Amazon was contacted for comment on the latest Bahrain drone incident, but said it had nothing to add beyond the statement in its current advisory.
Denial of infrastructure
Doing the damage is the Shaheed 136, a small and unsophisticated drone designed to overwhelm defenders with numbers. If only one in twenty reaches its target, the price-performance still exceeds that of more expensive systems.
When aimed at critical infrastructure such as datacenters, the effect is also psychological; the threat of an attack on its own can be enough to make it difficult for organizations to continue using an at-risk facility.
Iran’s targeting of the Bahrain datacenter is unlikely to be random. Amazon opened its ME-SOUTH-1 AWS presence in 2019, and it is still believed to be the company’s largest site in the Middle East.
Earlier this week, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Telegram channel explicitly threatened to target at least 18 US companies operating in the region, including Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, and Apple. This follows similar threats to an even longer list of US companies made on the IRGC-affiliated Tasnim News Agency in recent weeks.
That strategy doesn’t bode well for US companies that have made large investments in Middle Eastern datacenter infrastructure in recent years, drawn by the growing wealth and influence of countries in the region. This includes Amazon, which has announced plans to build a $5.3 billion datacenter in Saudi Arabia, due to become available in 2026. If this is now under threat, whether by warfare or the hypothetical possibility of attack, that will create uncertainty.
