Data Center Attacks - The New Front Line - EP 13
from CollapseCast
At 2:38 in the morning on January 17, 1991, the Gulf War opened with American helicopters destroying the radar sites Iraq used to see incoming jets. Thirty-five years later, on March 1, 2026, the first strikes in another Gulf war hit something different: an Iranian drone set an Amazon data center in the United Arab Emirates on fire. Banking apps, payments, and delivery services across the region went down, and Amazon told its customers to move their data out of the region. Within months, the US and Israel had bombed data centers in Tehran, Russia was knocking Ukrainian data centers offline one by one and joking about it as a "digital detox," and Iran's Revolutionary Guard had published a list of eighteen tech companies it called legitimate military targets. This episode follows how the buildings that run daily life became a front line: why a warehouse full of servers is worth a drone, how Ukraine moved its government's data out of the country days before the 2022 invasion, the American plot to bomb data centers in Virginia, and the Nashville bombing that knocked out 911 across parts of three states. It ends in the Gulf, where a $30 billion AI campus is being redesigned with underground sites and air defenses, while the US and China keep building giant data centers out in the open.
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