion for a minority stake in AI and cloud company G42 (one of Iran’s tech targets). The two companies say they will invest $1 billion “to boost AI skills in the UAE and broader region,” with Microsoft Azure as a backbone AI service provider. Big Tech infrastructure will become prime military targets in 21st century warfare. For its part, Saudi Arabia, which declared 2026 the Year of Artificial Intelligence, has multibillion-dollar military and tech deals with the U.S., including plans to invest over $100 billion in AI via a collaboration named Project Transcendence and the construction of a national AI backbone called Humain. Last November, the White House said Saudi Arabia would commit a “nearly $1 trillion investment … into U.S. infrastructure, technology, and industry,” up from $600 billion pledged earlier in the year. Other partnerships and investments worth billions are spreading across the region.
Running in parallel, the U.S. is successfully pressuring its Middle Eastern allies to cut some ties with Chinese tech. “We cannot work with both sides,” G42 CEO Peng Xiao told the Financial Times in 2023. The report said, “G42 had never had ‘deep AI research relationships’ with Chinese partners ‘because, frankly speaking, they’re not leaders in this domain,’” according to Xiao. Last November, the U.S. authorized the sale of $1 billion in high-level AI chips to G42 and Humain to “promote continued American AI dominance and global technological leadership.”
In other words, the United States is aggressively transitioning its Middle Eastern allies from dependent oil barons to digital colonies beholden to the American tech empire. The strategy aims to tighten the grip of Washington over the region, commercially and militarily, even as Trump puts its Gulf allies in the line of fire through the bombardment of Iran.
In March, the Trump administration announced a Cyber Strategy for America, which states that American responses to “cyber threats” will extend beyond the “‘cyber’ realm,” ostensibly to physical attacks. Whether the U.S. succeeds in sustaining its status as a global hegemon, it’s safe to assume that its Big Tech infrastructure will become prime military targets in 21st century warfare.
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