Author: David, Deep Tide TechFlow
Original Title: AI Within the Range of Artillery
On March 1, Iranian missiles and drones struck the Gulf region, with one landing 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 widely used AIs, runs on Amazon's cloud. On the same day, Claude experienced a global outage.
Anthropic's official explanation was a surge in users overwhelming the servers.
As of the time of writing, complaints about Claude's service being unavailable still persist on social media; the renowned prediction market Polymarket has already launched a prediction topic: "How many more times will Claude go down in March?"
If it is confirmed that Iran was responsible, this would be the first time in human history:
A commercial data center was physically destroyed in a war.
But why would a civilian data center be targeted?
Rewind two days. On February 28, the U.S. and Israel jointly launched an 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 assisted by Claude. Through collaboration between the military and data analytics company Palantir, Claude had long been integrated into the U.S. military's intelligence system.
Ironically, just hours before the airstrike, Trump ordered a comprehensive ban on Anthropic because the company refused to provide unrestricted access to its AI for the Pentagon. But despite the ban, the operation proceeded.
Publicly, it was stated that removing Claude from the military system would take at least six months.
So, before the ink on the ban was dry, the U.S. military used Claude to strike Iran. Iran then retaliated, and a missile landed on the data center running Claude AI.
Source: Bloomberg
The data center was likely not the intended target, merely collateral damage. But regardless of whether the missile was aimed at the data center, one thing is certain:
Truth lies within the range of artillery, and so does AI. Both the side firing the artillery and the side being hit by it are affected.
AI's Grand Infrastructure, Built on the Middle East Powder Keg
Over the past three years, Silicon Valley has relocated half of the AI industry to the Middle East Gulf.
The reason is simple. The UAE and Saudi Arabia have the world's wealthiest sovereign funds, cheap electricity, and one key regulation:
If you want to serve my customers, your data must be stored on my territory.
So Amazon opened data centers in the UAE and Bahrain, and invested $5.3 billion to build another in Saudi Arabia; Microsoft has nodes in the UAE and Qatar, with one in Saudi Arabia already completed.
OpenAI, in partnership with NVIDIA and SoftBank, is building a $30 billion AI park in the UAE, touted as the largest computing base outside the U.S.
In January of this year, the U.S. signed an agreement with the UAE and Qatar called "Pax Silica." Translated as "Silicon Peace," it sounds ideal.
The core of the agreement is to control the flow of chips, ensuring advanced chips do not fall into China's hands.
In exchange, the UAE secured permission to import hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA's most advanced processors annually. Abu Dhabi's G42 cut ties with Huawei, and Saudi AI companies pledged not to purchase Huawei equipment...
The entire Gulf's AI infrastructure, from chips to data centers to models, has fully aligned with the U.S.
These agreements considered everything: chip export controls, data sovereignty, investment reciprocity, and technology leakage risks.
But not one considered the possibility of someone bombing a data center with a missile.
An international security scholar at Qatar University made a fitting remark after the Amazon data center fire:
"These security frameworks were designed for supply chain control and political alignment. Physical security was never on the agenda."
Cloud computing has preached elasticity, redundancy, and decentralization for a decade. But data centers are physical buildings with walls, roofs, and coordinates. No matter how advanced your chips are, if the data center is bombed, it's bombed.
"Cloud" is a metaphor; data centers are not.
AI may seem virtual, running on code, floating in the cloud. But code runs on chips, chips are installed in data centers, and data centers are built on Earth.
Who Protects AI?
This time, Amazon's data center may have been collateral damage, or optimistically, mistakenly hit.
But what about next time?
In an era of escalating global geopolitical conflicts, if your data center runs AI models that help opponents with target identification, there is no reason for them not to treat your data center as a military facility.
International law has no answer to this question.
Current laws of war have provisions for "dual-use facilities," but those clauses were written for factories and bridges. No one considered data centers.
A data center that processes bank transactions by day and military intelligence analysis by night—is it civilian or military?
In peacetime, data center选址 considers latency, electricity costs, policy incentives... In war, none of that matters. What matters is how far your data center is from the nearest military base.
So, this bombing has shifted everyone's focus.
Previously, everyone was discussing the same anxiety: will AI replace my job? But no one discussed another question:
Before AI replaces you, how fragile is it itself?
A regional conflict brought down 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 nearly 1,300 hyperscale data centers worldwide today, with another 770 under construction. These centers consume increasing amounts of electricity, water, and money, and they承载 more and more—your savings, your medical records, your food delivery orders, even a country's military intelligence...
But the solutions protecting these data centers, to this day, likely still consist of fire suppression systems and backup generators.
When AI becomes a nation's infrastructure, its security is no longer just a company's concern. Who protects AI? Cloud providers? The Pentagon? Or the UAE's air defense system?
This question was theoretical three days ago. Not anymore.
AI is within the range of artillery. In fact, isn't everything in this era within the range of artillery?
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