[toast0]

One potential use of SEV is to provide a secure environment to run a VM at an untrusted provider. That provider could do lots of things with funky motherboards and forced migrations without notice by their clients.

If it's an insider attack on company owner and operated hardware, there's always some reason to have a long downtime, and you can piggyback on that to attack the CPUs... Or just put it in a new system and use the migration setup.

Suggested downtimes, organic or sabotage up to attacker's timeline:

HVAC failure: have to shut down many/most/all servers to manage temperatures until HVAC techs can fix.

Automatic transfer switch failure: these things love to fail at the same time as a utility failure, and aren't always easy to bypass.