I guess it makes me think about what a soft underbelly this could be for a lot of modern society. There's always been consideration of threats to refineries and power stations and industrial production and all those big metal deals. But like, forget any sort of nuclear exchange, any sort of crazy super Starfish style big EMP, just purely a few thousand drones nailing data centers. Nobody even directly dies, just a lot of wrecked computers. What would be the cost of losing all the clouds and colo stuff? How long to replace, at what cost? How much depends on it?
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Most data centers have a dedicated electrical substation that powers it, so it's possible to target the data center without affecting anywhere else.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore_County_substation_attack
That has a lot of collateral damage that may or may not be desirable though. Simultaneously it might have quite a different long term effect right? If all the actual computers are unharmed they can be powered in other ways in an emergency, even if at much higher cost. Or powered back up later, the time lost might be militarily very significant but they're not gone.
But how many people and companies actually have full functional decentralized clones of all programs and data? How many people and companies have devices that are locked to remote hosts they expect to check in on at least once in awhile even if they're not "cloud dependent"? What if all that was literally gone, a few thousand missiles or drones and data centers are all just completely erased including tape backups, everything, suddenly we're in a world where all that compute and data is poof. And without hurting anything else, no traditional war crimes either, no power or direct food or transport disruptions. Everyone is fine and healthy, except with this huge societal exocortex gone.
The bigger problem is that a war is likely to hit multiple levels of infrastructure at the same time. So the datacenters will come under attack, but so will the fiber cables, and the switching apparatuses, and the power plants, and likely also the humans who maintain it all. High-availability software is usually designed for 1-2 components to fail at once and then to transparently route around them. If large chunks of the infrastructure all disappear at once, you can end up in some very weird cascading failure situations.
That doesn't help much in a shooting war, unfortunately.
Redundancy is great for uncorrelated outages - if a freak weather event or power problem knocks out data centres in London, and your backups in Paris and Frankfurt are unaffected.
But if there's a war and London is getting bombed? Good chance Paris and Frankfurt are also getting bombed.
That's a big assumption. Often there's no time to do things right, or no money, or lack of oversight, and so on.
Not every company is staffed by empowered and highly motivated staff
(Perpetrators also not caught)
Electrical Transformer Manufacturing Is Throttling the Electrified Future - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47604887 - April 2026
If your threat model includes war and you want to have some of the conveniences of the Internet, you should make plans for how to host local copies of data and develop local-scale communications for the people you regularly talk with. The Internet is too big of a security and propaganda risk for governments to allow it to continue to exist when they are engaged in a real existential war.
But any single central point of failure might break them. Things like, is this account paid? Dunno!
1 blast can be expensively guarded againt. However designing anything above ground for sustained barges is practically/commercially prohibitive. Underground is only option.
PS: Civil Engineer. Designed few of those Gas explosion resistant control rooms.
Without those, yes, we remain unevolved and the argument — we are powerful apes is indeed valid
Price of Peace 1945 (Beveridge) https://ia601505.us.archive.org/17/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.2...
And Price of Peace 2020 (Carter) https://www.amazon.com/Price-Peace-Democracy-Maynard-Keynes/...
Should be required reading
While we're completely at the mercy of datacenters that we can colo out racks / power / upstreams from, it's a worthy discussion for any technology company that wants some amount of digital sovereignty over their presence online and ability to provide their service independent of a hypervisor / cloud provider (or even just a centralized location).
The best option is simply to anycast from any many distinct countries that are either neutral, or unlikely to be involved with any global or regional conflicts at any given time. You don't want them getting bombed at the same time!
e.g.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/oracle-opens-first...
Given the rapid and increasing rise of AI use in actually fighting wars, I suspect data centers won't just be a big target, they will eventually be the #1 priority target. Taking them offline won't just be of interest in terms of economic damage, it will be a direct strategic goal toward militarily winning the conflict.
I don't believe that's a real concern that the senior military people have anymore. War crimes are legal in 2026. That ship has sailed (and was double tap struck by the US Navy). Nobody is doing anything about it.
Which is why I specifically mentioned the risk of not being able to leave the country, because I'd be willing to wager a bit more than international prosecutions for war crimes are significantly more likely, and would be occuring in a world that is growing noticeably more "America needs to be taught a lesson" in spirit.
They're the way winners can punish their enemies.
If Germany and Japan had won WWII, US/British/Russian military and political leaders absolutely would've been on trial.
At the same time, agreements between peer countries to follow basic rules have generally held. Note that neither side in the current conflict is using dirty bombs, or dropping nerve gas or bioweapons on civilians, etc.
That's a fair point, the major change isn't that we suddenly started committing war crimes, it is that we've dropped all pretenses of trying to justify why what we did isn't one.
One of the most frustrating things about wars is people adopt policies that don't advance their objectives and then lie about what they're doing, what happened and why. This sets up an environment where militarys do things that aren't even in their own interests, let alone anyone else's, and the public discourse is busy arguing about some wild imaginary scenario that isn't related. Better to have people focused on the real world and accurately understanding both (1) what the policy was and (2) what the outcome of the policy was.
If I admit to killing someone because I want everyone to know I'm a tough, viscous killer and they'd better not piss me off or they'll be next - that's not an improvement.
As to the behavior itself, I imagine the merits are heavily dependent on context. International politics depends to some extent on demonstrating a willingness and ability to engage in violence. That's not the whole story but it's definitely part of it.
Not really, IMO. Their goal isn't honesty and transparency, they just DGAF to hide it because they correctly realize there won't be any personal consequences for their actions.
They are still lying about most everything else - why the war was started, suppressing the amount of causalities, etc.
President Davis The First isn't going to lift a finger to stop the ICC prosecuting former Secretary of Defense Hegseth, and, I suspect, neither would quite a few other potential future presidents.
Sovereignty and self-sufficiency are big topics. The US centric cloud at least is killing itself through geopolitical risks for gov customers outside the US. Literally number one operational risk now.
The country opposing the country you're in won't extradite.
Yeah. Financialize the economy presupposing a global open market, then subvert, boycott and bomb said market. So clever.
I mean, why even publish those locations?
if this is purely for PR, they can publish fake locations...
if this is for VIP visits... well you can always send private invitations
and thus is easily defended. It would be a pocket change - tens of millions - for AMZN to put say a Rheinmetall Skyshield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyshield at the data center.
Point defense systems like Skyshield (or even that very old and cheap - $2M - Gepard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flakpanzer_Gepard ) work wonderfully against all those drones coming in.
Heck, even just soldiers with MANPADs would have easily shot down those drones (you just have to distribute those soldiers to all those strategic objects which hasn't been done)
We have classic situation here - everybody have been watching Ukraine war for 4 years, yet nobody has prepared for such style of war.
>I am unconvinced that even AMZN's pocket change could realiably protect against the kind of attacks we see in this war
No even low flying slow drone - pretty typical situation of top Russian cruise missile shot down by Gepard
https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/zdbvim/a_ukr...
Also AMZN has its own drones dept - in "hot" zones in "hot" times they can put several people with drones (in the high speed configuration) to be used for interception. This is basically how Ukranians have been doing, and that is an experience they are now exporting to the Gulf states.
Deprioritised means migrate usage out of this zone just in case anyone misreads the context here.
I'm confused, what does ownership have to do with this particular failure mode? The issue here is a (for many) unforeseen new tradeoff involved in centralization. Colocating at a central place has the exact same tradeoff in this case: bandwidth is vastly more available and cheaper towards the core, and there are significant amortization gains to be had with a lot of basic shared infra. But it's also one big structure holding a lot of computers and infra everyone is depending on, that's the whole point of it! We're all sharing network backbone and power filtering/redundancy and so on and so forth, vs paying for that separately. That means a missile or drone or bomb hit to the building still hits all of us whether we own the servers there or we're running workloads on someone else's servers.
The only responses are either central counter measures or decentralization. Both have significant costs and complexity, that's why it wasn't just done proactively right?
This includes things I have expertise in.
In the case of if you could bring your own missile-defence-network, then you probably don't need co-location anyway. (There is nothing "co", it's just location you build & operate, with your Patriot or whatever)
spreading out decreases risk, concentration increases it