AI within artillery range

Author: David, Deep Tide TechFlow

On March 1st, Iranian missiles and drones struck the Gulf region, one of which landed on an Amazon data center in the UAE.

The data center caught fire, lost power, and approximately 60 cloud services were disrupted.

Claude, one of the world's most popular AIs, runs on Amazon's cloud. On the same day, Claude experienced a global outage.

Anthropic's official explanation was a surge in users that overwhelmed the servers.

As of press time, social media is still filled with complaints about Claude's service unavailability; on the well-known prediction market Polymarket, the topic of "how many more times will Claude experience outages in March" has already appeared.

If it is ultimately confirmed that Iran was responsible, this will be the first time in human history that a commercial data center has been physically destroyed in war. However, why would a civilian data center be bombed? Let's rewind two days. On February 28th, the United States and Israel launched a joint airstrike on Iran, killing Supreme Leader Khamenei and a number of senior officials. A significant portion of the intelligence analysis, target identification, and battlefield simulation for this airstrike was done with the help of Claude. Through cooperation between the military and the data analytics company Palantir, Claude had long been embedded in the US military's intelligence system. Ironically, just hours before the airstrikes, Trump had ordered a complete shutdown of Anthropic because it refused to hand over its AI to the Pentagon without restrictions. But despite the shutdown, the war was still going to be fought. The official statement was that it would take at least six months to remove Claude from the military system. So, before the ink was even dry on the ban, the US military used Claude to bomb Iran. Then Iran retaliated, and missiles landed on the server room running the Claude AI.

Image source: Bloomberg

The data center was most likely not targeted at, but merely affected by the impact. But regardless of whether the missile was aimed at the data center, one thing is certain:

Truth is within the range of artillery, and AI is also within the range of artillery. Both the side firing the cannon and the side being hit by it.

AI infrastructure is built on the Middle East powder keg

Over the past three years, Silicon Valley has moved half of its AI industry to the Gulf of Mexico.

The reason is simple.

The UAE and Saudi Arabia have the world's wealthiest sovereign wealth funds, cheap electricity, and a rule: "If you want to serve my customers, your data must be stored on my territory." Therefore, Amazon has opened data centers in the UAE and Bahrain, and is investing another $5.3 billion in Saudi Arabia to prepare for another. Microsoft has nodes in the UAE and Qatar, and its Saudi node is also completed. OpenAI, in partnership with Nvidia and SoftBank, is building an AI park in the UAE worth over $30 billion, touted as the largest computing power base outside the United States. In January of this year, the US signed an agreement with the UAE and Qatar called "Pax Silica," which sounds very appealing. The core of the agreement is to control the flow of chips and ensure that advanced chips do not fall into China's hands. In exchange, the UAE obtained a license to import hundreds of thousands of Nvidia's most advanced processors annually. Abu Dhabi's G42 severed ties with Huawei, and Saudi AI companies pledged not to buy Huawei equipment... The entire Gulf's AI infrastructure, from chips to data centers to models, has completely gravitated towards the US. These agreements considered everything, from chip export controls, data sovereignty, investment parity, and the risk of technology leaks. But none of them considered the possibility of someone bombing the data centers with missiles. A Qatar University international security scholar, after witnessing the fire at an Amazon data center, made a statement that I find quite apt: "These security frameworks are designed for supply chain control and political alignment; physical security has never been on the agenda." For ten years, cloud computing has been about elasticity, redundancy, and decentralization. But data centers are tangible buildings with addresses, walls, roofs, and coordinates. No matter how advanced your chips are, if the data center is bombed, it's bombed. "Cloud" is a metaphor; a data center is not. AI seems abstract, running in code and floating in the cloud. But the code runs on chips, the chips are installed in data centers, and the data centers are built on Earth. Who will protect AI? This time, Amazon's data center was affected, or at best, collateral damage. But what about next time? In a climate of escalating global geopolitical conflict, if your data center is running AI models that help your adversary identify targets, your adversary has no reason not to attack it as a military facility. International law also lacks an answer to this question. Current laws of war stipulate "dual-use facilities," but those provisions apply to factories and bridges; no one considers data centers. A data center that handles bank transactions during the day and intelligence analysis for the military at night—is it civilian or military? In peacetime, data center location considerations include latency, electricity prices, and policy incentives... In war, none of these matter; what matters is how far your data center is from the nearest military base. Therefore, this bombing has begun to shift everyone's attention. Previously, everyone discussed the same anxiety: would AI replace my job? But no one discussed another question: how vulnerable is AI itself before it replaces you? A regional conflict crippled the Middle East node of the world's largest cloud service provider for an entire day; and this was just one data center. There are currently nearly 1,300 hyperscale data centers worldwide, with another 770 under construction. These data centers consume more and more electricity, water, and money, and carry more and more things—your savings, your medical records, your food delivery orders, even military intelligence from a certain country... But the solutions for protecting these data centers, to this day, are still likely limited to fire protection systems and backup generators. When AI becomes a nation's infrastructure, its security is no longer just a matter for one company. Who will protect AI? Cloud vendors? The Pentagon? Or the UAE's air defense system? This question was theoretical three days ago. It's not. AI is within artillery range. Actually, it's not just AI. In this era, what isn't within artillery range?