AWS tells customers to abandon Middle East data centers after Iran strikes

Amazon Web Services has told customers to migrate away from its Abu Dhabi and Bahrain data centers, more than six months after Iranian drone strikes damaged the facilities. AWS has given no recovery timeline, and the UAE is reportedly considering underground data centers going forward.

Why it matters: This shows physical, geopolitical risk to data center infrastructure isn't hypothetical — a six-month-plus outage at major cloud facilities is a serious reliability and sovereignty wake-up call as AI workloads increasingly concentrate compute in a handful of regions.