Drone strikes on data centers disrupt Big Tech, halting operations in the Middle East

A data center developer has suspended all project funding in the Middle East after one of its facilities was damaged by an Iranian missile or drone. The decision comes as Iran’s war is forcing Silicon Valley investors and tech companies to rethink trillion-dollar plans to build more AI and cloud centers in the Gulf states.

The data center is owned by Pure Data Center Group, a London-based company that operates or is developing more than 1 gigawatt of data center capacity in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. “No one is going to run into a burning building,” said Pure DC CEO Gary Wojtaszek. Price CNBC. “No one is going to put in extra money to do anything until everything is settled.”

Data producers are already eating the cost of the war’s unsustainable damage from the war, which began with the US-Israeli attack on Iran on February 28. Iran responded by striking ships to shut it down. Hormuz River a trading center for US military and electronic equipment throughout the Gulf region.

Iran also hit two Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers in the United Arab Emirates, while missing one Iranian channel. drone attack it destroyed the third AWS data center in Bahrain. The Iranian attack damaged the structure, disrupted the electricity supply, and started a firefighting system that destroyed the water supply, AWS also reported through its service dashboard on March 1.

This led to disruptions in the cloud services of AWS customers such as banks, payment platforms, Dubai-based Careem, and cloud data provider Snowflake.