AWS declares Bahrain and UAE data centers irrecoverable six months after Iran strikes

Amazon Web Services told customers it cannot restore access to cloud infrastructure in Bahrain and part of the United Arab Emirates, more than six months after drone strikes damaged the sites in the opening days of the Iran war. In a health-dashboard update, the company wrote that after a thorough assessment it is "unable to restore access to the resources and data hosted exclusively in this region," and said the damage across multiple Bahrain sites exceeded what its regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand.

In the UAE the loss is narrower but equally final. Resources and data held exclusively within one availability zone, labeled mec1-az2, are damaged beyond hope of recovery, while engineers continue salvaging what they can from two other affected zones. Amazon disclosed in March that two of its UAE data centers took direct drone hits and that a nearby strike damaged a Bahrain facility. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed responsibility, saying it targeted the Bahrain site over Amazon's support for the U.S. military. Most Bahrain-based customers had already shifted workloads elsewhere on AWS advice before the region went dark in April.

This is AWS's first public update on the incidents since April, and it changes the character of the event: what customers could treat as a prolonged outage is now permanent data loss for anyone who kept single-region copies. The read-across runs wider than AMZN. The Gulf has been positioning itself as the next build-out zone for AI capacity, and the UAE Stargate campus, where OpenAI and Cisco signed on as core partners and which was scoped at 5-gigawatt capacity across roughly 10 square miles, is now being reconsidered in favor of dispersed sites, underground construction, blast-resistant concrete, and drone and missile interceptors.

AWS says it expects to provide further updates on the UAE in the coming months and will have more to share with Bahrain users in early 2027, which leaves customer compensation and contract remedies unresolved for at least another quarter. Shares were little changed on the day near $247.54, and the sell-side mean target sits at $328.17 across 60 analysts, so the market is so far treating this as a contained regional write-off rather than a challenge to the AWS franchise. The signal worth tracking is whether enterprise buyers in the Gulf begin pricing physical conflict risk into cloud region selection, which would shift where the region's AI capacity actually gets built.