ChatGPT, Do You Have a Drone Resistant Data Center?
May 14, 2026
Amazon has experienced some issues. The design of some of its data centers have been prone to overheating and missile and drone attacks. The overheating reflects some short cuts, does it not? The data centers in the war zone pose another problem.
But let’s not think about the three Amazon data centers that have suffered kinetics. Let’s think about another engineering power house; namely, OpenAI. As interesting as the testimony in the trial has been, I want to point out that the off-again, on-again hostilities mean that Iran may be scouting for some big, poorly shielded facilities stuffed full of hard-to-get, expensive hardware.
Tom’s Hardware reports on how Iran wants to decimate a target related to AI: “Iran Threatens ‘Complete And Utter Annihilation’ Of OpenAI’s $30B Stargate AI Data Center In Abu Dhabi — Regime Posts Video With Satellite Imagery Of ChatGPT-Maker’s Premier 1GW Data Center.”
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s (IRGC) General Ebrahim Zolfaghari threatened to destroy US and Israeli facilities. The $30 billion Stargate AI datacenter is a tempting target for destruction.
“One might query why Iran hasn’t already struck targets like the Stargate AI data center during the last month of hostilities if it were at all possible…Perhaps these were just ‘lucky’ shots that managed to get through defenses deployed in the Gulf States. Moreover, Iran has made similar threats against Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Google, and 14 other U.S. tech companies over recent weeks. With neither side looking like it will cool down the rhetoric and throttle back on the use of force right now, we might actually find out whether Iran can mount a devastating attack on U.S. business-related data centers or not. There will be lives at stake, of course, people are working at these facilities, so it isn’t all about the $30 billion that has been sunk into these huge projects in the Middle East.”
Let’s think about data center engineering. If a proven data center operator cannot keep its facilities’ temperature under control, was “good enough” or lower-cost engineering solutions implemented. What about facilities in regions where hostilities are usually on-going. Is the engineering of a newcomer to the data center operations business leasing or building facilities designed to cope with direct kinetic strikes. Sure, cooling is a difficult engineering problem. But a vulnerable facility means that more than “good enough” or “low cost” design, engineering and construction are needed.
Iran’s identification of obvious targets means one thing: Cheap kinetics and substantial financial losses. This is relevant because the costs of going elsewhere or strengthening what Iran appears to see as sitting ducks are not going to be trivial.
Iran’s identification of targets strikes me as a statement, “Your operate in facilities that are similar to shooting fish in a barrel.” Did you query your LLM about what the specifications should have been? If you did, maybe that information was incorrect. Just a thought.
Whitney Grace, May 14, 2026
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