Cut off from the power grid and suffering fire damage, it was not immediately clear whether the Amazon facility in the United Arab Emirates was deliberately targeted or damaged by falling debris.

But the incident showed that the purpose-designed buildings stuffed with sensitive computing, networking and cooling equipment have weak spots despite the extensive planning that goes into keeping them running.

Data centres "are such critical assets, because they are where all of our applications and data are stored," said Jonathan Hjembo of data firm Telegeography.

For firms pushing to serve data, video and audio streaming, applications and more to people around the world, siting the infrastructure near users makes it faster to serve them.

That is one reason why "the Middle East has been a key area of data centre and cloud development for the past several years," Hjembo said.

"All the major cloud providers have moved to multiple locations throughout the Gulf region."

The UAE is especially advanced in data centre construction thanks to its relative political stability and abundant energy, said Cinzia Bianco of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR).

Leaders believe hosting the infrastructure "will give the US in particular, but also others... another excuse for securing them and offering security guarantees," she added.

- 'Things you can't plan for' -

Given their importance to the global internet and clients' operations, data centres work to build up uninterruptible power supplies using batteries and backup diesel generators in case they are cut off from the grid.

Amazon said it was ordered by firefighters to shut off the generators at its stricken UAE site after a fire broke out.

In regular updates, Amazon's Web Services arm has told clients to backup their critical data and shift operations to other locations in its global network -- a typical fall-back option.

Data centres' physical security is tight, often featuring biometric access control, security guards and strengthened perimeters, Hjembo said.

"But when it comes to things like missile strikes, there are things that on a commercial level you just can't plan for," he added.

In many locations, cloud operators have to worry about "physical security, location exposure and geopolitical risk," said Swapna Subramani, research director for India, the Middle East and Africa at consulting firm Structure Research.

It was unlikely that the Amazon data centre was targeted deliberately, said Gartner cloud analyst Rene Buest, citing the difficulty of identifying valuable data centre buildings from outside.

"I believe it was an accidental hit, or perhaps energy infrastructure was targeted and the data centre was collateral damage," he said.

Nevertheless, "in future data centres could well be targets selected purposefully," he added, with belligerents seeking to disrupt intelligence-gathering or the operation of opposing artificial intelligence (AI) systems.

- Eggs in one basket -

The AI boom has meant the construction of massive data centres whose computing power is measured in tens of billions of dollars of equipment and gigawatts of electricity consumption.

In the UAE, a five-gigawatt AI campus one-quarter the size of Paris is under construction, backed by US tech giants such as OpenAI, Oracle, Cisco and Nvidia.

The Gulf country has pumped more than $147 billion into AI since 2024 and secured approval to import advanced Nvidia chips from the US administration that has been cautious about allowing exports.

Such concentrations of computing power will make data centres still more critical points of failure, Structure Research's Subramani said.

"As digital infrastructure becomes more critical to finance, government, enterprise, and AI workloads, the consequences of site-level disruption are no longer confined to a single facility," she highlighted.

For now, "more such disruptions are plausible if tensions persist, not only from direct strikes but also from collateral damage, grid instability, fibre (cable) chokepoints, and dependence on single regions," Subramani added.

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