A month ago, we warned readers that amid the trillions of dollars pouring into the global expansion of data centres, a striking blind spot remained. Wall Street analysts, almost without exception, were preoccupied with the familiar pressures of the industry: financing, advanced chip stacks, electricity supply, land acquisition and water use. Largely absent from their models was a newer and less comfortable risk — the prospect that data centres themselves could become targets in modern conflict. By Sunday morning, that concern had moved from the theoretical to the tangible. Amazon’s cloud computing arm, Amazon Web Services, confirmed that it had experienced degraded service in the United Arab Emirates, attributing the disruption to what it described as a “localised power issue”. Subsequent reporting by Reuters has shed further light on the episode, revealing that an AWS data centre in the UAE was forced to shut down operations entirely. If confirmed, the incident would mark the first known case of a commercial data centre being physically targeted amid an active conflict — a development that underscores how the infrastructure underpinning the digital economy is increasingly exposed to the realities of modern warfare. For years, data centres have been treated as neutral, hardened […]