What Happened

A senior Iranian official warned Sunday that cables, data centers and AI facilities in the region could be attacked if intense fighting resumes, The Associated Press reported. The warning came from Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council and a former Revolutionary Guard commander, in remarks carried by the state-run IRNA news agency, according to the AP.

“If war breaks out, many cables, data centers and artificial intelligence centers will come within range,” Rezaei said, according to Iran International, which reported that he described these sites as not yet among Iran's targets.

Rezaei called Washington's latest response to Iran's proposal for ending the war “insufficient.” He said the U.S. had accepted some of Iran's seven conditions but that others remained unclear, that Iran was no longer responding to the U.S. and that Washington needed to clarify issues he did not specify.

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Efforts to end the war and fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz are stalled, according to the AP. A faster, memorandum-style deal proposed by Iran's delegation at the U.N. General Assembly last month was rejected, though the two sides remain in contact through mediators. Iran's Revolutionary Guard navy warned that ships in the strait that switch off navigation and identification systems would be treated as hostile, IRNA reported via the AP, and the AP said attacks on vessels in the strait have increased since the proposal was rejected, with one reported Sunday.

The AP report named no company, cable system or facility. IranWire described the cables as communication cables, and the AP did not specify.

Why It Matters

Earlier in the war, Amazon Web Services said two of its data centers in the UAE were “directly struck,” and a facility in Bahrain was damaged by a drone that landed nearby, the AP reported March 3. AWS described structural damage, disrupted power and water damage from fire suppression, and it advised customers to move workloads out of the region. (Fortune also reported the damage.)

AWS says each region has at least three availability zones within about 60 miles of one another, according to the AP's March report. The AP noted that this spacing offers little protection against a military campaign and that physical security at such sites is designed to stop intruders, not missiles.

Leaders with systems hosted in the Gulf need to know whether those workloads, including backups and disaster-recovery copies, can be shifted quickly and whether that has been tested. Firms that chose regional hosting to meet data-residency rules may face conflicts if they move data abroad. Boards with Gulf operations, investments or AI projects can treat named threats to infrastructure as a planning input.

Context

In the same AP roundup, Iran-backed Houthi rebels claimed responsibility for attacks on King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, including a Saturday strike that killed 12 people.

What to Watch

Key questions include whether U.S.-Iran contacts through mediators clarify the disputed conditions or fighting escalates, whether cloud providers update guidance on Middle East regions, whether further incidents follow the Revolutionary Guard navy's warning in the Strait of Hormuz and whether Iranian officials name specific facilities or operators.

Sources