Data centers are increasingly under attack in the Ukraine-Russia war, as well as Iran’s wanton drone and missile attacks on neighboring states like Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a study revealed this weekend.
NBC News on Saturday counted no less than 27 attacks on data centers so far in 2026, seemingly heralding a “new global trend” of striking digital resources. The tally included two known U.S. and Israeli strikes on data centers in Iran during Operation Epic Fury, plus Iranian missile attacks on U.S. allies in the Middle East, and most recently Russia and Ukraine targeting each others’ digital infrastructure.
According to Alp Toker of NetBlocks, this “new global trend” of kinetic vs. digital warfare began in earnest after Iranian drones targeted Amazon Web Centers in the UAE in March, plus a data center in Bahrain. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) of Iran issued a statement describing the data centers as “military targets.”
“This has really shown that there is still innovation in warfare. Just when you think everything has been thought of, the idea of knocking out a data center and impacting millions of users and destroying the economy — the economy of a country — didn’t really seem to come up until it was a thing, until Iran invented it.” Toker said.
The idea of hitting data centers reportedly caught on quickly after Iran blazed the trail and other countries realized those valuable bits of digital infrastructure tended to be housed in large, vulnerable, poorly-defended buildings. The data itself can be moved, but moving gigantic amounts of information takes time and many countries have “data sovereignty laws” that prevent data centers from evacuating across national borders.
Russia went big on attacking Ukrainian data centers in September and Ukraine struck back in kind last week, hitting three data centers owned by leading Russian tech company Yandex, plus one that served state financial institution Sberbank. Russian President Vladimir Putin convened an emergency cybersecurity meeting after the attacks.
NBC News cited analysis from Cloudflare that showed Russia appearing to get the worst of this exchange, as traffic collapsed to various Russian online services in the aftermath, even though Yandex insisted the damage was minimal. A lively debate continues to this day over whether Ukraine managed to cripple Russia’s notorious information-warfare “bot army” by hitting the Yandex data centers or not.
A separate NBC report on Monday found “millions of Russians were feeling the impact of Ukrainian strikes on the data centers,” including some who lost access to all of their financial resources. Some Russians even said they could not get into their homes because their digital keys were rendered useless by the damage.
“The uncertainty was scary. We realized just how much hangs on Yandex. We did not quite appreciate it before,” a Russian who commutes between Krasnodar and Moscow said.
Some Russians were frightened enough by the Yandex outages to talk about abandoning the company’s myriad web services, which would be ruinous for companies like ride-sharing services that have Internet-heavy business models. The degree of panic that Ukraine was able to unleash in Russia by hitting three Yandex data centers is sure to be studied by military planners around the world.
Some data centers are more directly military targets, given how much the world’s most sophisticated fighting forces have come to rely on the Internet. The online world looks more like a “web” than ever, and it can be difficult for military cybersecurity specialists to tell where all of the strands lead.
Humanitarian groups insist that data centers should be considered civilian resources and protected by the laws of war, but there is little in the way of international law on the topic as of yet — and, even if there was, data centers would remain tempting targets for sabotage.
The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) warned on Friday that Ukraine’s strikes on the Yandex data centers — which happen to house the three supercomputers used by the company for AI research — could be a grim harbinger of things to come, as the value of digital infrastructure increases.
CFR advised government and corporate planners to “pursue a strategy of redundancy and resiliency” to mitigate the danger, making it easier to move valuable data to alternate locations and bring backup systems online when key data centers are damaged. For example, one of the reasons Russia suffered more from the exchange of data center attacks with Ukraine was that Russia has a “strict data localization law” that limits its options for backup servers, while Ukraine could rely on servers in the European Union (EU) in a pinch.
Other defensive strategies include dispersing data centers instead of relying on huge central facilities like Yandex did, or hardening computer facilities against attack, perhaps even by moving them underground — or, in the future, into orbit. The expense of such defensive measures is considerable, so the fallout from the data center wars of 2026 is likely to be an added layer of costs that AI visionaries were not anticipating.
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