Gulf data centres hit by strikes
Reports say drone strikes struck data centres in Bahrain and the UAE in March, testing Gulf sovereign-AI ambitions and prompting calls from industry players for greater protection of strategic facilities (semafor.com). The incidents have raised questions about the physical security premiums required for state-backed AI infrastructure in the region (semafor.com).
Drone strikes damaged three Amazon Web Services data center sites in the Gulf in early March, putting a live test to the region’s artificial intelligence buildout. (bloomberg.com) Amazon said two facilities in the United Arab Emirates were directly hit and infrastructure near a Bahrain facility was damaged by a nearby strike. The company warned that two of the region’s three data center hubs remained “significantly impaired” after the attacks. (bloomberg.com) CRN reported that Amazon told customers the strikes caused structural damage, power disruptions and water damage from fire suppression systems. The incidents hit Amazon Web Services facilities in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain as the regional war widened in early March. (crn.com) A data center is the warehouse behind cloud computing: rows of servers, backup power and cooling systems that keep apps, storage and artificial intelligence models running. Gulf governments have spent the past two years pitching that infrastructure as a national asset, pairing cheap energy, state capital and new chip deals to host more computing at home. (semafor.com) That push is especially visible in Abu Dhabi. In May 2025, G42, OpenAI, Oracle, NVIDIA, SoftBank Group and Cisco said they would build Stargate United Arab Emirates, a one-gigawatt artificial intelligence cluster inside a five-gigawatt United Arab Emirates–United States artificial intelligence campus. (g42.ai) G42 said in October 2025 that Stargate United Arab Emirates was under construction through Khazna Data Centers, with the first 200 megawatts expected to go live in 2026. That timetable put physical security, grid resilience and backup capacity at the center of the project before the March strikes. (prnewswire.com) Semafor reported that Gulf officials and industry executives are now treating large computing sites more like ports, pipelines and power plants than ordinary commercial real estate. The publication said the March attacks prompted calls for more protection around facilities tied to state-backed artificial intelligence plans. (semafor.com) Amazon’s damage reports did not stop the broader buildout. Semafor reported that Gulf backers still see sovereign artificial intelligence capacity as strategic infrastructure, even as the March strikes force a new price on insurance, hardening and redundancy. (semafor.com)
