Why Digital Infrastructure is Now a Strategic Asset in Modern Conflict

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War room strategies have evolved from tank blitzkriegs and code-breaking deceptions in World War II to AI-driven predictive analytics, drone swarms, and cyber operations in today’s conflicts.

​When Iranian drone strikes damaged AWS facilities in the Gulf—directly hitting two in the United Arab Emirates and impacting a third in Bahrain—it didn’t just disrupt services for 11 million people in the region, it signalled a shift: big tech had become a key target in modern warfare. 

The Gulf, which has spent years positioning itself as an AI hub, realized it hadn’t accounted for the physical dangers of hosting data centers. 

Data centers aren’t just a large-scale infrastructure that big tech is betting heavily on. Rather, it powers networks that underpin everything from financial markets and e-commerce to military command systems and autonomous weapons in today’s world.

​Experts consider this the first documented instance of data centers being intentionally targeted in a conflict, and they believe it won’t be the last. The recent attack on AWS facilities raises serious questions about the region’s assertions of safety and security.

​A bigger question now is: what does this mean for IT giants and governments? 

For tech companies, is it still worth building in the Gulf? For governments, the concern is more urgent: how to protect critical services that run on these data centers?

​A New Target in Sight

​Modern AI depends on highly concentrated infrastructure, primarily comprising large data centers, specialized computing clusters, massive energy and cooling systems, and high-capacity network connections.

​Iran’s Fars News Agency said that the Bahrain facility had been deliberately targeted “to identify the role of these centers in supporting the enemy’s military and intelligence activities.”​

“That seems plausible on its face that they didn’t know what the exact impacts would be, but the data centers seemed useful to the American way of war,” said Zachary Kallenborn, a WMD Warfare & Drone Swarms Analyst.

​Major US technology companies, including AWS, Microsoft, and Google, have data centers in the Middle East to support the region’s rapidly growing AI and cloud market. Microsoft announced it would invest $15.2 billion in the UAE between 2023 and 2029 to expand AI and cloud infrastructure, including a major partnership with Abu Dhabi-based G42, while Oracle pledged $14 billion over the next 10 years to bring the world’s best cloud and AI technology to Saudi Arabia.

​Additionally, AWS committed roughly $5.3 billion in 2025 to develop an AWS region in Saudi Arabia, scheduled to go operational in 2026. It, along with Saudi Arabia’s Humain, announced plans to invest over $5 billion in a strategic partnership to build a groundbreaking “AI Zone” in the country.

​“The striking of these new targets (data centers) indicates a new way of fighting wars that is increasingly focused on technology and poses new governance dilemmas,” noted Giuseppe Ciarliero, Policy & Governance, UN World Food Programme, in a blog.

​He added that these facilities were targeted because of their dual-use nature—that is, infrastructure serving both civilian and military purposes simultaneously. 

Since international laws were established long before the advent of cloud computing and modern technologies, they exist in a grey area. Is attacking a data center considered a war crime or a legitimate military target? 

“The challenge is to what extent the data center is used for military vs civilian purposes. In the laws of war, targeting infrastructure, including infrastructure used by civilians, is okay if the same infrastructure is also being used for major military activity. For instance, a rail bridge that carries civilian transit, and also transports troops to the frontline, is targetable,” added Kallenborn.

​Tech Advancements and Designs

As the global race to achieve AI supremacy continues, tech advancements are inevitable. The region’s, particularly Saudi Arabia and the UAE’s, ambition to become AI leaders could become a point of contention in the future.

“The more advanced an AI ecosystem becomes, the more concentrated its critical infrastructure tends to be and the more exposed it becomes to disruption,” said Olga Ustyuzhantseva, an AI & digital governance researcher, in a post. 

​The global AI market will soar from $189 billion in 2023 to $4.8 trillion by 2033, as per a 2025 UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD) report.

​With the recent escalations around data centers, the region will need to return to the drawing board to define its future tech ambitions and strategies. After all, the Middle East, aiming to become a data centre powerhouse, is expected to increase capacity from 1GW in 2025 to 3.3GW by 2030.

“Hyperscale data centers are engineered with multiple layers of security and redundancy, including hardened structures, restricted access zones, surveillance systems, and multiple backup power and network connections. However, like any critical infrastructure, they are not completely immune to disruption during geopolitical conflicts. You can have the strongest firewall in the world, but it won’t save you from a $500 drone or a cut power line,” shared Narendra Sen, Founder & CEO, RackBank and NeevCloud. 

Constructing a data center is a significant investment, with costs typically ranging from $600 to $1,100 per square foot, and operating an extensive data center service can cost between $10 million and $25 million per year.

Data center design in the Gulf has prioritized uptime, efficiency, scalability, and compliance, but now it also needs to account for failure and conflict. 

“Traditionally, resilience meant N+1 cooling, 2N power, redundant UPS, backup generators, and multiple telecom carriers. Those principles still matter, but war introduces a different class of risk. Designers must now think about airspace threats, fuel supply disruption, restricted access to sites, supply chain delays, cyber escalation, and instability in regional energy systems,” said Said Al Hosni, Datacenter Operations Manager, Datamount, in a post. 

​Is Infrastructure a Geopolitical Property?

While focusing on firewalls, encryption, and anti-malware for protection, this conflict reveals a stark truth: in high-stakes geopolitics, the cloud is not just a digital construct but a very physical and vulnerable entity.

When one heard the term “data center,” they pictured quiet, air-conditioned rooms full of blinking machines that kept businesses running but had little to do with the real world. That assumption has become obsolete.

“Algorithms may be virtual, compute is not. This is why AI is increasingly treated not only as a technological capability, but as part of national critical infrastructure. And infrastructure has always had a geopolitical property: it can be targeted. The strategic geography of AI may therefore be less about software and more about the physical locations where computation actually happens,” Ustyuzhantseva added.

​Sen noted that the rise of AI has made data centers strategic computing assets. “Hyperscale infrastructure now determines technological competitiveness between nations, especially in the global AI race led by countries such as the United States and China.”

​Can distributed infrastructure help future-proof systems? “Instead of concentrating computing capacity in a handful of mega campuses, we are expanding into regional locations and Tier-II cities (such as Indore and Raipur in India). By decentralising infrastructure and spreading digital capacity across the country, the risk of a single point of failure is significantly reduced,” added Sen.

​Spreading infrastructure across more locations reduces the damage any single attack can cause. But it does not make data centers any less of a target.

​What’s Next?

Governments have been increasingly acknowledging the strategic importance of data centers. The US recognizes them as part of its 16 critical infrastructure sectors, the UK designated them as critical national infrastructure in 2024, and the EU also gives them special status. Will international laws and bodies enter the picture? It’s ambiguous. 

​The Gulf has heavily invested in attracting global cloud providers and building advanced technology ecosystems, leveraging modern infrastructure, abundant energy resources, and geographic proximity to growing digital markets. Security frameworks in the region have mainly focused on technology export controls and semiconductor supply chains tied to these investments. 

“Over the next decade, we are likely to see a shift in how governments think about compute infrastructure,” noted Krishna Nadella, Head of US Sales, Financial Services, ITRS.

“That could mean stronger regulatory oversight, greater pressure for domestic compute capacity, and potentially even physical security measures around major compute clusters. Because if AI becomes the defining technology of this century — and there is growing evidence that it will — then the infrastructure that powers AI becomes a critical layer of economic and geopolitical influence,” he added.

Countries like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain may need to adjust their strategies to maintain their position as safe places for AI development.

“For emerging digital economies, local computing must also remain accessible and protected. If global computing power remains concentrated in a few expensive or geopolitically vulnerable hubs, innovation risks becoming a privilege reserved for the few. Digital sovereignty ensures that the right to innovate is supported not only by policy but also by resilient, locally available computing infrastructure,” added Sen.