GoKawiilMore than six months after Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers in Abu Dhabi and Bahrain were attacked by drones, the company has now had to tell customers to move their data to facilities in other regions. The Wall Street Journal reports that AWS has admitted that it's time for customers to jump ship to data centers located elsewhere in the world.
The move comes as AWS continues repairs on the damaged data centers, but it stopped short of offering a timeline as to when customers can expect either location to be back online. Both affected data centers became targets for the Islamic Republic of Iran after the United States and Israel launched strikes on that country in February of this year. Months later, the Bahraini data center was struck by cruise missiles, and Iranian state media claimed it had been "destroyed."
The move is bad news for the United Arab Emirates. The U.A.E. has spent years trying to become a world leader in data processing, a pitch that led it to lobby U.S. officials to allow it to buy AI chips for its data centers.
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Having made plenty of noise about OpenAI's decision to take a spot in a 5-gigawatt data center complex in May 2025, U.A.E. officials have since seen those plans stall. The WSJ points out that no lease has been signed well over a year later. OpenAI was expected to take 20% of the data center's total capacity, the kind of loss that is sure to sting officials if plans don't get back on track.
For its part, the U.A.E. is clearly well aware of the threat that the ongoing regional instability poses to its ambitions, and it's looking for ways to address the fears of potential partners. Officials have already hinted at the potential for underground data centers. While the move would make an already costly endeavor even more expensive, it could help defend new data centers from drone attacks. Building drone defense systems near data centers is another option.
Drone attacks can be catastrophic for any building, and data centers are no different. The data centers operated by AWS suffered fires and damaged infrastructure as a result of the strikes. In their efforts to fight the fires caused by drone strikes, emergency workers used water, causing further damage.
The Abu Dhabi and Bahrain data centers are relied upon by a variety of businesses in the banking and financial sectors. Those businesses cannot tolerate downtime, especially of the protracted variety. There's little sign of data centers slipping from the crosshairs of drone operators any time soon, either, and AWS is far from unique in finding its data centers under attack.
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Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) claimed in April that it had hit a data center linked to Oracle in Dubai. That unit further threatened American tech companies, including Microsoft, Oracle, Alphabet, and Nvidia, this spring. It accused the companies of contributing to attacks on Iran. With that in mind, and with tensions in the Middle East looking unlikely to ease any time soon, it's perhaps unsurprising that AWS has asked customers to move data to safer data centers around the world.
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