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AWS teams working around the clock to keep Middle East services up after drone strikes, CEO says

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Why This Matters

The ongoing conflict and drone strikes in the Middle East are significantly impacting AWS infrastructure, highlighting the vulnerabilities of global cloud services in geopolitically unstable regions. This situation underscores the importance of resilient infrastructure and diversified supply chains for the tech industry and consumers relying on cloud-based services. The disruptions also emphasize the interconnectedness of energy, geopolitics, and technology, affecting global economic stability.

Key Takeaways

Data centers, particularly those housing chips that can handle generative artificial intelligence models, consume large amounts of energy, which has become more expensive since the conflict began in February.

Last week, Iran's Revolutionary Guard navy announced it had targeted Amazon data center infrastructure in Bahrain. Amazon declined to comment at the time.

Dozens of AWS services in Bahrain and United Arab Emirates continue to be unavailable, according to the company's status page.

"It's a really difficult situation, and we're working incredibly hard," Garman told CNBC's Kate Rooney at the HumanX conference in San Francisco on Tuesday. "In fact, we have teams, 24/7, working to make sure that we can keep our infrastructure up for our customers in that region."

The Amazon division said in early March that drone strikes had damaged its data centers in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates .

On Monday, oil prices shot higher as President Donald Trump threatened attacks on civilian infrastructure if the Islamic Republic does not commit to reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

"It's obviously hugely disruptive for the global economy, as we're all very dependent on energy, and also just distracting for industry, for us," Garman said. "You know, there's not short-term, immediate things, but it really is just the drag on the global economy that we have to think about."

Amazon Web Services is the world's top supplier of cloud infrastructure that companies can rely on to run websites and applications. Google , Microsoft and Oracle are also working to build more data centers to provide cloud services worldwide.

Technology isn't the only industry seeing implications, Garman said.

"You just have to go further down the supply chain to find something, and so we're not different than that," he said.

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