Why Have Data Centers Become Military Targets?

Attacks on data centers in the Persian Gulf, Russia and Ukraine have opened a new front in the war, threatening artificial intelligence and the services people rely on most.

When the United States and Israel launched attacks against Iran earlier this year, Tehran responded by attacking energy infrastructure across the Persian Gulf. The result was a severe shock to global energy markets that continues to this day. At the time, its attacks on another type of infrastructure: data centers, were less publicized.

Since then, similar attacks have occurred in Russia and Ukraine, where both sides have been attacking data centers.

Experts say the attacks represent a new front in the war, where facilities that power the technology behind many vital industries have become military targets.

The boom in artificial intelligence has led to increased demand for computing power, data storage and cloud services, making the data centers that provide them an important part of modern infrastructure. A flurry of data center construction is already underway in the United States, and tech companies are investing hundreds of billions of dollars a year to meet the demand for AI. Telecom companies, banks, hospitals and energy suppliers all rely on them.

Kirk Cameron, director of the Institute for Advanced Computing at Virginia Tech, told TIME: "Data centers are now at the critical juncture of modern digital infrastructure. The loss of key data centers can collapse economies, disrupt public and private transportation with the loss of GPS, and affect essential government services for health, emergency dispatch, and power grids.

The military's use of artificial intelligence for targeting and information processing has made data centers vital to fighting a war. Ukraine uses artificial intelligence for a range of battlefield functions such as drone targeting, battle planning and missile analysis of Russian missile strikes. US technology companies such as Palantir are now working closely with the Ukrainian military to develop new AI-powered weapons, using the ability to immediately test their technology on the battlefield. The US military also uses Palantir's Maven system to help identify targets for attacks.

"Data centers are competitive advantages in war," says Cameron. Destroying capabilities means potentially crippling combat operations for the enemy. This is also a form of economic warfare and can lead to long-term competitive challenges for the target."

The first wave of attacks on data centers was carried out by Iran in March of this year, when Iran attacked two Amazon facilities in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and another in Bahrain was damaged by a nearby drone strike.

These facilities have been mostly offline since then. Amazon said on September 15 that it was "unable to restore access to resources and data hosted in these two regions."

Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centers in late September disrupted television broadcasts and Internet access. The Russian Defense Ministry announced that it had attacked data centers because they processed and transmitted intelligence data of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

Ukraine's response began on Oct. 8 and has since continued with drone attacks on three data centers owned by tech giant Yandex, often called Russia's version of Google. Medusa reported that the first site in Sassoon houses two of the three supercomputers Yandex uses to develop its AI models, and the outage disrupted several companies that rely on Yandex cloud services, including Russian Railways, Megafon, TBank and several media outlets.

After the first attack, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky defended the retaliation: "We always respond the same way. You all know that they hit and hit our data centers; we responded to them."

A spate of attacks in the past year has caused tech companies to rethink how and where they build data centers.

Emily Harding, director of the Information, National Security, and Technology Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, believes that data centers have become the new front line in the war and new strategies may be needed.

"If you're Russia and you attack a Microsoft data center, is that an attack on Ukraine? Is that an attack on Microsoft? Is that an attack on an American company and therefore on the United States?" he asks.

The U.S. has largely followed a policy that attacks on U.S. companies are not attacks on the U.S., but Harding said the administration may need to decide on a new approach that "creates deterrence not only to protect life and health, but also data."

And while the threat to data centers in the United States may be relatively low compared to the Persian Gulf and Ukraine or Russia, tech companies also need to think more about the security of their facilities during construction as they try to keep up with massive demand.

"The knock-on effect is that companies that own data centers are realizing they can't protect them, and that kind of calls into question the cloud model in general," Harding says. "They're going to have to make some big adjustments. You can see a time in the future where Amazon starts losing business to Microsoft because Microsoft does a better job of hiding their data centers."