The Cloud Is a Target

AWS data centers in the UAE were hit in airstrikes in March 2026. Not because they were military infrastructure. Because they were infrastructure. The distinction stopped mattering when the thing that runs your hospitals, banks, and civil registries also runs your adversary’s logistics.

We built the cloud on an assumption of physical neutrality. The server is somewhere else, the location doesn’t matter, the abstraction layer separates you from geography. But abstraction layers only hold as long as every party respects them. A missile doesn’t respect your abstraction layer. It hits the building, and every tenant in the rack goes down together — the medical records system, the gaming company, the humanitarian NGO, the defence contractor.

The metaphor of “the cloud” was always a lie about physicality. Data has weight. It sits in buildings. Buildings have coordinates. Coordinates can be targeted. The surprise is not that someone targeted a data center — it’s that we spent two decades pretending the physical substrate didn’t exist, and then acted shocked when someone else disagreed.

Digital ruins used to form slowly. Servers decommissioned, companies bankrupt, domains lapsed. Now they can form in an afternoon.