[p-o]

Interesting adjacent theory is how much are datacenters becoming military target to strike as part of disrupting initial defenses. It doesn't seem it was the case in this instance, but I could see this becoming a more important target in future.

Seems like it should be somewhat easier to bomb 50 datacenters than it would be to hack and disrupt 1000s of different services.

Again, this is just me thinking out loud on a tangent and this doesn't have much to do with this story, but I felt it was an interesting thought to share nonetheless.

[swiftcoder]

The more interesting question, is how many datacenters are just plonked next to a high-value military target?

For infrastructure reasons, we plonk datacenters down next to airports big enough to fly major hardware into, and near where the big oceanic cables come ashore… and for strategic reasons those are also the perfect places to place military bases

[throw475787]

Is there acrually some meaningful physical separation between military and civilian server deployments?

We seem to be really bad at separating those two. For example Starlink is basically military infrastructure now, used to guide bombs.

[jbverschoor]

Arpa net

[throawayonthe]

i do believe that was decommissioned in the late 80s

[pinkmuffinere]

You sound like you know things, and I have questions! What are the chances that we see infrastructure move to less-developed-but-more-stable regions of the world? What even are the candidate locations that wouldn't be an absolute headache to set up? I'm thinking perhaps West Africa? Or South Africa if it can stabilize a bit? Maybe other coastal locations that have good-enough transportation hubs nearby?

[swiftcoder]

AWS spreads a pretty wide net - there are already datacentres in Cape Town, São Paulo, Jakarta... You could certainly deploy your app far enough to dodge any regional instability.

However, proximity to money/power tends to be a factor in business, and the bulk of datacentres cluster around US/EU/MENA/China/Japan

[cherryteastain]

A datacenter IS a high value military target.

[Imustaskforhelp]

> Seems like it should be somewhat easier to nuke 50 datacenters than it would be to hack and disrupt 1000s of different services.

The bigger part of me seems that if we someone nukes 50 datacenters all at once or say all of Amazon's datacenters at once, then the data stored in there would simply be gone and given so many datacenters are located in Virginia,USA iirc or just so many companies being reliant on few datacenter providers.

The larger threat to me with the lose of data is firstly the panic within public fronting services but also, with Hedge Funds, Pension funds or banking datacenters who might be using these and if they lose the data, then its gonna cause even more public mayhem.

Some might be saying oh off-site backups exist but there has atleast been one instance, where a single Google accident had led to massive issues for a 135 Billion $ pension fund.

Relevant Kevin Faang video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GOAUyipnM4 [Google Accidentally Deletes $135 Billion Pension Fund, Chaos Ensues]

[treesknees]

In my experience many middle eastern companies tend to only operate out of the Middle East AZ’s. They’re not backhauling their data and customers to us-east-1. If the goal is to severely disrupt middle eastern rivals, then you don’t need to hit every possible AWS datacenter.

[Imustaskforhelp]

Interesting, I didn't know that so thanks for telling me something new.

But why is this the case? Like, saving costs? Doesn't this recent attack on AWS DC does show that they aren't as safe as previously thought especially in a region of conflict.

Is there any particular reason as to why this is the case?

[jamesfinlayson]

No idea what the laws are like but maybe data sovereignty? I'm in Australia and certain industries require Australian data to stay in Australia, which until ap-southeast-4 came along meant relying on one AWS region.

[fc417fc802]

Notably they did have backups. As you would expect for a $135 billion dollar undertaking. It's just that restoring from a calamity tends to be time consuming (a key difference between failover and a backup).

[roncesvalles]

Exactly. 2 is only sufficient for HA against random failures. It's not enough for HA against a determined adversary willing to use targeted force.

[tbrownaw]

> Seems like it should be somewhat easier to nuke 50 datacenters than it would be to hack and disrupt 1000s of different services.

Previous outage news makes it sound like the cloud providers still have quite a few logical single points of failure.

[Zeyka]

That's so interesting. Are any of the US military (or other satellite state of the US) systems running in "normal" datacenters or do they have a few protected DoD datacenters in the US?

[Imustaskforhelp]

Found this relevant article: https://serverlift.com/blog/military-modular-data-centers/ (AWS Military Modular Data centers)

I do think that though, atleast from the Anthropic decision prior, we know that Anthropic which was used by DoD should be on normal AWS datacenters.

I am saying this because, Dod Threatened to force take the source code of Anthropic if they don't agree to aggregious demands so that means that they don't have the source code.

Perhaps DoD used Anthropic within AWS Military modular DC's but I find it extremely unlikely.

I am almost certain that even with OpenAI who bent its knee to DoD, its still hosted on regular infrastructure and DoD is using these AI models on pretty sensitive tasks (During the Venezeula Maduro's capture, Anthropic/Claude were used iirc to handle some data analysis)

IMO Tho, Any Employee from Anthropic/OpenAI might know better tho about how these models are deployed.

[riknos314]

they have a press release stating that Claude is available on bedrock in secret regions

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2025/11/amazon-be...

https://aws.amazon.com/federal/secret-cloud/

[breppp]

> doesn't seem it was the case in this instance

To me it absolutely looks like the case in here, what are the chances three availability zones across two different countries have been attacked?

[ineedasername]

Data centers in space no longer look so unreasonable when the requirement is “redundancy against multi site bomb strikes mid op”. A little depressing when some pieces start to fit together.

[Kye]

How would that help? The ground station that handles local routing to and from the orbital station becomes the target.

[vineyardmike]

I’m not exactly fully bought into the idea (for many practicality reasons) but it seems easier to build many (and replace) ground stations than data centers.

Additionally, StarLink et al are now able to directly communicate with cell phones. It therefore should be possible to route entirely in space between “data center satellites” and communications satellites and communicate directly with an end user device, avoiding the entire terrestrial internet.

[ineedasername]

Routing? Why route? the link at the point of comms is direct. There's no extra ground station, unless you mean the person/people doing things. But either they're communicating direct to a DC on the ground, or one in space, or wherever. Setup so that-- sure-- they can work and coordinate better if someone isn't dropping bombs on ground nodes but that all nodes have some independent capabilities as well.

[jcgrillo]

IIUC part of the reason ballistic missiles have multiple warheads is that some of them detonate high up to knock out air defenses and other electronics allowing the rest to fall through to their targets. The last time we tried this experiment as a species was the starfish prime tests in 1962 which caused some electrical havoc in Hawaii. These days our systems are probably more delicate and sensitive? All that is to say, in a scenario where nukes are going off I'm not sure you'd even need to target any datacenters in particular.. they're probably all toast by default.

[roxolotl]

This is the data center version of https://xkcd.com/538/. Realistically if there is a hot war what you’re saying seems accurate.