According to AWS’s official status dashboard update, two facilities in the UAE were directly struck by drones, while one facility in Bahrain sustained physical damage from a nearby drone strike.

The company stated: “These strikes have caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage.”

This marks one of the first publicly confirmed physical military attacks on a major hyperscale cloud provider’s infrastructure.

The incidents affected the AWS Middle East (UAE) Region (ME-CENTRAL-1) and the AWS Middle East (Bahrain) Region (ME-SOUTH-1), leading to outages and degraded performance for services including EC2, S3, DynamoDB, Lambda, and RDS.

AWS has described the recovery as prolonged and unpredictable due to ongoing regional instability.

Customers have been advised to activate disaster recovery plans and migrate workloads to other AWS regions where possible.

Impact on Businesses and Users

The attacks caused service interruptions for banks, delivery apps, government services, and enterprises across the Gulf that depend on these availability zones.

With data centres becoming strategic targets in modern conflicts, this incident highlights the physical vulnerabilities of cloud infrastructure, even for tech giants like Amazon.

AWS and local authorities have not reported casualties from the strikes.

For African businesses and developers heavily reliant on AWS; common for Nigerian fintechs, startups, and enterprises routing through global cloud providers, this serves as a reminder of geopolitical risks.

Experts recommend multi-region redundancy and regular failover testing to avoid similar disruptions.

Amazon has not released detailed images or extent of damage, citing security reasons.

Recovery efforts were reported as making progress in some areas, but full restoration timelines remain unclear.

This is the largest private investment ever recorded in the state, revealing an escalation in the global need for computing power.

The facility, known as MACROHARDRR, will span about 800,000 square feet and is scheduled to begin operations in February 2026. Governor Tate Reeves confirmed the investment, describing it as a big moment for Mississippi’s economy and its focus on high-end digital infrastructure.

xAI is scaling fast, and Southaven is important to that plan. The site will expand the company’s Colossus supercomputer cluster to almost 2 gigawatts of compute power, placing it in the same league as hyperscale systems operated by Google, Microsoft and Amazon.

The data centre is being developed from a former GXO logistics warehouse and sits close to xAI’s newly acquired power plant site in Southaven, as well as its existing data centre operations in Memphis, Tennessee. 

Memphis already hosts Colossus, which the company has described as the largest supercomputer cluster in the world. The Southaven build effectively extends that footprint across state lines.

Governor Reeves spoke about the scale of the deal, calling it “the largest economic development project in Mississippi’s history.” State officials say the investment will create hundreds of permanent jobs in DeSoto County and deliver long-term tax revenue to support education, healthcare and public safety.

Musk first disclosed the purchase of MACROHARDRR on December 30, noting that it would lift xAI’s total compute capacity to 2GW, though he did not reveal the location or cost at the time. Those details now underline how capital-heavy the push for advanced computing has become.

Demand for data centres surged last year as companies rushed to secure the hardware and power needed to train increasingly complex models.

Bloomberg reported that xAI spent $7.8 billion in cash in the first nine months of 2025 alone, a reminder that firms in this space burn through capital at an exceptional pace.

Globally, investment is growing. Industry forecasts put hyperscaler capital expenditure above $600 billion in 2026, up 36% from the previous year, with around three-quarters of that spending tied directly to advanced computing infrastructure. 

More than 770 future hyperscale facilities are already in the pipeline, and single campuses are now measured in gigawatts rather than megawatts.

Against that backdrop, the Mississippi Data Centre places xAI among the world’s biggest infrastructure builders.