The $1 Billion Question: Can Hyperscalers Afford to Lose a Data Center to War in 2026? | The Motley Fool

I never thought I’d be writing a sentence like this, but here we are: Iranian drones struck three Amazon Web Services data centers in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain on March 1, marking the first confirmed military attack on a hyperscale cloud provider in history.

And suddenly, the trillion-dollar artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure boom has a question that Silicon Valley wants to answer. Can hyperscalers actually afford to lose a data center to war?

For me, the short answer is yes. Financially, they can absorb it. But the longer answer is far more uncomfortable, and it’s the one I think matters for investors.

What happened?

The United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury on Feb. 28, a coordinated strike campaign against Iranian military infrastructure. Iran retaliated broadly, firing over 500 ballistic missiles and nearly 2,000 drones across the region.

Among the targets? Two AWS data centers in the UAE and one in…