{"text":[[{"start":5.76,"text":"The writer is author of ‘Chip War’"}],[{"start":8.12,"text":"With recent attacks on Russian data centres, Kyiv has disrupted the country’s internet economy, from mobile payments to rideshare apps. Yet Ukraine is not the first power to hit its adversaries’ data centres this year. Russia has attacked Ukraine’s data centre infrastructure, as well. And Iran has damaged facilities from Bahrain to the United Arab Emirates, including major centres operated by leading US cloud-computing firms."}],[{"start":34.515,"text":"When US officials first described computing power as a national security asset, some analysts interpreted this as Washington’s penchant for seeing everything through a security lens. Now, it turns out, the Iranians, Russians and Ukrainians agree — and are aiming their drones and missiles accordingly."}],[{"start":51.48,"text":"Militaries have long targeted the communications and command-and-control nodes of their adversaries, of course. The US struck both military and civilian communication hubs in wars against Iraq in 1991 and 2003 as well as in the Balkans in the 1990s. Russia reportedly targeted at least one Ukrainian government data centre in a cruise missile barrage at the start of its war in 2022."}],[{"start":75.12,"text":"This year, however, has seen an acceleration in data centre attacks. One reason for this is that it is getting tougher to distinguish military from civilian data centre infrastructure. The International Committee of the Red Cross has called on countries to “segregate” military tech infrastructure to protect civilian services. In practice, most governments are doing the opposite."}],[{"start":96.18,"text":"A second is that data centres are getting bigger and more expensive. A drone that costs thousands of dollars can produce millions of dollars of disruption. This ratio will only grow. The Amazon data centres damaged by Iran in the UAE and Bahrain were relatively small compared to the gigawatt-scale campuses under construction for AI workloads."}],[{"start":115.64,"text":"Finally, data centres are growing more politically salient. Iran very publicly threatened to strike tech companies in the early stages of this year’s Gulf war. This undermines the high-profile strategy of Saudi Arabia and the UAE to position themselves as major AI players. The UAE successfully lobbied the Trump administration to let it buy unlimited quantities of high-end AI chips. G42, the Emirati AI firm, has partnered with OpenAI on a data centre campus it says may reach one gigawatt in scale, part of a total of 5 gigawatts of promised investments."}],[{"start":146.2,"text":"After Iran’s attacks, the UAE has had to rework this plan. Rather than a single large campus, it now envisions a network of data centres, according to media reports. New designs may incorporate blast-resistant concrete, jamming gear and missile-defence systems. Others could be placed underground. The low-cost energy that underpinned the Gulf’s attraction to data centre developers must be balanced against the price of missile defence and the risk of disruption."}],[{"start":173.76,"text":"Around the world, data centre operators are asking whether guards and high fences provide sufficient security. Long-range missiles are cheaper than ever. Drones are proliferating. Security companies already advertise drone detection and defence. Russia is now mandating that data centres defend themselves."}],[{"start":192.76,"text":"This is bad news for the AI infrastructure build-out, particularly for the small- to medium-sized countries seeking to build “sovereign AI”. Russia’s government spent years ousting foreign owners and taking control of data centres and the tech companies, like search company Yandex, that operate them. Yet this state ownership did not guarantee security from Ukrainian drones."}],[{"start":213.8,"text":"Nor were localisation requirements a successful strategy for securing Gulf countries’ data. AWS revealed that data stored at one Bahraini data centre was permanently destroyed by an Iranian strike. As these facilities face the drone war, the concept of data protection is taking on a much more literal meaning."}],[{"start":235.77,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1792477480_2583.mp3"}