Amazon Bahrain Data Centres Damaged Following Recent Iranian Military Strikes

Amazon Data Centres I Iranian Strikes: The US tech giant Amazon's cloud business operations in Bahrain, an island nation in West Asia, has been damaged after Iran's military strikes conducted on Wednesday.

Numerous Amazon Web Services facilities have been hit during the recent attacks linked to Iran, as per The FT report.

Further, the report noted that the West Asian country's interior ministry said that Civil Defence forces were responding to fire in facility of a company due to Iranian strikes.

The concerned authorities were taking measures at the site, according to the ministry.

The attack which damaged the company's data centre comes after Iran’s Revolutionary Guards (IRG) threatened that American companies such as Google, and Microsoft operating within the Middle East could be part of their target list.

The other major US-based tech firm it looked to target are Apple, Meta, HP, Tesla, Nvidia, Oracle, Boeing, Cisco, and IBM.

Earlier, Amazon noted that its Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Bahrain had been ‘disrupted’ owing to the conflict in the Middle East.

This marked the second time that the company's operations had been affected due to the war. An Amazon spokesperson told Reuters that the disruption was due to ‘drone activity’ in the area.

In the early phase of the war, Iran had hit two Amazon Web Services data centres in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and a third commercial facility in Bahrain.

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Why Are Data Centres On Iran's Target List?

Amid the US-Iran war, the West Asian nation's aggression over data centres has opened a new dimension to warfare due to rising dependency of US military force on AI capabilities, while also being able to affect services catering to government agencies, and banks in the region.

Earlier, reports have indicated US military used AI tools, especially Anthropic's Claude, for analysis and operational suppor, with includes the operation that led to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro's capture.

The computing infrastructure that powers these models usually resides in secure AWS cloud servers that are said to host secret government data and software tools.

In the lead upto striking Amazon's infra for the second time, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRG) had claimed that the strikes were aimed at data centres supporting ‘the enemy's’ military and intelligence activities.

On the other hand, an Iranian news agency described major tech company data centres in the region as "enemy technology infrastructure".