On April 3rd, the Financial Times and other foreign media cited sources close to the matter, reporting that Amazon's data center in Bahrain was hit by a missile attack.
The day before the attack, entities and related assets operated by Silicon Valley giants in the Middle East, including 18 US companies such as Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Meta, were all alerted to the risks.
Just in early March, two other data centers of Amazon in Bahrain and the UAE were also attacked.
The attack on hyperscale data centers amidst conflict signifies that they have become highly &#34;attractive&#34; strategic targets—calculated from publicly available information, a 1GW data center represents a total investment exceeding 50 billion US dollars.
It is important to note that the destruction of a data center is not merely about physical damage or the loss of tens of billions of dollars in assets. As critical infrastructure, an attack can also affect the progress of internet and artificial intelligence development in a country or region.
<h2>Your Takeout Has Lost Connection</h2>
The most direct consequence of a data center being bombed is service interruption.
During the first attack in early March, two of the three &#34;Availability Zones&#34; in Amazon's AWS data centers in the UAE went offline simultaneously, causing a paralysis of many local internet services.
Online services of Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank and Emirates NBD were interrupted, payment platform Hubpay became unusable, and the food delivery app Careem was also paralyzed. Millions of users who relied on these digital services found their wallets, ride-hailing apps, and company operations inaccessible as the data centers shut down.
Although AWS had always emphasized the redundant design of its data centers—where a backup would automatically take over if one facility experienced issues—the simultaneous strikes on multiple facilities this time rendered the redundancy mechanism largely ineffective.
Notably, physical damage includes building structural collapse, power supply disruption, fires, and secondary water damage caused by the activation of firefighting systems. Amazon explained on its service health dashboard that the reconstruction and recovery process for the data center will be &#34;very long,&#34; with some services requiring weeks to repair.
For the operators and owners of data center assets, physical damage directly correlates with economic loss.
Building a traditional data center is estimated to cost between 7 million and 12 million US dollars per MW. 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 earlier, can reach 50 billion US dollars.
Data from ConstructConnect, an American construction industry analysis firm, revealed in February that the average cost of data centers breaking ground in 2025 will be 633 million US dollars.
Including the recently attacked data center in Bahrain, the direct physical losses, equipment replacement, and reduced revenue for AWS's four facilities are conservatively estimated to be in the billions of US dollars.
Furthermore, in emails sent to affected users, Amazon stated it would waive their usage fees for March, a move that could also dilute the company's profits in the short term.
<h2>Critical Infrastructure Within Range</h2>
Compared to the capital expenditures of tech giants, the loss from a single data center attack is &#34;insignificant.&#34;
Public data shows that Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft plan to spend a total of 630 billion US dollars by 2026, an increase of 62% from 388 billion US dollars in 2025. Amazon alone has allocated 200 billion US dollars. Of this, approximately 75% of the combined spending (about 450 billion US dollars) will be directly invested in AI infrastructure.
A significant portion of these funds was originally planned for the Middle East.
From 2021 to 2024, the Middle East has been a hot region for cloud vendors' expansion. By early 2025, Saudi Arabia alone secured over 21 billion US dollars in data center investment commitments.
Among these, Microsoft plans to invest 15.2 billion US dollars in the UAE between 2023 and 2029, having already spent 7.3 billion US dollars on collaborations with G42 and infrastructure; Google, in partnership with Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, has committed 10 billion US dollars to build a global AI center; Amazon plans to invest an additional 5.3 billion US dollars in Saudi Arabia to build a new region including an &#34;AI Zone&#34;; Oracle has also invested 1.5 billion US dollars to expand its cloud footprint in Saudi Arabia, deeply integrating with Nvidia to support sovereign AI projects.
The expansion of infrastructure in the Middle East by US tech giants is on one hand to cater to local AI development plans and on the other hand to show goodwill to Middle Eastern capital, such as sovereign wealth funds.
Trump is also actively promoting the expansion of US data centers in the Middle East.
In May 2025, Trump led executives from tech giants including Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on a trip to the Middle East, attempting to secure over 2 trillion US dollars in data center investment commitments through a vision of &#34;transitioning from chaos to commerce.&#34;
<img src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://wpimg-wscn.awtmt.com/f7a5afca-47bb-4d11-9386-1305e0708916.jpeg?x-oss-process=image/auto-orient,1/interlace,1/resize,w_1440,h_1440/quality,q_95/format,jpg" alt="" original-src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://wpimg-wscn.awtmt.com/f7a5afca-47bb-4d11-9386-1305e0708916.jpeg"/>
Model of the largest data center under construction in the UAE, part of the Middle Eastern &#34;Project Stargate.&#34;
The most noteworthy among these is the &#34;Stargate&#34; hyperscale AI data center project in Abu Dhabi. This project aims to leverage the cheap energy and land in the Middle East to build the largest AI infrastructure outside of the United States.
When data centers are given such high strategic value, they inevitably become targets.
Ioannis Kalpouzos, a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, believes that whether a data center should be a target depends on the facts at the time of the incident, not its past use.
Kalpouzos explained: &#34;If the facility is currently used to train large language models of strategic value, for instance, by fine-tuning them for specific functions, then this could make it a potential target.&#34;
This &#34;double-use&#34; attribute transforms data centers from quiet power consumers into strategic &#34;choke points.&#34; This also means that future data centers may require not only security guards and fences but also professional protection systems and counter-drone technologies.
As Vili Lehdonvirta, a professor at Aalto University, stated, when national powers increasingly incorporate commercial cloud and AI into their strategic operations, adversaries will view them as critical facilities. This makes data centers legally &#34;transparent&#34; and vulnerable. Once deemed to effectively promote an adversary's strategic capabilities, the entire physical entity could be considered a legitimate target under international law.
<h2>Uncertainty in Middle Eastern Computing Power</h2>
Will computing power prices increase after Amazon's data center attacks? Short-term impact is limited.
A report by Knight Frank, &#34;Global Data Center Research Report 2024-2025,&#34; points out that although the Middle East (especially the Gulf states) has strong capital and energy advantages, its current share of operational third-party data center capacity globally is only about 1%.
In other words, the damage incurred at this stage is not enough to cause a fundamental shock to global computing power supply.
Meanwhile, on Amazon's service health page, the company encourages users to migrate some workloads to servers in Europe, North America, and the Asia-Pacific region to mitigate the pressure caused by regional outages to some extent.
However, in the medium to long term, computing power prices do face upward pressure, primarily from three channels.
Foremost is the cost of physical defense, which will not be elaborated here.
The second is multi-regional backup. In the context of armed conflict, redundancy within a single geographical area is no longer sufficient to cope with risks. If companies are forced to adopt cross-regional or even cross-continental disaster recovery solutions, the cost of using cloud services will significantly increase.
The third is energy and insurance costs. Energy accounts for about 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 directly reflect on electricity bills. Simultaneously, insurance rates for data centers in high-risk areas may also increase.
Alok Mehta, Director of the Geo-Tech Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), stated: &#34;This attack has changed the way companies think about security. To maintain business continuity, companies have to adopt more expensive backup solutions. This investment in 'digital resilience' is essentially an implicit price increase for computing power.&#34;
It is worth noting that Knight Frank also predicts in the report that by 2030, data center capacity in the Middle East is expected to triple, reaching 3.3GW or even higher. The greater this capacity, the greater the losses from attacks will be, magnified exponentially.
Although market institutions remain optimistic about future growth, the risks of conflict will also alter the calculation models of data center investors. Future incremental investments will face more rigorous cost-benefit assessments.
According to assessments by Patrick J. Murphy, Executive Director of Hilco Global's Geopolitical Division, and others, the focus of the next wave of computing power construction may shift to regions with more predictable security situations.
<h2>In Conclusion</h2>
From the UAE to Bahrain, the repeated attacks on data centers as civilian facilities within a month are related to their nature as critical infrastructure.
Data centers host almost everything from personal daily applications to business systems. When these facilities are attacked, the economy, daily life, and all operations built upon them, as well as related industries, groups, and services, will be directly affected.
To some extent, the complex geopolitical environment has also taught tech companies a lesson: while investing hundreds of billions of dollars to expand computing power infrastructure, they must also re-evaluate the associated physical security costs, the value of which may soon surpass that of the chips themselves.
On this topic, I am reminded of Musk's previously strongly promoted space data centers, and Microsoft's underwater data centers. Ignoring feasibility and construction cycles, are these unconventional construction ideas the optimal solution for security concerns?
The answer may also be no.
Risk Disclosure and Disclaimer
Markets are subject to risks, and investment requires caution. This article does not constitute personal investment advice, nor does it consider the specific investment objectives, financial situation, or needs of individual users. Users should consider whether any opinions, views, or conclusions in this article are appropriate for their specific circumstances. Investment based on this is at your own risk.

On April 3rd, Amazon's data center in Bahrain was hit by a missile, causing service disruptions. The day before the attack, assets of 18 US companies in the Middle East were put on alert. This attack not only caused physical damage but also impacted the development of the internet and artificial intelligence. In early March, three of Amazon's data centers in the UAE were also attacked, leading to the paralysis of many local services. Amazon stated that the rebuilding and recovery process for the data centers will be very long, with some services potentially taking weeks to repair

After a Missile Hit an Amazon Data Center