Connexion
When Russia began attacking Ukrainian data centers and telecommunication infrastructure, it apparently failed to prepare for possible retaliation. Now Russia’s digital services are facing widespread outages after Ukrainian drone strikes knocked out three of the largest data centers owned by Russian tech giant Yandex within several days.
Pro-Kremlin bloggers are warning that Russia’s centralized digital economy could collapse because the country is not prepared for the “data center war” it started, according to posts translated by the pseudonymous independent researcher ChrisO_wiki. The Russian commentators also suggested that Ukraine’s decentralized digital services could prove more resilient than Russia’s system if the countries continue trading such blows.
Russia initially launched a drone strike campaign targeting Ukrainian data centers and mobile phone networks in late September. The attacks temporarily disrupted Internet and cell phone service for up to 100,000 households in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and came as part of a broader long-range strike campaign that has involved Russian missiles and jet-powered drones hitting Ukraine’s power grid infrastructure, transportation hubs, and even residential apartment building blocks.
Ukrainian drone strikes have knocked out two of five data centers belonging to the Russian tech giant Yandex. The damage has left Yandex, known as “Russia’s Google” because it operates the country’s most popular search engine, struggling to maintain its AI chatbot and other online services.
The Ukrainian drones struck Yandex data centers in the Sasovo and Kaluga regions of Russia on October 8 and October 9, according to Reuters. Those actions came as a direct response to a Russian drone strike campaign targeting Ukraine’s data centers, which has disrupted mobile phone and Internet services for thousands of Ukrainians since late September.
“We continue to respond to Russia’s attacks on Ukraine, and we’re doing so with high precision,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a post on X. “Another data center was hit as well—our symmetrical response.”
A surge in Russian jet-powered drone strikes on Ukrainian data centers has increasingly disrupted mobile phone and Internet services for thousands of people. Now Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other government officials are warning of the need for more air defense capabilities, as such telecommunication outages could threaten Ukraine’s digital economy and undermine the country’s ongoing resistance to Russia’s invasion.
The Russian attacks on Ukrainian telecommunication infrastructure have focused on Ukraine’s capital of Kyiv since September 23, according to the nonprofit Reporters Without Borders. Ukraine’s digital transformation ministry reported that 100,000 households in the Kyiv region were temporarily experiencing Internet outages from those initial strikes—and Russia has only intensified its strike campaign against major Ukrainian data centers and mobile phone networks in recent weeks.
“Russian attacks on Ukraine’s telecommunication infrastructure are not new, with strikes and shelling previously damaging fiber optic lines, cell towers, and facilities belonging to mobile network companies,” said Tetiana Gaviuk, analyst for Europe at ACLED, in a post on October 1. “However, the recent concentrated attacks on Kyiv’s data centers and telecom networks stand out because multiple providers and facilities were hit within days, indicating Russia’s increased pressure on Ukraine’s digital infrastructure.”
Half a year after Iranian drone strikes knocked out multiple Amazon data centers, the US tech company has acknowledged the permanent loss of some customer data that was hosted in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.
Amazon Web Services was “unable to restore access to the resources and data” hosted in some of the war-damaged data centers, according to an AWS dashboard update posted on September 15. The development was first reported by Reuters and suggests that the Iranian strikes inflicted catastrophic damage on the data centers.
Customer data was irretrievably lost in one of three AWS availability zones in the United Arab Emirates region, specifically the mec1-az2 availability zone. Each availability zone is serviced by one or more Amazon data centers.
Oracle’s proposed investment in 2 gigawatts of renewable energy projects for New Mexico comes as local opposition could delay development of the Project Jupiter data center that Oracle is building for OpenAI.
The two tech companies are developing the $165 billion Project Jupiter data center in Santa Teresa, New Mexico, as part of the broader Stargate AI infrastructure project announced by President Donald Trump in 2025. But Project Jupiter faces local protests and court battles over concerns about its environmental impacts—and the latest Oracle announcement on September 8 seeking proposals for renewable energy projects does not change the fact that the data center will be powered by fuel cells that consume natural gas.
“Like all matching programs, this would be synthetic in the sense that 2 GW of renewables wouldn't directly power the data center,” wrote Michael Thomas, CEO of the Cleanview data platform that tracks renewable energy and data center projects, in a LinkedIn post.
In early June, a fire broke out in a still-unfinished building at the Lake Mariner data center in Somerset, New York, exposing just how little the local fire department knew about what it was walking into. Firefighters reportedly found no working alarm, no suppression system, and three dead hydrants; the safety documents they’re legally entitled to see reportedly burned up in the blaze.
Steve Matisz, chief of the Barker Fire Department, said his crew went into the building “kind of blind,” facing heavy black smoke from chemicals they couldn’t identify because the safety sheets meant to inform them had apparently burned up. “It’s been a difficult situation,” Matisz said. He wasn't sure what to think about the claim that the safety sheets had burned in the fire.
The site is a former coal mine on Lake Ontario. The $3.2 billion campus is one of the largest AI data center buildouts in New York, and it has many stakeholders. A company called TeraWulf owns and operates the data center on land it leases from a company owned by its own CEO; Fluidstack, a UK-based AI company, will run the center; Google holds warrants for a future 14 percent equity stake and has agreed to guarantee Fluidstack’s lease payments; and Anthropic is among the AI companies whose compute demand the facility exists to serve.
Meta is testing robots that can plug in cables, reset servers, and handle other tasks inside its data centers, according to several current and former workers familiar with the projects. The ongoing effort, which has not been previously reported, may eventually allow Meta to operate its rapidly expanding data center footprint with fewer humans, keeping labor costs in check as its spending on AI infrastructure soars.
Meta is using robots and related hardware from several different vendors, including Watney Robotics, Kinova, and ABB, according to the same workers, who asked to remain anonymous because they weren’t authorized to speak to the media. Kinova and ABB declined to comment. Watney didn’t respond to requests for comment.
In one experiment, Meta is evaluating whether a Kinova Gen3 robotic arm could be used for power cycling or cutting off electricity to servers. The company is also testing a different robot to swap networking cables. One Meta data center worker estimates that if it’s successful, the bot could replace up to 80 percent of some people’s workloads. “We thought those of us performing the physical tasks were safe for a while, but not anymore,” says the worker. “It’s coming for us all, unfortunately.”
“Protect our water,” “Water for people not AI,” “Don’t mess with our water,” declare protest signs from Texas to New Mexico to Arizona. Angered by water use, energy consumption, and pollution, locals are increasingly protesting the rapid expansion of data centers in the United States as tech companies work to rapidly expand capacity for AI.
Many data centers rely at least partly on water to absorb heat from air or surfaces, and then cause cooling as it evaporates, just like sweating keeps our bodies cool. The processors inside data centers can reach internal temperatures of up to 176° Fahrenheit, for the same reasons that an overtaxed laptop heats up.
But while there’s little doubt that data centers are consuming significant amounts of energy, water consumption is more complicated. Claims circulating online bring scant clarity, ranging from articles claiming that chatbots can consume 500 ml of water per query to some online commentators declaring AI's water issue to be nonexistent. And the consumption data from large tech companies themselves are often incomplete and inconsistent.
Data centers have become the largest driver of a surging electricity demand that is straining US power grids. But the AI data center boom has also accelerated investment in a technology that could provide a silver lining for everyone—solid-state power transformers that replace industrial-age technology with modern power electronics.
Power grids currently rely on conventional transformer technology that is painstakingly assembled by hand and has a fundamental design dating back to the 1880s. Two copper wire coils manually wound around a steel core create electromagnetic fields that help step up voltage levels of alternating current electricity for long-distance transmission or step down voltage levels for the electricity use of homes and businesses. The largest power transformers cannot be mass-manufactured but are instead custom-built for each utility company’s electrical substations.
Manufacturing constraints, coupled with the scramble to upgrade US power infrastructure, have meant utility companies and other customers must wait up to several years for delivery of new power transformers. That not only hinders power grid infrastructure expansion needed to support growing electricity demand, but also delays the process of replacing aging power transformers.
Nowhere is the US data center boom bigger than in Texas. But less than a year after declaring Texas the “epicenter of AI development,” Governor Greg Abbott has declared a moratorium on all new power grid connections for data centers—at least until developers provide more information about their projects’ potential impacts on the grid and communities.
The Republican governor directed regulators in an August 3 announcement at the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the grid operators at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) to perform a “comprehensive verification and audit of all data centers advancing through ERCOT’s interconnection process.” As an independent system operator, ERCOT oversees a power grid that operates separately from the rest of the United States and provides services to most of Texas.
Texas has aggressively courted data center development with its availability of cheap land and relatively abundant energy resources, along with offering state incentives, like tax breaks and fewer regulations. That puts the state on track to surpass Virginia in becoming the largest US data center market.
Satellite images have revealed new damage to Amazon data centers in the Middle East along with at least one crucial Saudi oil facility, following missile and drone attacks by Iran and its Houthi allies.
The images from Europe’s Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellites provide evidence of a widening war as the United States and several Gulf states exchange military strikes with Iran, the Houthi faction in Yemen, and Iran-backed militias in Iraq. Such satellite images also offer independent verification of claimed war damage, despite the US government having pressured US commercial firms and even Europe to restrict satellite imagery of the region.
Three Amazon data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain were already previously damaged by Iranian drone strikes on March 1. Those earlier attacks stuck Amazon with months of expected repairs and forced Amazon Web Services customers in the Middle East to migrate workloads to other cloud regions.
From New York to Texas, state and local governments have heard the message: Their constituents are wary of data centers. Across the political spectrum, large numbers of Americans agree that these facilities should pay taxes, cover the bill for water and power upgrades, keep noise to a minimum, and employ locals at decent wages. In other words, data centers should legitimately benefit the communities whose land and power they use.
Developers often express a willingness to do these things—until they see the specific list of requirements.
A pitched battle in the Philadelphia suburbs provides a vivid illustration of this dynamic. Developer Brian O'Neill wants to build a 2 million-square-foot data center in a former steel plant. Under Pennsylvania law, Plymouth Township (in which the plant is located) cannot simply say "no" to any lawful land use, but it can enforce zoning rules and require project mitigations in the name of health and safety.
Verizon is seeking to tap into Silicon Valley’s AI spending in a big way. The telecom giant revealed a deal worth more than $1 billion to link Google data centers using Verizon’s dark fiber routes—and it’s also tearing copper wiring out of central offices as it converts them into small data centers suitable for supporting AI inference workloads.
The telecom company publicly disclosed the Google partnership and data center conversion efforts as part of a new “AI Connect” business initiative during an earnings conference call covering the second quarter of 2026. Verizon also expects to announce additional AI-related deals by the end of the year that would be “worth multiple billions of dollars in revenue over the next several years,” said Dan Schulman, CEO of Verizon Communications, during the earnings call.
“Now it really is about, 'how do you connect data center to data center to assure that you can optimize to maximize the ever-exploding need for compute?'” Schulman said. “And while that data center connectivity demand is exploding, there's an equal amount of desire and demand to power inference models and applications that need ultra-low latency, like robotics or remote surgery, autonomous driving, and move that out into the edge, as opposed to these big, massive data centers.”
The Trump administration is quietly considering a rule change that could make it easier for polluters to build facilities—including certain gas plants and diesel generators that power data centers—with little to no notice to the public.
On Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency held a public hearing on a proposed rule change that would hand the power to states to decide how the public participates in the permitting process for certain new sources of air pollution. The proposed rollback comes as data centers face greater pushbackacross the US, with many communities using the permitting process to try to slow down development. Any changes could have major consequences for how ordinary people are given notice about new or expanded polluting facilities coming into their neighborhoods.
“As someone actively working in communities with data centers, I know this to be fundamentally true: People want to have a say,” Vanessa Lynch, a Pennsylvania organizer with Moms Clean Air Force, said at the EPA hearing.
Energy companies are raising money at IPO at their fastest pace this century, taking advantage of investors’ hunt for new ways to bet on the boom in power-intensive AI data centers.
Initial public offerings for energy firms raised $12.6 billion in the first half of this year, according to data firm Dealogic. That marks the highest half-year level since the peak of the dotcom bubble in late 1999 and the highest first-half figure on record. It is well above 2025’s full-year total of $4.3 billion.
The surge in fundraising comes as access to the vast amounts of energy needed to run data centers emerges as a bottleneck in a multi-trillion-dollar AI investment boom.
SpaceX has pinned the bulk of its future value on orbital data centers. Not rockets. Not spacecraft.
Instead, it envisions launching and maintaining a constellation of 1 million satellites capable of generating 120 GW to power tens of millions—and potentially up to 100 million—frontier-class GPUs for data center services.
The company's founder, Elon Musk, revealed plans for this massive constellation months ago, but until recently, the scope of the individual satellites was largely unknown. That changed in June, when Musk and Ian Dahl, director of satellite engineering for SpaceX, spoke in a promotional video about the company's plans to develop the first iteration of an orbital data center, called an AI1 satellite. The video finally provided the company's numbers about the satellite's size and power capabilities.
US manufacturers in many Rust Belt cities and towns are paying significantly higher electricity costs as growing energy demand from data centers strains the largest power grid operator in the United States. The resulting squeeze on profit margins for steelmakers and brick factories could further undermine President Donald Trump’s “Made in America” plan to revive US manufacturing, and it comes as Trump has simultaneously championed the tech companies behind the AI data center boom.
Factory electricity bills are generally rising faster than those for other business customers or residential customers, according to a Reuters analysis. It highlighted the example of the Belden Brick Company, a 141-year-old brick manufacturer in Ohio, whose electricity bills have soared from $1,600 to $12,000 per month due to a higher monthly capacity charge in the 13-state region served by the grid operator PJM Interconnection.
Meanwhile, the Steel Manufacturers Association warned that US steel companies concentrated in the Rust Belt region served by PJM Interconnection are paying tens of millions of dollars in higher power costs per year. Electricity accounts for 20 to 40 percent of the total production costs of making steel.
DeepSeek, the Chinese startup developing large language models that are competitive with those from US companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, is planning to enter the silicon business, according to Reuters.
Citing three people familiar with the matter, Reuters writes that DeepSeek has been working on a move into silicon for about a year. It has been meeting with potential partners in the hardware and silicon space and has been hiring engineers for the project.
Google reported that its annual electricity consumption rose by 37 percent in 2025—the largest increase in the company’s history as Silicon Valley’s AI data center buildout continues. But the tech giant says it kept operational carbon emissions down by continuing to purchase massive amounts of clean energy.
The company’s latest sustainability report acknowledges that Google’s total electricity usage has increased by more than 250 percent since 2019, which the company attributed to ongoing growth in Google Cloud, YouTube video streaming, and data center construction and operations supporting various AI products and services. The unprecedented 37 percent annual increase is part of an ongoing trend, given how Google’s total electricity consumption also grew by 27 percent in 2024.
“While the path to achieving our climate ambitions will not be linear—given our AI infrastructure buildout is currently accelerating faster than the grid is decarbonizing—we remain focused on scaling abundant and affordable clean power globally and progressing technological innovations that drive down emissions across our operations and the broader industry,” according to the Google sustainability report.
US homeowners have embraced home batteries in record-breaking numbers in early 2026, spurred on by state incentives while seeking to offset rising residential electricity costs. The trend could even unlock a more flexible energy supply for power grid operators and even AI data centers.
New home battery installations reached a record 673 megawatts of energy storage in the first quarter of 2026, according to the US Energy Information Administration. That trend was driven by states with high electricity prices that have implemented policies to incentivize home battery installation, Bloomberg News reported.
This residential battery trend stands out as a natural next step for states that have already successfully boosted rooftop solar adoption among homeowners, given how batteries enable homeowners to use stored solar energy at night. California and Hawaii accounted for the majority of new residential battery storage, while Texas and Arizona also saw significantly higher numbers of installations.
South Korea’s government and top tech companies are committing $1 trillion to several flagship megaprojects that could bolster global memory chip supply, build new AI data centers, and spur commercial deployment of humanoid robots by 2028.
The announcement comes as South Korean companies such as Samsung and SK Hynix have enjoyed record profits and stock valuations due to the AI industry’s demand for memory chips—with the subsequent supply strain leading to memory chip shortages and higher prices for consumer electronics. Meanwhile, Hyundai Motor Company is racing to mass-manufacture humanoid robots developed by its subsidiary, Boston Dynamics, so that the robotic workers can start taking over certain laborious tasks in automotive factories and other workplaces.
“We must secure the core elements of AI faster than any other country,” said South Korean President Lee Jae Myung in a televised speech on June 29, as reported by BBC News and other media outlets. “Semiconductors, physical AI, and AI data centers are the triple axis for a great leap forward."
A new chip architecture from IBM can integrate nearly 100 billion transistors on a chip the size of a human fingernail—nearly twice the transistor density of the company’s previous generation of chip technology. The resulting improvement in chip compute performance and energy efficiency comes from what IBM describes as the “world’s first sub-1 nanometer chip technology” for AI data centers.
“It's not just an incremental step, it's a meaningful leap forward,” said Jay Gambetta, director of IBM Research and IBM Fellow, in an advance media briefing. He described the new chip technology as “pointing to a future where computing becomes significantly more powerful without a corresponding increase in energy.”
It’s worth unpacking what the “world’s first sub-1 nanometer chip technology” means, because it is impractical to build reliably functional chips with transistors and other features smaller than 1 nanometer due to various physical limitations. Instead, IBM is basically claiming that its new “nanostack” architecture can deliver the computing performance improvements that would be expected if a theoretical chip could be built with physical features smaller than 1 nanometer.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and Codex and the models those tools use, and Broadcom, an established silicon supplier, have announced a new chip, called Jalapeño, designed specifically for large language model inference in data centers.
The companies intend to deploy the chip at large data centers and claim this is just the first generation in a long-term project that will see chips refined over time.
If you hang out in any even vaguely AI-skeptical parts of the Internet, you've probably stumbled on plenty of memes and posts premised on data centers' insatiable thirst for water to power evaporative cooling. But a new report from Amazon highlights just how little water all these AI data centers are using in aggregate, on a relative basis, even as individual data centers can strain local water supplies.
In a Thursday blog post, Amazon claims its data centers withdrew "about 2.5 billion gallons" globally in 2025. That number sounds incredibly large at first glance, but it looks downright puny compared to the 117 trillion gallons of water withdrawn in the US alone in 2015. It's also useful to compare Amazon's number to stats from more water-intensive areas, from the 3.3 trillion gallons used annually on US lawns and landscaping to the 1.3 trillion gallons a year used in California almond orchards to the 531 billion gallons a year used just for US golf courses.
Amazon is just one company, of course, and a relative latecomer to reporting its data center water usage numbers. Google data centers withdrew about more than 6.1 billion gallons of water in 2024, on top of about 2.75 billion gallons from Microsoft and about 1.4 billion gallons from Meta in the same year.
On Monday, SpaceX amended its initial public offering to state that water conditions—including water scarcity, regulations around water, and drought—could constrain data center development.
It isn’t the only tech company trying to assess how water scarcity might impact its business. Water use is emerging as one of the most contentious data center issues. A recent Gallup poll found that seven out of 10 Americans are opposed to data center development, with water scarcity ranking as the top resource concern. Facing increasingly fierce resistance, some tech companies are scrambling to assure the public that they’re facing the issue head-on.
Data centers primarily use water to cool server racks, which throw off massive amounts of heat. One popular technique, known as evaporative cooling, uses fresh water to absorb the heat, which is then pumped to cooling towers where it evaporates outside.
Intel plans to ship an AI chip by the end of this year that uses cheaper memory and cooling technology than rival offerings from Nvidia and AMD, as the US chipmaker seeks to capitalize on a sharp turnaround in its fortunes.
Kevork Kechichian, who leads Intel’s data center group, told the FT that the company is “starting with the basics” as it tries to challenge its rivals in the booming market for semiconductors that power AI.
Its new “Crescent Island” graphics processing unit is designed to speed up “inference” tasks, the stage when a user makes their request, rather than the training of models, an area where Nvidia’s processors are dominant.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has highlighted AI as the tentpole of the company’s future, projecting a multi-trillion-dollar market opportunity that rivals the total value of all US economic activity. But the company must first win over customers who generally favor AI models from competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
SpaceX described its traditional space launch and satellite business as playing a supporting role to its fledgling AI business in financial disclosures that preceded an expected initial public offering of company stock. That stems from SpaceX having formally acquired Musk’s company xAI earlier this year—the SpaceXAI division now oversees the Grok AI models and the associated Grok chatbot previously developed by xAI.
The SpaceX S-1 filing claimed that the company has “the largest actionable total addressable market in human history” and highlighted AI as representing most of that opportunity at an estimated $26.5 trillion market—a number that comes close to rivaling US nominal GDP that stood at nearly $32 trillion in the first quarter of 2026.
A proposed merger of the largest utility in the country by market value, NextEra Energy, with the sixth-largest, Dominion, would create a megacompany at a time when data centers and rapid increases in electricity demand are reshaping the industry.
The proposal, announced Monday morning and contingent on state and federal regulatory approval, would result in a company that leads in nearly every aspect of the US power and utility industry, including overall electricity generation, natural gas generation, and renewables.
The $67 billion deal combines NextEra’s size and reach with Dominion’s positioning as the local utility for the world’s largest concentration of data centers in northern Virginia. But the results are likely bad for consumers and the environment, creating a company with enormous financial and political strength that will be difficult to effectively regulate, according to consumer advocates and analysts.
The latest example of burgeoning opposition to rapid data-center development in Pennsylvania came at a town hall meeting overflowing with frustration about how the state is managing the surge.
As about 225 people watched, more than 20 speakers in the two-hour online forum late Wednesday spoke about resistance to an industry they blame for rising electricity prices, heavy water use, noise pollution and rural industrialization. Gov. Josh Shapiro, who has tried to thread the needle of welcoming data centers while proposing some guardrails, was a frequent target.
“This is a public trust and transparency issue,” said Jennifer Dusart, a small business owner and resident of Mechanicsburg, near the state capital. “Too many Americans are finding out about these projects after decisions have been made. We have been bulldozed over, and when citizens have raised concerns, they are often dismissed as uninformed, emotional or anti-progress.”
The tourist and ski resort town of Lake Tahoe must scramble to find a new energy supplier by May 2027—the result of a Nevada utility company saying it needs the power capacity in part for new data centers. The resulting energy crisis impacts 49,000 California residents who live near Lake Tahoe, nestled in the Sierra Nevada mountains on the border between California and Nevada.
Lake Tahoe’s local electricity provider, California-based Liberty Utilities, has been obtaining 75 percent of its power from the Nevada-based company NV Energy. But the latter has said it will stop providing power to the Lake Tahoe region by May 2027, according to extensive reporting by Fortune.
Nevada's fast-growing data center development is one of the main reasons given by NV Energy for ending its energy supply agreement with Liberty, according to a Liberty filing with California regulators. Fortune highlighted data from NV Energy’s own planning documents showing that a dozen data center projects in northern Nevada could drive 5,900 megawatts of new demand by 2033.
Data centers may be coming to your neighborhood as side installations associated with new homes—and in exchange would offer subsidized electricity and Internet access along with backup batteries to homeowners. The company behind the plan has already begun pilot testing in preparation for a 100-home trial run this year.
The “distributed data center solution” announced by the San Francisco startup SPAN would deploy thousands of XFRA nodes that contain liquid-cooled Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs operating with minimal noise, according to a press release. By harnessing excess power capacity among US households, SPAN aims to quickly expand the available compute for AI workloads without the costs and delays associated with trying to build warehouse-size data centers.
“Data centers are loud, ugly, and often drive up local electricity bills,” said Chris Lander, vice president of XFRA at SPAN, in correspondence with Ars. “[This] is quiet, discreet, and makes energy more affordable for the host and community.”
Silicon Valley investors, such as Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, have bet hundreds of millions of dollars on deploying AI data centers powered by waves in the middle of the world’s oceans—a move that coincides with the mounting challenges tech companies are facing in building AI data center projects on land.
The latest investment round of $140 million is intended to help the company Panthalassa complete a pilot manufacturing facility near Portland, Oregon, and speed up deployments of wave-riding “nodes” designed to generate electrical power, according to a May 4 press release. Instead of sending renewable energy to a land-based data center, the floating nodes would directly power onboard AI chips and transmit inference tokens representing the AI models’ outputs to customers worldwide via satellite link.
“Panthalassa’s idea transforms an energy transmission problem into a data transmission problem,” Benjamin Lee, a computer architect and engineer at the University of Pennsylvania, told Ars. “Performing AI computation on the ocean would require transferring models to the ocean-based nodes and then responding to prompts and queries.”
Amazon’s cloud customers will need to wait several more months before the US tech company can repair war-damaged data centers and restore normal operations in the Middle East. The announcement comes two months after Iranian drone strikes targeted three Amazon data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain—meaning that full recovery from the cloud disruption could take nearly half a year in all.
The Amazon Web Services (AWS) dashboard posted an April 30 update describing how its UAE and Bahrain cloud regions “suffered damage as a result of the conflict in the Middle East” and are unable to support customer applications. The update also said that “relevant billing operations are currently suspended while we restore normal operations” in a process that “is expected to take several months.”
That wording suggests Amazon will continue to avoid billing AWS customers in the affected regions—ME-CENTRAL-1 and ME-SOUTH-1—after it initially waived all usage-related charges for March 2026 at an estimated cost of $150 million.
A data center developer has paused all Middle East project investments after one of its facilities was damaged by an Iranian missile or drone attack. The decision comes as the Iran war is forcing Silicon Valley investors and tech companies to rethink a trillion-dollar plan to build more AI and cloud data centers in Gulf countries.
The damaged data center is owned by Pure Data Centre Group, a London-based company that is operating or developing more than 1 gigawatt of data center capacity across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. “No one’s going to run into a burning building, so to speak,” Pure DC CEO Gary Wojtaszek told CNBC. “No one’s going to put in new additional capital at scale to do anything until everything settles down."
Data center developers are already eating the costs of uninsurable war damage from the conflict, which began with a US-Israeli attack on Iran on February 28. Iran primarily responded by attacking shipping to shut down the Strait of Hormuz trade corridor along with striking US military bases and energy infrastructure across the Gulf region.
In Tazewell County, Illinois, Michael Deppert depends on a natural pool of water beneath the sandy soils of his farm to irrigate the pumpkins, corn, and soybeans growing in his fields.
So when a data center was proposed about eight miles away, he feared it would tap the same aquifer, potentially eroding crop yields and profits.
Deppert, who is also the president of the local farm bureau lobby group, says locals were also “nervous” about how a data center would affect the “good, clean drinking water.” Residents launched a fierce opposition campaign, packing city council meetings and mounting petitions. After several months, the project, led by developer Western Hospitality Partners, was scrapped.
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