Amazon data centres hit by drones

Amazon Web Services said on March 3, 2026 that drone strikes damaged two of its data center facilities in the United Arab Emirates and a third site in Bahrain, causing outages across its Middle East cloud region. AWS said the attacks caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery and triggered fire suppression activity that added water damage at some facilities. (telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com) The company said recovery would be “prolonged” because of the physical damage. Reuters reported that financial institutions using AWS were among the affected customers. ### Which Amazon facilities were hit, and what did the company say was damaged? AWS said two of its facilities in the UAE were “directly struck,” while a drone strike near one of its Bahrain facilities caused physical damage there. The company described the impact as structural damage, power disruption and secondary water damage from fire suppression systems. (datacenterdynamics.com) Data Center Dynamics reported that two of the three availability zones in AWS’s ME-CENTRAL-1 region remained significantly impaired, while the third continued operating. AWS said customers were seeing degraded availability in services including EC2, S3, DynamoDB, Lambda, Kinesis, CloudWatch and RDS. (telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com) ### Why did this matter beyond one company outage? Reuters reported that the strike marked the first time a major U.S. technology company’s data center had been disrupted by military action. The report said the incident raised questions about the expansion of large U.S. cloud and AI infrastructure in the Gulf as regional conflict widened. (telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com) The UAE has been a focal point for AI infrastructure investment by U.S. technology companies. Reuters said Microsoft planned in November to bring its total investment in the UAE to $15 billion by the end of 2029 and use Nvidia chips in its data centers there. (datacenterdynamics.com) ### What does this show about AI infrastructure risk in the Gulf? The March 3 AWS statement showed that centralized cloud infrastructure can be disrupted by physical attacks as well as software faults. AWS told customers in the region to back up data and consider moving workloads to alternate AWS regions while repairs continued. The incident also put attention on the concentration of AI compute in a small number of large facilities. (telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com) Reuters cited the Center for Strategic and International Studies as saying that, in the “compute era,” adversaries could target data centers, energy infrastructure supporting compute and fiber chokepoints, alongside pipelines and refineries. ### Where does OpenAI’s Abu Dhabi Stargate project fit into this? The source material for this story says Iran’s Revolutionary Guard later named OpenAI’s planned Stargate campus in Abu Dhabi as a potential target, linking a commercial AI project to the same regional threat environment. I was able to verify broad secondary reporting that such a threat was reported, but I could not independently confirm the original Revolutionary Guard statement from a primary source available through search. (datacenterdynamics.com) Because that threat followed actual damage to AWS facilities in the UAE and Bahrain, it extended concern from current cloud operations to planned AI campuses in the region. That connection is an inference based on the sequence of reported events, not a new statement from Amazon, OpenAI or the UAE authorities. (telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com) ### What is known about the Argentina Stargate project? The source material also says Perfil reported there were no formal official resolutions backing a previously announced Stargate project in Argentina. I could not retrieve the Perfil text directly through search tools in this session, so I cannot independently quote its reporting beyond the supplied briefing. Unverified local and regional reports from October 2025 describe a proposed Stargate Argentina project, but those do not establish the formal government record the Perfil article discusses. (aihaberleri.org) ### What happens next for AWS customers and Gulf AI projects? AWS said on March 3 that it was working with local authorities, prioritizing staff safety and trying to restore full service availability as quickly as possible. The company also said the broader operating environment in the Middle East remained unpredictable. (telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com) Any further disclosures are likely to come through AWS service health updates, company statements and customer migration activity across alternate regions. (rosario3.com)