Data · Ars Technica
Drone strikes on data centers spook Big Tech, halting Middle East projects
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◌ Single Source
A data center developer has paused all Middle East project investments after one of its facilities was damaged by an Iranian missile or drone attack.
Key facts
- The Revolutionary Guard attempted to make good on that threat by attacking an Oracle data center in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, on April 2, according to Data Center Dynamics
- The 16-acre site already has 20 megawatts of data center capacity operational in service of an unnamed hyperscale customer, with the facilities being designed to support AI and cloud deployments
- Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps directly threatened retaliation against US companies that it identified as having Israeli links and supporting military tech applications after an Iranian bank’s data
- No one’s going to run into a burning building, so to speak,” Pure DC CEO Gary Wojtaszek told CNBC
Summary
The damaged data center is owned by Pure Data Centre Group, a London-based company that is operating or developing more than 1 gigawatt of data center capacity across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Data center developers are already eating the costs of uninsurable war damage from the conflict, which began with a US-Israeli attack on Iran on February 28. Iran also directly struck two Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers in the United Arab Emirates, while a near-miss from an Iranian one-way attack drone damaged a third AWS data center in Bahrain. That led to widespread disruptions in cloud services for AWS customers like banks, payment platforms, the Dubai-based ride-hailing app Careem, and the data cloud provider Snowflake.