When servers become targets
Data centers have come into the crosshairs of other recent armed conflicts. During the US-Israeli conflict with Iran earlier this year, drone strikes hit three Amazon Web Services (AWS) facilities in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
Given that data centers can serve both civilian and military purposes simultaneously, the legal status of their targeting is far from straightforward.
Kubo Mačák, an expert in international humanitarian law, said a data center must meet two conditions to be considered a military objective within the meaning of the Geneva Conventions: it must make an effective contribution to military operations and its destruction must provide a “definite military advantage”.
“If you know they are storing military intelligence or using the data center to power military artificial intelligence tools,” Mačák said, there could be reason to consider that a military objective.
Following the most recent attacks on Yandex data centers, users of social media platform
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy used the reports to boast that the strikes had made social media less toxic, even though independent researchers and domestic research institutes have found no evidence that they specifically disrupted Russian disinformation campaigns.
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