The AI boom created a colossal market for compute—GPUs, networking gear and the massive datacenters that run it all. It also bolstered a second less celebrated market: protecting those facilities and the crown-jewel chips inside from threats.

On top of rising anti-data center sentiment stateside, the war in Iran has turned that problem into a line item. “Data centers are secondary targets right after obvious military sites,” says Matt McCrann, former executive at drone defense company DroneShield, who has worked with data centers in the U.S. and Middle East.

That shift matters because the AI data centers being built these days aren’t just expensive—they’re also possible strategic infrastructure during times of war. Enemies don’t need to hit a military site to degrade an opponent’s capability; they can hit compute that potentially underpins communications, logistics, payments and even military planning.

Executives in data center security tell Forbes that reality is driving an increased appetite for more hardened security—especially counter-drone capabilities—both in the Middle East and elsewhere. (The one gigawatt of existing capacity in the Middle East is set to triple via 2.2 GW under construction and another 12 GW in planning stages, per public real estate firm JLL.)

In early March, drone strikes damaged Amazon Web Services data centers in Bahrain and the UAE causing a significant and costly disruption in services. More than a month later, AWS dashboards still showed that services remain “disrupted” from the affected region (though some are now resolved); Amazon refunded March credits for those using them, The Register reported, setting the company back an estimated $150 million. Data centers usually have extensive insurance policies, but almost all of them exclude damage from military conflict, says Tom Harper, data center leader at insurance broker Gallagher. “Typically a policy excludes war. So if it’s an active war, it’s not gonna be covered.”

The threat isn’t just explosive drones. It’s also “loitering” drones which probe wireless networks and map data center layouts looking for weak spots. The practical point is blunt: when U.S. tech companies build........

© Forbes