Why Iran Is Hitting Data Centers?

People assumed cloud as vast, weightless, and invulnerable (at least from physical attacks). However, cloud do not physical buildings, servers, cooling systems, and fiber-optic cables. These concrete buildings can be turned to ashes by drones. On 1 March 2026, Iran did struck cloud facilities. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or IRGC accepted responsibility for drone attacks on three Amazon Web Services or AWS facilities in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. This was a novel attack in the history of war. This event not only hard hit the cloud facilities but has sent shockwaves to the tech & AI industry, broader economy, and international law. A Timeline of the Attacks Why Iran is targeting data centers? The IRGC stated that these data are behind the enemy’s military and intelligence. The US military was using Anthropic’s AI model Claude (which runs on AWS cloud) for assessing intelligence, identifying targets, and simulating battles during the before attacking Iran. In 2025, Microsoft revoked Azure cloud services to Israel Defense Forces’ Unit 8200, as the IDF was using Azure infrastructure in the Netherlands, storing intelligence and operating AI language models. Therefore, IRGC claim has high substance. The commercial cloud infrastructure stores two types of…