A point that didn’t fit in today’s already-long Morning Jolt about data center construction, relating to security concerns . . .
Back in July 2025, Christopher S. Chivvis and Sam Winter-Levy of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace wrote in the Washington Post that a Trump-administration-approved plan to build massive artificial intelligence data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia was a deeply flawed idea. They warned that the plan would “put a central node of the world’s future AI infrastructure in locations highly vulnerable to attack from hostile actors — and at a time when the risk from cheap drones is intensifying.”
But hey, what were the odds that the Iranians or some other force with access to cheap drones were going to start launching them at strategically important locations in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, or other U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf, right?
On March 1, Iran used Shahed 136 drones to strike two Amazon data centers in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), causing devastating fire, power outages, and further damage as firefighters fought the blazes. A strike on a third Amazon data center in Bahrain soon followed, although reports suggest the attack caused the damage indirectly when a drone hit nearby. It is unclear at this time whether the strike slightly missed the data center or merely caused collateral damage to the facility while attacking another target.
These attacks highlight the importance of data centers to civilian society and their growing operational significance in contemporary warfare.
Ask Chivvis and Winter-Levy for the lottery numbers, while you’re at it.