Cloud architects have spent years designing around floods, fires, and power outages. Drones and missiles weren’t really part of that planning, until now. The UAE is reworking the design of its planned 5-gigawatt AI data centre campus after Iranian missile and drone strikes damaged cloud infrastructure across the UAE and Bahrain earlier this year, according to Reuters.
The original plan called for a single 10-square-mile campus in Abu Dhabi. Six people familiar with the discussions told Reuters the UAE is likely shifting toward a network of smaller data centres spread across multiple locations instead, though officials haven’t settled on a final design, construction costs, or schedule impact yet.
G42, the UAE technology company leading the project, said work is progressing as planned and that the project’s specifics remain under continuous review given the security standards critical infrastructure at this scale demands.
The strikes themselves triggered the redesign. AWS confirmed earlier this year that drones directly struck two of its UAE facilities, and a separate strike near one of its Bahrain sites caused physical damage too. The attacks significantly impaired two of the three Availability Zones in AWS’s UAE region, and customers saw degraded service across EC2, S3, DynamoDB, Lambda, and several other core services. AWS said in April that its UAE region could no longer reliably support customer applications and told customers to migrate to other regions entirely, warning the restoration process could take several months. As of September 11, service in the region remained disrupted.
That kind of damage sits outside what standard cloud redundancy handles. AWS and Microsoft both design their availability zones as physically separated failure domains meant to survive utility outages, fires, floods, and earthquakes, placing them far enough apart to limit correlated failures while keeping them close enough for low-latency replication. A targeted missile or drone strike poses a different category of threat entirely, one that even NIST’s own security guidance acknowledges physical distance alone doesn’t fully address.
The revised UAE plans reportedly include underground infrastructure, blast-resistant construction materials, backup power and cooling systems, and equipment designed to intercept drones and missiles before they reach facilities. Planners are even considering mountain locations for some sensitive data centres.
Construction on the project’s first phase, the 1-gigawatt Stargate UAE cluster involving OpenAI, Oracle, Nvidia, Cisco, and SoftBank, has already begun and will likely continue with modifications aimed at protecting it against aerial attacks, even as officials rethink later phases of the broader campus from the ground up.
