How, and why, US data centers in the Gulf became targets of war
Al Mayadeen English (AWIP)
Al Mayadeen English

A man walks away after watching a black plume of smoke
rising from a warehouse in the industrial area of Sharjah
City, United Arab Emirates, Sunday, March 1, 2026, fol-
lowing reports of Iranian strikes in Dubai (© AP Photo)
Drone strikes on Amazon data centres in the UAE and Bahrain have exposed the vulnerability of US tech infrastructure in the Gulf, and threatened the region's AI ambitions.
The drone strikes that knocked Amazon Web Services facilities offline in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain this week were not random acts of escalation. They were, according to analysts and industry insiders, a calculated strike on infrastructure that the United States has quietly woven into its military architecture across West Asia.
Amazon and Google hold a $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli government to provide cloud computing and artificial intelligence services to entities, including the Israeli occupation forces.
That contract, largely absent from Western coverage of the strikes, may explain why AWS facilities, and not the dozens of data centers operated by local Gulf companies on behalf of US tech giants, were the ones that were hit.
"It would be easier to target AWS," Ed Galvin, founder of data center research firm DC Byte, told Bloomberg, noting that other US tech services are typically housed within locally operated facilities, making them harder to identify and strike. Of approximately 230 data centers built or under development across Gulf Arab states, only a handful are wholly owned and operated by a US company, according to DC Byte. All three struck this week belong to Amazon.





































