"Information is the fuel of the 21st century, and its analysis is the combustion engine." The phrase from the then CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, has gained credibility since he stated it in January 2010 at the Davos Forum. In 2026, however, we have discovered that, like oil, information also has its "refineries" and "storage tanks": data centers.
Since the late 19th century, one of the most effective ways to paralyze a country has been to attack its energy infrastructure. It could be bombing the nine refineries in Ploiesti, in Nazi-occupied Romania, the pipeline connecting the Saudi Gulf oil fields with the Yanbu oil terminal in the Red Sea, or interrupting the electricity supply in Serbia in 1999. But now there is another equally vulnerable target if a country is to be paralyzed: its large data centers and the underwater cables and communication systems through which the internet travels. The virtual economy has roofs, walls, and large warehouses that a drone costing a few tens of thousands of euros can blow up, leaving entire countries without internet. No one ever thought that the cloud would be so physical.
Russian citizens are experiencing this situation. Between last Thursday and Sunday, Ukraine bombed three major data centers of Yandex, the "Russian Google". The company holds 72% of the country's online search market, 65% of the VTC market (driver services like Cabify or Uber), and between 7% and 13% of the cloud services market. Those three attacks were enough for a good part of Russians to be left without VTC, or even without access to the country's railways, whose website crashed with the destruction of the data centers, as did many other companies' websites. In one of the attacked facilities, two of the three supercomputers used to develop Russian artificial intelligence were located. It's not that Russia is a power in AI or aspires to be one. But this simple bombing will set it back even further.
The attack on Yandex also triggered a wave of rumors about the decline in activity of Russian bots on social networks, fueled by, among others, Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelenski. "Suddenly, it has become a bit easier to breathe on many social networks," Zelenski ironically stated in his online speech at the Warsaw Security Forum, referring to this alleged decline in malicious activity on networks. But this is a statement that is not supported by the facts.
"The data is what it is," explains Álex Romero, CEO of the cyberintelligence company Alto Intelligence, which tracks over six million groups on Telegram, one of the networks most used by Russian bots, and has not observed "a significant decrease in posts during the days of the attacks." The bots used by Yandex are like those of Google. Their goal is to collect data from websites to index them in their search engine, not to manipulate the public opinion of other countries.
The truly relevant aspect of the Yandex case is how data centers have become a legitimate target of war. Ukraine was not a pioneer, by any means, in choosing these targets. On March 1, Israel and the United States bombed a data center of the Iranian bank Sepah in Tehran. Their goal, according to the The Wall Street Journal, was to paralyze the payment of salaries to members of the Islamic Republic's security forces. On March 11, Iranian drones severely damaged three data centers of Amazon's cloud division, Amazon Web Services (every time a document with a URL ending in "amazonaws" is opened, that company's cloud is being used). Two were in the United Arab Emirates; the third, in Bahrain. More than six months have passed since the attack, and the latter still remains closed.
The cases of Russia, Iran, the UAE, and Bahrain show how vulnerable data centers are. It is also inevitable because they have been designed as civilian and industrial facilities, not as potential targets in a war. Like a refinery, they are vulnerable. They require huge amounts of energy and water. Firefighting operations can further damage them, as was evident in the Persian Gulf. And their cost is considerable.
However, data centers can be considered "dual-use" military facilities, with both a civilian and a military aspect. Maven Smart System, the defense software used by the US and NATO and developed by the controversial US multinational Palantir, relies on AWS data centers. Israel and Ukraine have used the cloud services of, among other companies, Microsoft, for their wars against Hamas and Russia, respectively. The fact that the operations of a data center can constantly change makes it even more difficult to determine whether these facilities are civilian, military... or both at the same time.
Destroying a data center also has consequences for the digital sovereignty of countries. For example, when its facilities in the UAE and Bahrain were out of service, AWS advised its clients in the region to authorize the transfer of their operations to third countries. This raises the question of whether a public body of a country can reasonably authorize sensitive or simply confidential data of its citizens to be taken to a foreign industrial facility with a different legal regime, whose authorities, theoretically, can access them if necessary.
The UAE, which plans to make a significant investment in data centers, is now preparing to move them to uninhabited and isolated areas where they are harder to reach. It is not possible to shield them all. And duplicating functions so that the destruction of one does not cause interruptions in online services only yields limited results. No one ever thought that data centers would be on the front lines.