Amazon’s cloud business operations in Bahrain suffered damage after Wednesday’s Iranian strike. According to a Financial Times report, several Amazon Web Services devices were hit during recent attacks linked to Iran.
The report also cites a post by Bahrain’s interior ministry saying that civil defense forces were “fighting a fire at a company building as a result of Iranian aggression”. The ministry said that relevant authorities are taking measures on the ground, but did not provide any further details.
Notably, the attack on Amazon comes just a day after Iran’s Revolutionary Guards threatened that US companies operating in the Middle East could be targeted.
However, the initial list of major companies that Iran planned to target did not include Amazon. Instead, it included names like Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, HP, Tesla, Nvidia, Oracle, Boeing, IBM and Cisco.
Just a week earlier, Amazon said its Amazon Web Services in Bahrain had been “disrupted” due to the conflict in the Middle East. This was the second time the company’s operations were affected by war. An Amazon spokesman told Reuters the breach was due to “drone activity” in the area.
Early in the war, Iran struck two Amazon Web Services data centers in the United Arab Emirates and a third commercial facility in Bahrain.
Why are data centers becoming a target?
According to a report by The Conversation, data centers are becoming key targets due to the US military’s growing reliance on advanced AI capabilities for decision support.
Notably, previous reports indicated that the US military was using AI tools, particularly Anthropic’s Claude, for analysis and operational support during critical missions during the Trump regime, including the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and military strikes against Iran.
The computing infrastructure that powers these models is typically located in secure AWS cloud servers that are said to host classified government data and software tools.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has previously claimed that the attacks targeted data centers supporting the military and intelligence activities of the “enemy”. Iran’s news agency also previously specifically labeled the data centers of major technology companies in the region as “hostile technology infrastructure.”
The report also noted that the US requires cloud computing providers to store government and military data at US or Defense Department bases, meaning it is unclear whether the targeted facilities in the Persian Gulf actually hosted military operations.
But the strikes may be symbolic and are aimed at shaking the global economy by disrupting local banking systems and threatening major US technology investments in the Gulf region.
