This may have been long discussed, but I feel like this war is the first time I've really thought hard about how big a target data centers would be in any sort of modern peer war and how that's an entirely new thing since the last time it was really on the radar (end of CW) right? We've built trillions and trillions of dollars in infrastructure in the peace time since, and it seems fairly concentrated. AWS is amongst the biggest there is, and according to mappers like [0] there are only around 240 operational total worldwide with another 130ish under construction. Like, in one respect that seems like a bunch, but vs the kind of attacks we see done in a matter of days in modern wars it's a pretty small number for the whole planet isn't it? In the first 24 hours of the war the US and Israel launched on Iran, they hit something like 1500-2000 targets. How hardened are the data centers? Are they in structures that handle some level of explosives? Do they have counter measures like internal blast walls dividing things into cells so a few hundred pounds of high explosive in one area doesn't damage outside the cell? I mean, of course like all data centers they'll have considered extensive countermeasures to fire, environmental threats, grid issues and so on. But has "nation-state level attack via mass drones or bombardment" been part of the threat model over the last few decades? Hardening of telecoms was certainly considered for old Ma Bell and such back in the CW days but that was a very different environment.
I guess it makes me think about what a soft underbelly this could be for a lot of modern society. There's always been consideration of threats to refineries and power stations and industrial production and all those big metal deals. But like, forget any sort of nuclear exchange, any sort of crazy super Starfish style big EMP, just purely a few thousand drones nailing data centers. Nobody even directly dies, just a lot of wrecked computers. What would be the cost of losing all the clouds and colo stuff? How long to replace, at what cost? How much depends on it?
Instead of targeting data center itself, it's far easier to target the electrical substation that powers the datacenter. It's relatively simple to do. Transformers require oil to cool themselves, and if the coolant reservoir is damaged, then they overheat and shut off. This exact infrastructure attack occurred in North Carolina in 2022 [0], where someone fired bullets into the coolant reservoirs and caused a several day power outage. The perpetrator was never caught. It's speculated a foreign actor did this to gauge the response in a future wartime scenario.
Most data centers have a dedicated electrical substation that powers it, so it's possible to target the data center without affecting anywhere else.
>Instead of targeting data centers, it's far easier to target the electrical substation that powers the datacenter
That has a lot of collateral damage that may or may not be desirable though. Simultaneously it might have quite a different long term effect right? If all the actual computers are unharmed they can be powered in other ways in an emergency, even if at much higher cost. Or powered back up later, the time lost might be militarily very significant but they're not gone.
But how many people and companies actually have full functional decentralized clones of all programs and data? How many people and companies have devices that are locked to remote hosts they expect to check in on at least once in awhile even if they're not "cloud dependent"? What if all that was literally gone, a few thousand missiles or drones and data centers are all just completely erased including tape backups, everything, suddenly we're in a world where all that compute and data is poof. And without hurting anything else, no traditional war crimes either, no power or direct food or transport disruptions. Everyone is fine and healthy, except with this huge societal exocortex gone.
Any cloud engineer worth their salt is going to have their programs be stateless and their data replicated across multiple data centers. Many cloud engineers are not worth their salt, but working in Big Tech, this has been table stakes for 20+ years. There are regular disaster drills, both scheduled and unscheduled, that test what happens when a datacenter disappears. Ideally everything transparently fails over, and most of the time, this is what happens.
The bigger problem is that a war is likely to hit multiple levels of infrastructure at the same time. So the datacenters will come under attack, but so will the fiber cables, and the switching apparatuses, and the power plants, and likely also the humans who maintain it all. High-availability software is usually designed for 1-2 components to fail at once and then to transparently route around them. If large chunks of the infrastructure all disappear at once, you can end up in some very weird cascading failure situations.
> Any cloud engineer worth their salt is going to have their programs be stateless and their data replicated across multiple data centers.
That doesn't help much in a shooting war, unfortunately.
Redundancy is great for uncorrelated outages - if a freak weather event or power problem knocks out data centres in London, and your backups in Paris and Frankfurt are unaffected.
But if there's a war and London is getting bombed? Good chance Paris and Frankfurt are also getting bombed.
It's not, unless you think part of the definition of "worth their salt" is never working for a company with bad resource allocation. And I don't see why it would be.
Not necessarily. Many backup generators can only run for whatever the insurance estimators have calculated is the time required to restore the grid connection and that's it. For example one common means of generating backup power is marine diesels, which are readily available. These use the ocean for cooling. If you're using them to power a data center you need to provide cooling water to run them, and when you've run through that they shut down. That's just one example, but in general you can't run backup generators indefinitely.
This is the same sinking realization people had after 9/11 when thinking about infrastructure. Just damaging one or two substations serving the downtown core of a major city could cause massive economic damage.
>1:45 a.m. – The first bank of transformers, riddled with bullet holes and having leaked 52,000 US gallons (200,000 L; 43,000 imp gal) of oil, overheated...
That wasn't thought to be due to a foreign actor though, more likely it was domestic terrorism. Why would the effect on a rural local power station ever be a good measure of a wartime scenario at all?
It’s far more difficult to replace a data center than to replace transformers. Ukraine’s electricity grid has been under attack for years and manages to replace and rebuild transformers and restore power within hours.
No, taking out the transformers, which can have lead times of three to five years, will result in the most long-term damage. You can't just pull one out of storage and drop it into place.
Ukraine has proven otherwise. A lot of European countries pulled them out of storage and gave to Ukraine. Of course there will be a limit to this if you destroy enough of them.
Right. The diesel generator radiators are also susceptible to the same attack. A few bullets to each radiator would cause a coolant leak, and eventually they'd run out of coolant, overheat, and shut off.
The gear to replace the power infra is more readily available than the thousands and thousands of miles of wire and fiber in a datacenter, plus all the equipment, batteries, inverter/chargers, maybe some diesel generators, etc.
If you want to do economic damage, you hit the datacenter.
If you want to turn the people of the country against you and mobilize them, then you hit the power infra.
In any significant war the Internet is going to go down. That's what has happened empirically in countries undergoing significant wars or social unrest, like Russia, Iran, Yemen, Ethiopia, Syria, Myanmar, and Afghanistan. While IP packet routing itself may have been designed to survive a nuclear war, there have been many centralized systems built on top of it (DNS? Edge caching? Cloudflare? Big Tech) that are essential to the functioning of what we know of as the Internet.
If your threat model includes war and you want to have some of the conveniences of the Internet, you should make plans for how to host local copies of data and develop local-scale communications for the people you regularly talk with. The Internet is too big of a security and propaganda risk for governments to allow it to continue to exist when they are engaged in a real existential war.
In the "end times" where computers stop working and we don't even have electricity, your dollars in your digital bank account will be equally useless, and dollar banknotes will be used as fire starter.
Bitcoin was never designed as a post-collapse currency.
Building blast resistant is a common practices for Refinery control rooms. The same methodologies can be employed for data centers as well.
1 blast can be expensively guarded againt. However designing anything above ground for sustained barges is practically/commercially prohibitive. Underground is only option.
PS: Civil Engineer. Designed few of those Gas explosion resistant control rooms.
> the first time I've really thought hard about how big a target data centers would be in any sort of modern peer war
Given the rapid and increasing rise of AI use in actually fighting wars, I suspect data centers won't just be a big target, they will eventually be the #1 priority target. Taking them offline won't just be of interest in terms of economic damage, it will be a direct strategic goal toward militarily winning the conflict.
Until it is clear that the use of AI in "actually fighting wars" doesn't put senior military people at risk of never being able to leave their own country again for fear of prosecution for war crimes, I'm not so sure that the "rapid and increasing rise" is going to actually be a thing.
> Until it is clear that the use of AI in "actually fighting wars" doesn't put senior military people at risk of never being able to leave their own country again for fear of prosecution for war crimes
I don't believe that's a real concern that the senior military people have anymore. War crimes are legal in 2026. That ship has sailed (and was double tap struck by the US Navy). Nobody is doing anything about it.
War crimes are unlikely to be prosecuted within the USA. On this we agree.
Which is why I specifically mentioned the risk of not being able to leave the country, because I'd be willing to wager a bit more than international prosecutions for war crimes are significantly more likely, and would be occuring in a world that is growing noticeably more "America needs to be taught a lesson" in spirit.
Primarily, countries should prosecute their own criminals. That's the whole sovereignty thing. If you don't, and these are international criminals, your country as a whole is what we call a state supporter of terrorism, or some such, if those international crimes have political goals and are directed against other countries and their people as a whole (and don't fit the high bar of self-defense). If the crimes are done by those in power, it's just state terrorism.
I'll rephrase my previous post for you, to make it clearer:
Lack of prosecution of high-level war criminals makes your country a state supporter of terrorism. (the claim in the post)
Because that's what US war criminal leaders do. They terrorize entire nation by threatening population's survival via destruction of all their power plants, which I assume includes nuclear fallout from their nuclear power plant.
War crimes have never been anything more than a way the west can punish its enemies. It’s hilarious people think this norm continuing is some refutation of the system as designed.
> War crimes have never been anything more than a way the west can punish its enemies.
They're the way winners can punish their enemies.
If Germany and Japan had won WWII, US/British/Russian military and political leaders absolutely would've been on trial.
At the same time, agreements between peer countries to follow basic rules have generally held. Note that neither side in the current conflict is using dirty bombs, or dropping nerve gas or bioweapons on civilians, etc.
> War crimes have never been anything more than a way the west can punish its enemies
That's a fair point, the major change isn't that we suddenly started committing war crimes, it is that we've dropped all pretenses of trying to justify why what we did isn't one.
Isn't that an improvement? It seems better to have people who are honest about what they're doing, even when committing war crimes. At least then people can have an honest conversation about whether the policy is working.
One of the most frustrating things about wars is people adopt policies that don't advance their objectives and then lie about what they're doing, what happened and why. This sets up an environment where militarys do things that aren't even in their own interests, let alone anyone else's, and the public discourse is busy arguing about some wild imaginary scenario that isn't related. Better to have people focused on the real world and accurately understanding both (1) what the policy was and (2) what the outcome of the policy was.
If I admit to killing someone in court, because I regret it, I acknowledge I have a debt to society I need to pay, and honesty is the first step on my route towards eventual reform - that's an improvement.
If I admit to killing someone because I want everyone to know I'm a tough, viscous killer and they'd better not piss me off or they'll be next - that's not an improvement.
You'd rather a vicious killer who pretended to be harmless and actively tried to fool you?
As to the behavior itself, I imagine the merits are heavily dependent on context. International politics depends to some extent on demonstrating a willingness and ability to engage in violence. That's not the whole story but it's definitely part of it.
Not really, IMO. Their goal isn't honesty and transparency, they just DGAF to hide it because they correctly realize there won't be any personal consequences for their actions.
They are still lying about most everything else - why the war was started, suppressing the amount of causalities, etc.
That would require a future president to choose to use the authorization.
President Davis The First isn't going to lift a finger to stop the ICC prosecuting former Secretary of Defense Hegseth, and, I suspect, neither would quite a few other potential future presidents.
Most of the world that did convert to Islam, did it out of pragmatism. That goes for Catholicism as well. Though a special part of my heart goes out to the pragmatic Quakers of the early US, who largely seem to have done it just to have a chance to thumb their nose at the government.
While we're completely at the mercy of datacenters that we can colo out racks / power / upstreams from, it's a worthy discussion for any technology company that wants some amount of digital sovereignty over their presence online and ability to provide their service independent of a hypervisor / cloud provider (or even just a centralized location).
The best option is simply to anycast from any many distinct countries that are either neutral, or unlikely to be involved with any global or regional conflicts at any given time. You don't want them getting bombed at the same time!
Ironically,the classical target, Washington DC, is less than 25 miles down a very simple highway to Northern Virginia's massive datacenter alley. Our national defense is ultimately predicated on heavy ordnance not being able to show up undetected in this part of the world. Hence the path preferred by attackers of burrowing into Azure signing keys or ransomware attacks on the grid. Much less hardware to transport.
Oracle are actually subletting part of Bynet's new-ish Har Hotzvim facility which has 2,400 racks but is probably power-constrained - I believe it had 16 MW when it went live, with passive provision for doubling that. Even if it's since been upgraded, that's still only 13 kW per rack which is pretty stingy these days.
As a very rough rule of thumb building down is about 4x more expensive than building up. So probably worth doing if you're Shin Bet (who I believe also have space in the same dc), but for the likes of Oracle it's only going to be used to serve clients with specific security requirements. Think of it as a halo project - more of a marketing exercise than something that's actually going to be used by the average customer.
The same goes for datacentres hosted in cold war bunkers etc - they always end up being too constrained in one way or another to be useful. The big facilities end up being built above ground and rely on geographic redundancy rather than trying to make themselves (literally) bomb-proof.
The way everything is so overleveraged on the success of these companies being packed into ETFs, it would probably take down the whole economy. You'd be able to shut down even more manufacturing without even destroying it just from economic forces. That is unless the US responds by nationalizing everything, which they won't. They'd rather it go to smithereens so someone has a chance to be made wildly rich rebuilding.
Communicating with submarines that are deep underwater is pretty hard. There are techniques like ELF (Extremely Low Frequency) but they require a small power station to transmit a few characters a minute.
Then ask yourself why is the US so aggressively trying to switch the world to a martial stance.
It’s a rhetorical question, of course, because we all know it’s because China is winning the traditional economic game on the manufacturing the McKinsey and Bain class sold out for decades and therefore military will have to become the new leadership measuremen, only appreciating as an asset in a less safe dog eat dog world.
The Thiels and friends who came up with this shit of course have their own infrastructure in their end time bunkers, but however stupid this gambit sounds, it’s what’s being played right now.
Agreed that Govt/Military runs on AWS/Azure/whatever. They care about "security" in a "virtual" sense, but I presume soon we'll see requirements like: "Must Have: Missile Defence Perimeter" next to the "Must be FIPS compliant".
Sovereignty and self-sufficiency are big topics. The US centric cloud at least is killing itself through geopolitical risks for gov customers outside the US. Literally number one operational risk now.
But aren't they pretty hard to hide? I mean, they cover a lot of grounds, they have lots of infrastructure leading right to them...even if someone makes a few wrong guesses, it's going to be easy to find where the data centers are.
>Disclaimer: Please be aware that Amazon Web Services does not list its data center locations publicly. Hence all AWS listings in our database are based on publicly available information from third parties, open databases, property registries, construction applications, permits, tenders, news coverage and our custom research. There may be incorrect or outdated locations, as well as locations missing.
Tangentially related but Iran wasn't much of a threat to the USA before Trump decided to attack it. And apart from Israel, nobody is backing this war. The sooner he realizes it makes zero sense, the better for the whole world. It seems that apart from Russia and the USA, other countries are not so eager to start wars. And what is happening now is a bitter lesson also for China: starting a war is easy, winning it is nearly impossible. So I hope we won't really start to build all infra in under-earth bunkers after all.
>We've built trillions and trillions of dollars in infrastructure in the peace time since, and it seems fairly concentrated.
and thus is easily defended. It would be a pocket change - tens of millions - for AMZN to put say a Rheinmetall Skyshield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyshield at the data center.
Considering how hard US military bases and radar systems have been hit (and those are not city-sized target) I am unconvinced that even AMZN's pocket change could realiably protect against the kind of attacks we see in this war
How they were hit? Multiple drones overwhelming relatively small number of air defense systems. Systems like Patriot are great against several very capable targets like ballistic missiles. Such (expensive centralized) systems do much worse against multiple widespread targets like an armada of low flying low speed drones (add to that low speed cut-off filter to avoid hitting general aviation and the likes).
Heck, even just soldiers with MANPADs would have easily shot down those drones (you just have to distribute those soldiers to all those strategic objects which hasn't been done)
We have classic situation here - everybody have been watching Ukraine war for 4 years, yet nobody has prepared for such style of war.
>I am unconvinced that even AMZN's pocket change could realiably protect against the kind of attacks we see in this war
No even low flying slow drone - pretty typical situation of top Russian cruise missile shot down by Gepard
Also AMZN has its own drones dept - in "hot" zones in "hot" times they can put several people with drones (in the high speed configuration) to be used for interception. This is basically how Ukranians have been doing, and that is an experience they are now exporting to the Gulf states.
Trying to build things in a way that they have to be resistant to missile and drone stand is not a very reasonable scaling constraint. That's why we need non stupid leaders who don't start pointless wars
Trump really only babbles nothing burgers now. The whole "we must open the Strait of Hormuz", but it was closed following the invasion of Iran at the behest of Netanyahu proxy-controlling Trump - so how is that then logical that you refer to a prior state that already existed, as a new war-meta-goal? This is like an autogenerate of fake news and lies. This can not be the person really "leading" the USA, so who is really making those decisions? Trump even forgets what he said the day before and even contradicts himself in the very same sentence; then he chains buzzwords that make no sense, such as "we can not have healthcare because we must wage war instead". This is like George Orwell 1984, but stupid. George Orwell's book made sense; Trump is just dementia 2.0 1984 reversed. Nobody would read that Trump-novel, just as nobody serious would watch Melania. It's the ultimate Soap TV show for the US audience, but it is just not watchable. No risk management or analysis; Hegseth recently mass-fired those who said his plan is stupid. Well, even after firing people, the plan is just stupid.
Most of the world is past blaming Trump for this. They're now blaming Americans for not removing an obviously insane tyrant from power. Americans have long said, "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." Well, where's that vigilance? You're not all blind, are you? Suddenly lost your taste for "freedom", have you?
You may not have voted for Trump, but now you're accountable to the world for him.
It's not quite as bad as in the UAE where only about 10% of the nation has citizenship but it's basically the same picture. Most people there are practically indentured servants
>if you dont colo your own servers you don't own anything.
I'm confused, what does ownership have to do with this particular failure mode? The issue here is a (for many) unforeseen new tradeoff involved in centralization. Colocating at a central place has the exact same tradeoff in this case: bandwidth is vastly more available and cheaper towards the core, and there are significant amortization gains to be had with a lot of basic shared infra. But it's also one big structure holding a lot of computers and infra everyone is depending on, that's the whole point of it! We're all sharing network backbone and power filtering/redundancy and so on and so forth, vs paying for that separately. That means a missile or drone or bomb hit to the building still hits all of us whether we own the servers there or we're running workloads on someone else's servers.
The only responses are either central counter measures or decentralization. Both have significant costs and complexity, that's why it wasn't just done proactively right?
I don't think it is. There are many many cases where you do want to own them.
The people you rent yours from are making a shit load of money so it doesn't sound that bad of an idea
I buy lots of things from people who make a pile of money from low margin goods/services sheerly on scale. There are many things i could not reproduce more cheaply from constituent parts, even if i value my time at $0.
I don't think co-locating with AWS or any other DC in Middle-East would help in this case. Unless you bring your own missile defence network, you are vulnerable.
In the case of if you could bring your own missile-defence-network, then you probably don't need co-location anyway. (There is nothing "co", it's just location you build & operate, with your Patriot or whatever)
This may have been long discussed, but I feel like this war is the first time I've really thought hard about how big a target data centers would be in any sort of modern peer war and how that's an entirely new thing since the last time it was really on the radar (end of CW) right? We've built trillions and trillions of dollars in infrastructure in the peace time since, and it seems fairly concentrated. AWS is amongst the biggest there is, and according to mappers like [0] there are only around 240 operational total worldwide with another 130ish under construction. Like, in one respect that seems like a bunch, but vs the kind of attacks we see done in a matter of days in modern wars it's a pretty small number for the whole planet isn't it? In the first 24 hours of the war the US and Israel launched on Iran, they hit something like 1500-2000 targets. How hardened are the data centers? Are they in structures that handle some level of explosives? Do they have counter measures like internal blast walls dividing things into cells so a few hundred pounds of high explosive in one area doesn't damage outside the cell? I mean, of course like all data centers they'll have considered extensive countermeasures to fire, environmental threats, grid issues and so on. But has "nation-state level attack via mass drones or bombardment" been part of the threat model over the last few decades? Hardening of telecoms was certainly considered for old Ma Bell and such back in the CW days but that was a very different environment.
I guess it makes me think about what a soft underbelly this could be for a lot of modern society. There's always been consideration of threats to refineries and power stations and industrial production and all those big metal deals. But like, forget any sort of nuclear exchange, any sort of crazy super Starfish style big EMP, just purely a few thousand drones nailing data centers. Nobody even directly dies, just a lot of wrecked computers. What would be the cost of losing all the clouds and colo stuff? How long to replace, at what cost? How much depends on it?
----
0: https://www.datacentermap.com/c/amazon-aws/
Instead of targeting data center itself, it's far easier to target the electrical substation that powers the datacenter. It's relatively simple to do. Transformers require oil to cool themselves, and if the coolant reservoir is damaged, then they overheat and shut off. This exact infrastructure attack occurred in North Carolina in 2022 [0], where someone fired bullets into the coolant reservoirs and caused a several day power outage. The perpetrator was never caught. It's speculated a foreign actor did this to gauge the response in a future wartime scenario.
Most data centers have a dedicated electrical substation that powers it, so it's possible to target the data center without affecting anywhere else.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore_County_substation_attack
>Instead of targeting data centers, it's far easier to target the electrical substation that powers the datacenter
That has a lot of collateral damage that may or may not be desirable though. Simultaneously it might have quite a different long term effect right? If all the actual computers are unharmed they can be powered in other ways in an emergency, even if at much higher cost. Or powered back up later, the time lost might be militarily very significant but they're not gone.
But how many people and companies actually have full functional decentralized clones of all programs and data? How many people and companies have devices that are locked to remote hosts they expect to check in on at least once in awhile even if they're not "cloud dependent"? What if all that was literally gone, a few thousand missiles or drones and data centers are all just completely erased including tape backups, everything, suddenly we're in a world where all that compute and data is poof. And without hurting anything else, no traditional war crimes either, no power or direct food or transport disruptions. Everyone is fine and healthy, except with this huge societal exocortex gone.
Any cloud engineer worth their salt is going to have their programs be stateless and their data replicated across multiple data centers. Many cloud engineers are not worth their salt, but working in Big Tech, this has been table stakes for 20+ years. There are regular disaster drills, both scheduled and unscheduled, that test what happens when a datacenter disappears. Ideally everything transparently fails over, and most of the time, this is what happens.
The bigger problem is that a war is likely to hit multiple levels of infrastructure at the same time. So the datacenters will come under attack, but so will the fiber cables, and the switching apparatuses, and the power plants, and likely also the humans who maintain it all. High-availability software is usually designed for 1-2 components to fail at once and then to transparently route around them. If large chunks of the infrastructure all disappear at once, you can end up in some very weird cascading failure situations.
> Any cloud engineer worth their salt is going to have their programs be stateless and their data replicated across multiple data centers.
That doesn't help much in a shooting war, unfortunately.
Redundancy is great for uncorrelated outages - if a freak weather event or power problem knocks out data centres in London, and your backups in Paris and Frankfurt are unaffected.
But if there's a war and London is getting bombed? Good chance Paris and Frankfurt are also getting bombed.
Especially given modern weaponry. "Cheap" missiles and drones have a range that covers the better part of a continent.
> worth their salt
That's a big assumption. Often there's no time to do things right, or no money, or lack of oversight, and so on.
Not every company is staffed by empowered and highly motivated staff
To the parent poster's point.
It's not, unless you think part of the definition of "worth their salt" is never working for a company with bad resource allocation. And I don't see why it would be.
Transformers are also manufacturing constrained.
Electrical Transformer Manufacturing Is Throttling the Electrified Future - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47604887 - April 2026
Higher tier data centers can run for extended periods of time on backup generators, and some indefinitely if roads allow for diesel delivery.
Not necessarily. Many backup generators can only run for whatever the insurance estimators have calculated is the time required to restore the grid connection and that's it. For example one common means of generating backup power is marine diesels, which are readily available. These use the ocean for cooling. If you're using them to power a data center you need to provide cooling water to run them, and when you've run through that they shut down. That's just one example, but in general you can't run backup generators indefinitely.
> where someone fired bullets into the coolant reservoirs and caused a several day power outage.
So you mean to say, one doesn't even need drones, a datacenter could be (temporarily) taken out with a handgun?
Yes, though with a rifle (higher stopping power than a handgun).
Large parts of our society are built on trust, and there is societal ignorance of how vulnerable our infrastructure is.
Criminals generally aren't that sophisticated or intelligent, so they aren't aware they can target these places.
This is the same sinking realization people had after 9/11 when thinking about infrastructure. Just damaging one or two substations serving the downtown core of a major city could cause massive economic damage.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack
(Perpetrators also not caught)
>1:45 a.m. – The first bank of transformers, riddled with bullet holes and having leaked 52,000 US gallons (200,000 L; 43,000 imp gal) of oil, overheated...
That wasn't thought to be due to a foreign actor though, more likely it was domestic terrorism. Why would the effect on a rural local power station ever be a good measure of a wartime scenario at all?
It’s far more difficult to replace a data center than to replace transformers. Ukraine’s electricity grid has been under attack for years and manages to replace and rebuild transformers and restore power within hours.
Both seem like easy targets. Hitting the datacenters themselves could results in more permanent damage.
No, taking out the transformers, which can have lead times of three to five years, will result in the most long-term damage. You can't just pull one out of storage and drop it into place.
Ukraine has proven otherwise. A lot of European countries pulled them out of storage and gave to Ukraine. Of course there will be a limit to this if you destroy enough of them.
Europe scraped together some transformers they'd been holding in reserve as spares and hoped they wouldn't need them themselves at some point, but once they were gone, they were gone. https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-bottlenecks-transfor...
How about use drone submarines to cut optic fibre undersea cables?
You forgot the diesel generators within the DCs
Right. The diesel generator radiators are also susceptible to the same attack. A few bullets to each radiator would cause a coolant leak, and eventually they'd run out of coolant, overheat, and shut off.
Not enough damage.
Send two drones to firebomb the roof of the datacenter. Wouldn't trigger any fire suppression system that I am aware of.
hitting the electrical grid is a war crime, not so much an AWS server farm. optics / progressive escalation does matter
You're barking up the wrong tree.
The gear to replace the power infra is more readily available than the thousands and thousands of miles of wire and fiber in a datacenter, plus all the equipment, batteries, inverter/chargers, maybe some diesel generators, etc.
If you want to do economic damage, you hit the datacenter.
If you want to turn the people of the country against you and mobilize them, then you hit the power infra.
In any significant war the Internet is going to go down. That's what has happened empirically in countries undergoing significant wars or social unrest, like Russia, Iran, Yemen, Ethiopia, Syria, Myanmar, and Afghanistan. While IP packet routing itself may have been designed to survive a nuclear war, there have been many centralized systems built on top of it (DNS? Edge caching? Cloudflare? Big Tech) that are essential to the functioning of what we know of as the Internet.
If your threat model includes war and you want to have some of the conveniences of the Internet, you should make plans for how to host local copies of data and develop local-scale communications for the people you regularly talk with. The Internet is too big of a security and propaganda risk for governments to allow it to continue to exist when they are engaged in a real existential war.
Some systems are anycast and available in many datacenters for bandwidth cost reasons. Netflix used to deploy content caches in ISP edges.
But any single central point of failure might break them. Things like, is this account paid? Dunno!
Netflix and Youtube both still use caches in ISP edges. The internet would melt without them.
Which is why bitcoin was always a ready really dumb idea as “end times hedge”
In the "end times" where computers stop working and we don't even have electricity, your dollars in your digital bank account will be equally useless, and dollar banknotes will be used as fire starter.
Bitcoin was never designed as a post-collapse currency.
Dollars work without electricity. Gold works. Bottlecaps work.
One of my friends speculated that bullets will be a great currency at the end of the world.
Building blast resistant is a common practices for Refinery control rooms. The same methodologies can be employed for data centers as well.
1 blast can be expensively guarded againt. However designing anything above ground for sustained barges is practically/commercially prohibitive. Underground is only option.
PS: Civil Engineer. Designed few of those Gas explosion resistant control rooms.
Wouldn't it me much more effective and efficient to have a mechanism to simply not pick leaders who choose war?
History suggests we’ll have wars periodically, probably for as long as humans exist.
Progress is possible, it just requires retaining lessons from the past, and education
Without those, yes, we remain unevolved and the argument — we are powerful apes is indeed valid
Price of Peace 1945 (Beveridge) https://ia601505.us.archive.org/17/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.2...
And Price of Peace 2020 (Carter) https://www.amazon.com/Price-Peace-Democracy-Maynard-Keynes/...
Should be required reading
Seems to be really fucking difficult if the previous US election is any indication. May as well build all our infrastructure underground.
Most people on the planet did not pick Trump or Putin or any of the other leaders who recently chose to start a war.
Sure but thats really fucking hard tho.
> the first time I've really thought hard about how big a target data centers would be in any sort of modern peer war
Given the rapid and increasing rise of AI use in actually fighting wars, I suspect data centers won't just be a big target, they will eventually be the #1 priority target. Taking them offline won't just be of interest in terms of economic damage, it will be a direct strategic goal toward militarily winning the conflict.
Until it is clear that the use of AI in "actually fighting wars" doesn't put senior military people at risk of never being able to leave their own country again for fear of prosecution for war crimes, I'm not so sure that the "rapid and increasing rise" is going to actually be a thing.
> Until it is clear that the use of AI in "actually fighting wars" doesn't put senior military people at risk of never being able to leave their own country again for fear of prosecution for war crimes
I don't believe that's a real concern that the senior military people have anymore. War crimes are legal in 2026. That ship has sailed (and was double tap struck by the US Navy). Nobody is doing anything about it.
War crimes are unlikely to be prosecuted within the USA. On this we agree.
Which is why I specifically mentioned the risk of not being able to leave the country, because I'd be willing to wager a bit more than international prosecutions for war crimes are significantly more likely, and would be occuring in a world that is growing noticeably more "America needs to be taught a lesson" in spirit.
Primarily, countries should prosecute their own criminals. That's the whole sovereignty thing. If you don't, and these are international criminals, your country as a whole is what we call a state supporter of terrorism, or some such, if those international crimes have political goals and are directed against other countries and their people as a whole (and don't fit the high bar of self-defense). If the crimes are done by those in power, it's just state terrorism.
Actually, we call them "war crimes" and have done since at least WWII.
I'll rephrase my previous post for you, to make it clearer:
Lack of prosecution of high-level war criminals makes your country a state supporter of terrorism. (the claim in the post)
Because that's what US war criminal leaders do. They terrorize entire nation by threatening population's survival via destruction of all their power plants, which I assume includes nuclear fallout from their nuclear power plant.
War crimes have never been anything more than a way the west can punish its enemies. It’s hilarious people think this norm continuing is some refutation of the system as designed.
> War crimes have never been anything more than a way the west can punish its enemies.
They're the way winners can punish their enemies.
If Germany and Japan had won WWII, US/British/Russian military and political leaders absolutely would've been on trial.
At the same time, agreements between peer countries to follow basic rules have generally held. Note that neither side in the current conflict is using dirty bombs, or dropping nerve gas or bioweapons on civilians, etc.
> War crimes have never been anything more than a way the west can punish its enemies
That's a fair point, the major change isn't that we suddenly started committing war crimes, it is that we've dropped all pretenses of trying to justify why what we did isn't one.
Isn't that an improvement? It seems better to have people who are honest about what they're doing, even when committing war crimes. At least then people can have an honest conversation about whether the policy is working.
One of the most frustrating things about wars is people adopt policies that don't advance their objectives and then lie about what they're doing, what happened and why. This sets up an environment where militarys do things that aren't even in their own interests, let alone anyone else's, and the public discourse is busy arguing about some wild imaginary scenario that isn't related. Better to have people focused on the real world and accurately understanding both (1) what the policy was and (2) what the outcome of the policy was.
If I admit to killing someone in court, because I regret it, I acknowledge I have a debt to society I need to pay, and honesty is the first step on my route towards eventual reform - that's an improvement.
If I admit to killing someone because I want everyone to know I'm a tough, viscous killer and they'd better not piss me off or they'll be next - that's not an improvement.
You'd rather a vicious killer who pretended to be harmless and actively tried to fool you?
As to the behavior itself, I imagine the merits are heavily dependent on context. International politics depends to some extent on demonstrating a willingness and ability to engage in violence. That's not the whole story but it's definitely part of it.
> Isn't that an improvement?
Not really, IMO. Their goal isn't honesty and transparency, they just DGAF to hide it because they correctly realize there won't be any personal consequences for their actions.
They are still lying about most everything else - why the war was started, suppressing the amount of causalities, etc.
The Hague Invasion Act takes care of that.
That would require a future president to choose to use the authorization.
President Davis The First isn't going to lift a finger to stop the ICC prosecuting former Secretary of Defense Hegseth, and, I suspect, neither would quite a few other potential future presidents.
It does not seem like USA, Israel, Iran or Russia cares.
That being said, if it has meaningful military data on it, then it is a valid target. And that would be their argument.
If they hit AI data centers, 50% of software developers will convert to Islam. :)
Most of the world that did convert to Islam, did it out of pragmatism. That goes for Catholicism as well. Though a special part of my heart goes out to the pragmatic Quakers of the early US, who largely seem to have done it just to have a chance to thumb their nose at the government.
Care to explain?
xAI's data centers in space (should they happen) will push the frontier of war firmly overhead too.
Hey now, we had space stations with cannons in what, the 70s?
Satellite -> satellite warfare already happens, and may have even been the the cause of a Starlink satellite "exploding" the other day.
I recently wrote a little on this https://generalresearch.com/detail-oriented/how-to-seed-a-cl...
While we're completely at the mercy of datacenters that we can colo out racks / power / upstreams from, it's a worthy discussion for any technology company that wants some amount of digital sovereignty over their presence online and ability to provide their service independent of a hypervisor / cloud provider (or even just a centralized location).
The best option is simply to anycast from any many distinct countries that are either neutral, or unlikely to be involved with any global or regional conflicts at any given time. You don't want them getting bombed at the same time!
Ironically,the classical target, Washington DC, is less than 25 miles down a very simple highway to Northern Virginia's massive datacenter alley. Our national defense is ultimately predicated on heavy ordnance not being able to show up undetected in this part of the world. Hence the path preferred by attackers of burrowing into Azure signing keys or ransomware attacks on the grid. Much less hardware to transport.
Iran doesn't, but whether or not China and Russia have nuclear subs parked off the East Coast is anyone's guess.
There are ways to shield data centers if one is serious about it...
e.g.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/oracle-opens-first...
Oracle are actually subletting part of Bynet's new-ish Har Hotzvim facility which has 2,400 racks but is probably power-constrained - I believe it had 16 MW when it went live, with passive provision for doubling that. Even if it's since been upgraded, that's still only 13 kW per rack which is pretty stingy these days.
As a very rough rule of thumb building down is about 4x more expensive than building up. So probably worth doing if you're Shin Bet (who I believe also have space in the same dc), but for the likes of Oracle it's only going to be used to serve clients with specific security requirements. Think of it as a halo project - more of a marketing exercise than something that's actually going to be used by the average customer.
The same goes for datacentres hosted in cold war bunkers etc - they always end up being too constrained in one way or another to be useful. The big facilities end up being built above ground and rely on geographic redundancy rather than trying to make themselves (literally) bomb-proof.
The way everything is so overleveraged on the success of these companies being packed into ETFs, it would probably take down the whole economy. You'd be able to shut down even more manufacturing without even destroying it just from economic forces. That is unless the US responds by nationalizing everything, which they won't. They'd rather it go to smithereens so someone has a chance to be made wildly rich rebuilding.
Don't forget underseas cables: https://www.submarinecablemap.com/
How about using drone submarines to cut optic fibre undersea cables? Can geolocation coordinates be beamed to submarines deep under water?
Communicating with submarines that are deep underwater is pretty hard. There are techniques like ELF (Extremely Low Frequency) but they require a small power station to transmit a few characters a minute.
> Nobody even directly dies
People almost directly start dying if data centers go down.
Not in the minutes, but within days definitely
Then ask yourself why is the US so aggressively trying to switch the world to a martial stance.
It’s a rhetorical question, of course, because we all know it’s because China is winning the traditional economic game on the manufacturing the McKinsey and Bain class sold out for decades and therefore military will have to become the new leadership measuremen, only appreciating as an asset in a less safe dog eat dog world.
The Thiels and friends who came up with this shit of course have their own infrastructure in their end time bunkers, but however stupid this gambit sounds, it’s what’s being played right now.
Agreed that Govt/Military runs on AWS/Azure/whatever. They care about "security" in a "virtual" sense, but I presume soon we'll see requirements like: "Must Have: Missile Defence Perimeter" next to the "Must be FIPS compliant".
My partner works in that space.
Sovereignty and self-sufficiency are big topics. The US centric cloud at least is killing itself through geopolitical risks for gov customers outside the US. Literally number one operational risk now.
Yep. Look at my last comment. Its exactly how to mitigate risk related to the nation you're in, in a data sense.
The country opposing the country you're in won't extradite.
> I've really thought hard about
Yeah. Financialize the economy presupposing a global open market, then subvert, boycott and bomb said market. So clever.
hmm maybe aws should make datacenter locations secret?
I mean, why even publish those locations?
if this is purely for PR, they can publish fake locations...
if this is for VIP visits... well you can always send private invitations
But aren't they pretty hard to hide? I mean, they cover a lot of grounds, they have lots of infrastructure leading right to them...even if someone makes a few wrong guesses, it's going to be easy to find where the data centers are.
>Disclaimer: Please be aware that Amazon Web Services does not list its data center locations publicly. Hence all AWS listings in our database are based on publicly available information from third parties, open databases, property registries, construction applications, permits, tenders, news coverage and our custom research. There may be incorrect or outdated locations, as well as locations missing.
AWS doesn't disclose their locations.
> hmm maybe aws should make datacenter locations secret?
Open source intelligence today rivals the best of any nation. That would be virtually impossible to hide for long.
One more reason for P2P decentralized tech.
Tangentially related but Iran wasn't much of a threat to the USA before Trump decided to attack it. And apart from Israel, nobody is backing this war. The sooner he realizes it makes zero sense, the better for the whole world. It seems that apart from Russia and the USA, other countries are not so eager to start wars. And what is happening now is a bitter lesson also for China: starting a war is easy, winning it is nearly impossible. So I hope we won't really start to build all infra in under-earth bunkers after all.
[dead]
>We've built trillions and trillions of dollars in infrastructure in the peace time since, and it seems fairly concentrated.
and thus is easily defended. It would be a pocket change - tens of millions - for AMZN to put say a Rheinmetall Skyshield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyshield at the data center.
Considering how hard US military bases and radar systems have been hit (and those are not city-sized target) I am unconvinced that even AMZN's pocket change could realiably protect against the kind of attacks we see in this war
How they were hit? Multiple drones overwhelming relatively small number of air defense systems. Systems like Patriot are great against several very capable targets like ballistic missiles. Such (expensive centralized) systems do much worse against multiple widespread targets like an armada of low flying low speed drones (add to that low speed cut-off filter to avoid hitting general aviation and the likes).
Point defense systems like Skyshield (or even that very old and cheap - $2M - Gepard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flakpanzer_Gepard ) work wonderfully against all those drones coming in.
Heck, even just soldiers with MANPADs would have easily shot down those drones (you just have to distribute those soldiers to all those strategic objects which hasn't been done)
We have classic situation here - everybody have been watching Ukraine war for 4 years, yet nobody has prepared for such style of war.
>I am unconvinced that even AMZN's pocket change could realiably protect against the kind of attacks we see in this war
No even low flying slow drone - pretty typical situation of top Russian cruise missile shot down by Gepard
https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/zdbvim/a_ukr...
Also AMZN has its own drones dept - in "hot" zones in "hot" times they can put several people with drones (in the high speed configuration) to be used for interception. This is basically how Ukranians have been doing, and that is an experience they are now exporting to the Gulf states.
https://www.hisutton.com/Ukrainian-Interceptor-Drones.html
>Amazon tells its employees to deprioritize these regions as the Iran war deals meaningful damage to its infrastructure in the Gulf.
Deprioritised means migrate usage out of this zone just in case anyone misreads the context here.
This is the part I don’t understand about Elon’s Terafab: What protects it from a missile? Or laser?
Better yet: Jeff or Sir Richard hook up one of their ships and just tow away the Terafab… yoink!
There are good physics-based reasons to put data centers in space, but the geo-political world isn’t informed merely by physics.
Trying to build things in a way that they have to be resistant to missile and drone stand is not a very reasonable scaling constraint. That's why we need non stupid leaders who don't start pointless wars
Does the status page still show it as up?
Wanna check?
Trump really only babbles nothing burgers now. The whole "we must open the Strait of Hormuz", but it was closed following the invasion of Iran at the behest of Netanyahu proxy-controlling Trump - so how is that then logical that you refer to a prior state that already existed, as a new war-meta-goal? This is like an autogenerate of fake news and lies. This can not be the person really "leading" the USA, so who is really making those decisions? Trump even forgets what he said the day before and even contradicts himself in the very same sentence; then he chains buzzwords that make no sense, such as "we can not have healthcare because we must wage war instead". This is like George Orwell 1984, but stupid. George Orwell's book made sense; Trump is just dementia 2.0 1984 reversed. Nobody would read that Trump-novel, just as nobody serious would watch Melania. It's the ultimate Soap TV show for the US audience, but it is just not watchable. No risk management or analysis; Hegseth recently mass-fired those who said his plan is stupid. Well, even after firing people, the plan is just stupid.
Most of the world is past blaming Trump for this. They're now blaming Americans for not removing an obviously insane tyrant from power. Americans have long said, "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." Well, where's that vigilance? You're not all blind, are you? Suddenly lost your taste for "freedom", have you?
You may not have voted for Trump, but now you're accountable to the world for him.
I wonder if this is what Bezos had in mind when he doubled down on support for Trump.
The way the richest people in the US have sucked up to Trump is shameful.
Not your (drone)air-defense, not your data center I guess.
I hate when "the cloud" which I imagined to be some entity in ether space, turns out to be just a building with computers that can be bombed
It's someone else's computer. Better that someone not be in the middle east..
The big security mantra from aws has always been that they deal with the security of the cloud and you/we deal with the security in the cloud.
I wonder if this will translate to amazon implementing para-militar security of the cloud (eg: drones to defend from drone attacks).
My intuition suggests me that:
- Bezos would have absolutely considered this, like seriously considered - the current ceo likely won’t
Btw the writing has been on the proverbial wall for some time, amazon is in their day-2 era.
[flagged]
It's not quite as bad as in the UAE where only about 10% of the nation has citizenship but it's basically the same picture. Most people there are practically indentured servants
if you dont colo your own servers you don't own anything.
>if you dont colo your own servers you don't own anything.
I'm confused, what does ownership have to do with this particular failure mode? The issue here is a (for many) unforeseen new tradeoff involved in centralization. Colocating at a central place has the exact same tradeoff in this case: bandwidth is vastly more available and cheaper towards the core, and there are significant amortization gains to be had with a lot of basic shared infra. But it's also one big structure holding a lot of computers and infra everyone is depending on, that's the whole point of it! We're all sharing network backbone and power filtering/redundancy and so on and so forth, vs paying for that separately. That means a missile or drone or bomb hit to the building still hits all of us whether we own the servers there or we're running workloads on someone else's servers.
The only responses are either central counter measures or decentralization. Both have significant costs and complexity, that's why it wasn't just done proactively right?
I think it's a joke: you REALLY don't want to own your own servers.
I don't think it is. There are many many cases where you do want to own them. The people you rent yours from are making a shit load of money so it doesn't sound that bad of an idea
I buy lots of things from people who make a pile of money from low margin goods/services sheerly on scale. There are many things i could not reproduce more cheaply from constituent parts, even if i value my time at $0.
This includes things I have expertise in.
AWS is clearly not in a low-margin business, though.
you're going to save money by having your own physical servers?
Yes, a lot of money in fact.
The challenges of doing so are often significantly overstated. It can make a lot of sense to own them.
It sometimes makes financial sense to own your own servers
You do if you need absolute control over data location, isolation, and physical access.
You should have the opposite takeaway - if you don't have redundancy in the cloud you don't actually have uptime.
Your servers also may get hit with a bomb/missle.
Why would I want to own a cut-off datacenter in Dubai?
... with some extra holes in it, no less.
I don't think co-locating with AWS or any other DC in Middle-East would help in this case. Unless you bring your own missile defence network, you are vulnerable.
In the case of if you could bring your own missile-defence-network, then you probably don't need co-location anyway. (There is nothing "co", it's just location you build & operate, with your Patriot or whatever)
boolean "you are vulnerable" means nothing, because it's always True
spreading out decreases risk, concentration increases it
"If you don't colo your own generators you don't own anything."