I guess it makes me think about what a soft underbelly this could be for a lot of modern society. There's always been consideration of threats to refineries and power stations and industrial production and all those big metal deals. But like, forget any sort of nuclear exchange, any sort of crazy super Starfish style big EMP, just purely a few thousand drones nailing data centers. Nobody even directly dies, just a lot of wrecked computers. What would be the cost of losing all the clouds and colo stuff? How long to replace, at what cost? How much depends on it?
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Most data centers have a dedicated electrical substation that powers it, so it's possible to target the data center without affecting anywhere else.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore_County_substation_attack
That has a lot of collateral damage that may or may not be desirable though. Simultaneously it might have quite a different long term effect right? If all the actual computers are unharmed they can be powered in other ways in an emergency, even if at much higher cost. Or powered back up later, the time lost might be militarily very significant but they're not gone.
But how many people and companies actually have full functional decentralized clones of all programs and data? How many people and companies have devices that are locked to remote hosts they expect to check in on at least once in awhile even if they're not "cloud dependent"? What if all that was literally gone, a few thousand missiles or drones and data centers are all just completely erased including tape backups, everything, suddenly we're in a world where all that compute and data is poof. And without hurting anything else, no traditional war crimes either, no power or direct food or transport disruptions. Everyone is fine and healthy, except with this huge societal exocortex gone.
The bigger problem is that a war is likely to hit multiple levels of infrastructure at the same time. So the datacenters will come under attack, but so will the fiber cables, and the switching apparatuses, and the power plants, and likely also the humans who maintain it all. High-availability software is usually designed for 1-2 components to fail at once and then to transparently route around them. If large chunks of the infrastructure all disappear at once, you can end up in some very weird cascading failure situations.
Electrical Transformer Manufacturing Is Throttling the Electrified Future - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47604887 - April 2026
So you mean to say, one doesn't even need drones, a datacenter could be (temporarily) taken out with a handgun?
Large parts of our society are built on trust, and there is societal ignorance of how vulnerable our infrastructure is.
Criminals generally aren't that sophisticated or intelligent, so they aren't aware they can target these places.
(Perpetrators also not caught)
The gear to replace the power infra is more readily available than the thousands and thousands of miles of wire and fiber in a datacenter, plus all the equipment, batteries, inverter/chargers, maybe some diesel generators, etc.
If you want to do economic damage, you hit the datacenter.
If you want to turn the people of the country against you and mobilize them, then you hit the power infra.
If your threat model includes war and you want to have some of the conveniences of the Internet, you should make plans for how to host local copies of data and develop local-scale communications for the people you regularly talk with. The Internet is too big of a security and propaganda risk for governments to allow it to continue to exist when they are engaged in a real existential war.
But any single central point of failure might break them. Things like, is this account paid? Dunno!
Bitcoin was never designed as a post-collapse currency.
1 blast can be expensively guarded againt. However designing anything above ground for sustained barges is practically/commercially prohibitive. Underground is only option.
PS: Civil Engineer. Designed few of those Gas explosion resistant control rooms.
Given the rapid and increasing rise of AI use in actually fighting wars, I suspect data centers won't just be a big target, they will eventually be the #1 priority target. Taking them offline won't just be of interest in terms of economic damage, it will be a direct strategic goal toward militarily winning the conflict.
I don't believe that's a real concern that the senior military people have anymore. War crimes are legal in 2026. That ship has sailed (and was double tap struck by the US Navy). Nobody is doing anything about it.
That being said, if it has meaningful military data on it, then it is a valid target. And that would be their argument.
While we're completely at the mercy of datacenters that we can colo out racks / power / upstreams from, it's a worthy discussion for any technology company that wants some amount of digital sovereignty over their presence online and ability to provide their service independent of a hypervisor / cloud provider (or even just a centralized location).
The best option is simply to anycast from any many distinct countries that are either neutral, or unlikely to be involved with any global or regional conflicts at any given time. You don't want them getting bombed at the same time!
e.g.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/oracle-opens-first...
As a very rough rule of thumb building down is about 4x more expensive than building up. So probably worth doing if you're Shin Bet (who I believe also have space in the same dc), but for the likes of Oracle it's only going to be used to serve clients with specific security requirements. Think of it as a halo project - more of a marketing exercise than something that's actually going to be used by the average customer.
The same goes for datacentres hosted in cold war bunkers etc - they always end up being too constrained in one way or another to be useful. The big facilities end up being built above ground and rely on geographic redundancy rather than trying to make themselves (literally) bomb-proof.
Yeah. Financialize the economy presupposing a global open market, then subvert, boycott and bomb said market. So clever.
People almost directly start dying if data centers go down.
Not in the minutes, but within days definitely
It’s a rhetorical question, of course, because we all know it’s because China is winning the traditional economic game on the manufacturing the McKinsey and Bain class sold out for decades and therefore military will have to become the new leadership measuremen, only appreciating as an asset in a less safe dog eat dog world.
The Thiels and friends who came up with this shit of course have their own infrastructure in their end time bunkers, but however stupid this gambit sounds, it’s what’s being played right now.
Sovereignty and self-sufficiency are big topics. The US centric cloud at least is killing itself through geopolitical risks for gov customers outside the US. Literally number one operational risk now.
The country opposing the country you're in won't extradite.
I mean, why even publish those locations?
if this is purely for PR, they can publish fake locations...
if this is for VIP visits... well you can always send private invitations
AWS doesn't disclose their locations.
Open source intelligence today rivals the best of any nation. That would be virtually impossible to hide for long.
and thus is easily defended. It would be a pocket change - tens of millions - for AMZN to put say a Rheinmetall Skyshield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyshield at the data center.
Point defense systems like Skyshield (or even that very old and cheap - $2M - Gepard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flakpanzer_Gepard ) work wonderfully against all those drones coming in.
Heck, even just soldiers with MANPADs would have easily shot down those drones (you just have to distribute those soldiers to all those strategic objects which hasn't been done)
We have classic situation here - everybody have been watching Ukraine war for 4 years, yet nobody has prepared for such style of war.
>I am unconvinced that even AMZN's pocket change could realiably protect against the kind of attacks we see in this war
No even low flying slow drone - pretty typical situation of top Russian cruise missile shot down by Gepard
https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/zdbvim/a_ukr...
Also AMZN has its own drones dept - in "hot" zones in "hot" times they can put several people with drones (in the high speed configuration) to be used for interception. This is basically how Ukranians have been doing, and that is an experience they are now exporting to the Gulf states.
Deprioritised means migrate usage out of this zone just in case anyone misreads the context here.
Better yet: Jeff or Sir Richard hook up one of their ships and just tow away the Terafab… yoink!
There are good physics-based reasons to put data centers in space, but the geo-political world isn’t informed merely by physics.
I wonder if this will translate to amazon implementing para-militar security of the cloud (eg: drones to defend from drone attacks).
My intuition suggests me that:
- Bezos would have absolutely considered this, like seriously considered - the current ceo likely won’t
Btw the writing has been on the proverbial wall for some time, amazon is in their day-2 era.
You may not have voted for Trump, but now you're accountable to the world for him.
I'm confused, what does ownership have to do with this particular failure mode? The issue here is a (for many) unforeseen new tradeoff involved in centralization. Colocating at a central place has the exact same tradeoff in this case: bandwidth is vastly more available and cheaper towards the core, and there are significant amortization gains to be had with a lot of basic shared infra. But it's also one big structure holding a lot of computers and infra everyone is depending on, that's the whole point of it! We're all sharing network backbone and power filtering/redundancy and so on and so forth, vs paying for that separately. That means a missile or drone or bomb hit to the building still hits all of us whether we own the servers there or we're running workloads on someone else's servers.
The only responses are either central counter measures or decentralization. Both have significant costs and complexity, that's why it wasn't just done proactively right?
In the case of if you could bring your own missile-defence-network, then you probably don't need co-location anyway. (There is nothing "co", it's just location you build & operate, with your Patriot or whatever)
spreading out decreases risk, concentration increases it
