Macdonald Amoah, Morgan Bazilian, and Jahara Matisek
For most of the digital age, data centers were treated as background infrastructure, the quiet commercial machinery behind the abstraction called “the cloud.” They hosted financial systems, communications networks, logistics software, and, increasingly, the computing power behind artificial intelligence (AI). Hackers, ransomware, and cyber breaches were the primary threats to these systems. Now, those have become old problems. The cloud was never some weightless digital mist. It was always a physical system built from land, concrete, transformers, cooling systems, cables, and electricity. This means the cloud is still vulnerable to the old logic of war.
As governments, corporations, and militaries grow more dependent on concentrated cloud infrastructure, the facilities housing that computing power are now strategic infrastructure. Data centers are no longer just anonymous commercial properties tucked behind the digital economy. They are becoming part of the strategic rear: fixed, valuable, energy-hungry infrastructure whose disruption can impose immediate economic and operational costs. With states focused on building digital capacity and AI, including the Pentagon using an AI tool for the Iran War, the data centers built to enable economic productivity and warfighting abilities mean this infrastructure is a newly fixed target that is difficult to harden and protect.
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