Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has claimed responsibility for a second attack on an Amazon Web Services (AWS) data center in Bahrain, escalating the ongoing conflict’s impact on critical digital infrastructure in the Middle East. The IRGC stated that the strike, carried out on July 20, involved “several cruise missiles” that destroyed the facility, according to the state-affiliated news outlet Sepah News. The attack is the latest in a series of Iranian strikes targeting cloud infrastructure in the region, following an initial assault on the same AWS site in March and further attacks in April, which have severely disrupted AWS’s Bahrain region for months.
The IRGC framed the strike as retaliation for what it described as a U.S. attack on civilian facilities under construction in Darkhovin, Iran, on July 19. The U.S. Central Command (CentCom) confirmed it conducted operations on the night of July 18, targeting Iranian military coastal surveillance and air defense facilities, maritime capabilities, and missile and drone storage sites, as well as IRGC forces that had launched attacks on U.S. service members in Jordan on July 17. CentCom did not specify that the Darkhovin nuclear power plant—still in early construction stages—was among the targets. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) stated on X that it was investigating reports of the overnight attack, noting that the facility “contained no nuclear material when last visited by the IAEA.”
AWS has not confirmed whether its Bahrain data center was hit, and no updates have been added to its status page for the region. The company has been contacted for comment. The broader implications for the data center industry are significant: Iran has previously struck an Oracle data center in Dubai and threatened OpenAI’s Stargate site in the UAE, signaling a pattern of targeting cloud and hyperscale infrastructure as part of its military strategy. This ongoing disruption threatens to undermine regional data center reliability, drive up insurance costs, and force operators to reassess security protocols in the Middle East, a region increasingly central to global AI and cloud expansion.