AWS says some customer data is gone for good
Drone strikes on three Middle East facilities caused permanent data loss.
Six months after Iranian drones struck its Middle East data centres, AWS says some customer data is gone for good.
The announcement, made on Tuesday, is the first public sign that customers without offsite backups at the affected facilities have suffered permanent data loss. Here's what it means.
Drones, fire, and water
In the opening weeks of the current conflict, Iran launched drones at three AWS data centres in the Middle East, damaging some of them. The strikes caused structural damage, started fires, or led to further damage from the water used in firefighting efforts.
The attacks likely prompted more than one operator to review its plans to build data centres in the Middle East, shifting instead to regions such as Southeast Asia.
Multi-AZ is not a backup
The AWS announcement is a sombre reminder that public clouds are ultimately hosted within physical data centres. And despite the resilience equipment and numerous failsafes built into their designs, data centres can go down.
Of course, cloud providers like AWS have always advised customers to deploy mission-critical workloads across more than one availability zone (AZ), which are hosted either in completely segregated sections of the same data centre or in another facility entirely.
Yet the unprovoked attacks on multiple data centres mean that even deployments in a different cloud region, a much more expensive proposition, are not failsafe.
Bunkers and interceptors
For now, some upcoming data centres are being redesigned. OpenAI's 5GW Stargate UAE, for instance, is being reworked from a massive 10-square-mile campus into a network of data centres spread across the country. According to a Reuters report last week, some might even be built underground.
While the first 200MW phase is expected to continue as planned, modifications will be made to protect the site from aerial attacks. These include drone and missile interceptors, electronic jamming equipment, blast-resistant concrete, more backup power, and additional cooling systems.
The incorporation of air defences might seem disproportionate, but AI data centres and the AI systems they house are incredibly expensive. A 1GW AI data centre could cost as much as US$50 billion if equipped with cutting-edge Nvidia GPUs. Missile defences look cheap in comparison.
Even so, some tech giants are moving ahead with their Gulf projects. Construction of a 200MW Microsoft data centre in Abu Dhabi continues, while Amazon says it will still launch data centres in Saudi Arabia by end-2026.
The question worth sitting with is this: will data centre design itself change because of what happened in the Middle East?
