Iran’s security chief, Mohsen Rezaei, has warned that cables, data centres and artificial intelligence (AI) facilities across the region could be attacked if war with the United States erupts again. The warning comes as the capture of Yemeni territory along the Red Sea coastline last month by the Iran-backed Houthis has raised concerns over the safety of internet cables linking Europe and Asia. Fierce fighting is under way between Yemen’s internationally recognised government and the Houthis at several locations, including Bab al-Mandeb, through which nearly one-fifth of global internet traffic passes.
Data centres and US business interests were hit in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates during the US-Israel war on Iran. Tehran said these attacks were in response to US attacks on Iranian civilian installations. Active hostilities have largely ended since the June memorandum of understanding between Iran and the US, but attacks on ships passing through the global oil chokepoint – the Strait of Hormuz – have continued.
So how exposed is the region’s internet? Here’s what you need to know: Because so much data travels through a few narrow routes. More than 90 percent of data capacity between Europe and Asia passes through cables under the Red Sea, according to estimates by the research firm TeleGeography.
They enter the sea through Bab al-Mandeb, a strait about 26km (16 miles) wide at its narrowest, one of the busiest maritime routes connecting Europe to Asia. Cables can be cut by anchors or sabotage, and repairs in a war zone need permits and safety guarantees. Data centres, which run banking apps and cloud services, are large, fixed targets.
Data centres depend on uninterrupted electricity, cooling and telecommunications, he said, while undersea cables “are difficult to protect continuously and disruption can affect several countries simultaneously”. Yes, repeatedly since the war began in February. On March 11, the semi-official Tasnim news agency said Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has published a list of “Iran’s new targets”, including cloud infrastructure belonging to Google, Microsoft and Oracle in Israel and some Gulf states.
That same month, the IRGC named 17 US firms in a Telegram post, including Google, Meta, and Apple, as well as the Emirati AI company G42 as potential targets. Krieg said he would take Rezaei’s threat seriously, but drew a distinction between Iran’s ability to cause significant disruption and its ability “to systematically destroy the Gulf’s digital infrastructure”. In March, Amazon Web Services (AWS) said two of its facilities in the UAE were “directly struck” by drones, while a strike near one in Bahrain “caused physical impact to our infrastructure”.
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