7 ms·

This may have been long discussed, but I feel like this war is the first time I've really thought hard about how big a target data centers would be in any sort

by xoa 6mo ago

This may have been long discussed, but I feel like this war is the first time I've really thought hard about how big a target data centers would be in any sort of modern peer war and how that's an entirely new thing since the last time it was really on the radar (end of CW) right? We've built trillions and trillions of dollars in infrastructure in the peace time since, and it seems fairly concentrated. AWS is amongst the biggest there is, and according to mappers like [0] there are only around 240 operational total worldwide with another 130ish under construction. Like, in one respect that seems like a bunch, but vs the kind of attacks we see done in a matter of days in modern wars it's a pretty small number for the whole planet isn't it? In the first 24 hours of the war the US and Israel launched on Iran, they hit something like 1500-2000 targets. How hardened are the data centers? Are they in structures that handle some level of explosives? Do they have counter measures like internal blast walls dividing things into cells so a few hundred pounds of high explosive in one area doesn't damage outside the cell? I mean, of course like all data centers they'll have considered extensive countermeasures to fire, environmental threats, grid issues and so on. But has "nation-state level attack via mass drones or bombardment" been part of the threat model over the last few decades? Hardening of telecoms was certainly considered for old Ma Bell and such back in the CW days but that was a very different environment. I guess it makes me think about what a soft underbelly this could be for a lot of modern society. There's always been consideration of threats to refineries and power stations and industrial production and all those big metal deals. But like, forget any sort of nuclear exchange, any sort of crazy super Starfish style big EMP, just purely a few thousand drones nailing data centers. Nobody even directly dies, just a lot of wrecked computers. What would be the cost of losing all the clouds and colo stuff? How long to replace, at what cost? How much depends on it? ---- 0: https://www.datacentermap.com/c/amazon-aws/ https://www.datacentermap.com/c/amazon-aws/

asdff 6mo ago
The way everything is so overleveraged on the success of these companies being packed into ETFs, it would probably take down the whole economy. You'd be able to shut down even more manufacturing without even destroying it just from economic forces. That is unless the US responds by nationalizing everything, which they won't. They'd rather it go to smithereens so someone has a chance to be made wildly rich rebuilding.
georgemcbay 6mo ago
> the first time I've really thought hard about how big a target data centers would be in any sort of modern peer war Given the rapid and increasing rise of AI use in actually fighting wars, I suspect data centers won't just be a big target, they will eventually be the #1 priority target. Taking them offline won't just be of interest in terms of economic damage, it will be a direct strategic goal toward militarily winning the conflict.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6mo ago
  Until it is clear that the use of AI in "actually fighting wars" doesn't put senior military people at risk of never being able to leave their own country again for fear of prosecution for war crimes, I'm not so sure that the "rapid and increasing rise" is going to actually be a thing.
  - georgemcbay 6mo ago
    > Until it is clear that the use of AI in "actually fighting wars" doesn't put senior military people at risk of never being able to leave their own country again for fear of prosecution for war crimes I don't believe that's a real concern that the senior military people have anymore. War crimes are legal in 2026. That ship has sailed (and was double tap struck by the US Navy). Nobody is doing anything about it.
    - edgyquant 6mo ago
      War crimes have never been anything more than a way the west can punish its enemies. It’s hilarious people think this norm continuing is some refutation of the system as designed.
      - georgemcbay 6mo ago
        > War crimes have never been anything more than a way the west can punish its enemies That's a fair point, the major change isn't that we suddenly started committing war crimes, it is that we've dropped all pretenses of trying to justify why what we did isn't one.
mooreds 6mo ago
Don't forget underseas cables: https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ https://www.submarinecablemap.com/
- ghywertelling 6mo ago
  How about using drone submarines to cut optic fibre undersea cables? Can geolocation coordinates be beamed to submarines deep under water?
  - rcxdude 6mo ago
    Communicating with submarines that are deep underwater is pretty hard. There are techniques like ELF (Extremely Low Frequency) but they require a small power station to transmit a few characters a minute.
tristanj 6mo ago
Instead of targeting data center itself, it's far easier to target the electrical substation that powers the datacenter. It's relatively simple to do. Transformers require oil to cool themselves, and if the coolant reservoir is damaged, then they overheat and shut off. This exact infrastructure attack occurred in North Carolina in 2022 [0], where someone fired bullets into the coolant reservoirs and caused a several day power outage. The perpetrator was never caught. It's speculated a foreign actor did this to gauge the response in a future wartime scenario. Most data centers have a dedicated electrical substation that powers it, so it's possible to target the data center without affecting anywhere else. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore_County_substation_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore_County_substation_attack
- xoa 6mo ago
  >Instead of targeting data centers, it's far easier to target the electrical substation that powers the datacenter That has a lot of collateral damage that may or may not be desirable though. Simultaneously it might have quite a different long term effect right? If all the actual computers are unharmed they can be powered in other ways in an emergency, even if at much higher cost. Or powered back up later, the time lost might be militarily very significant but they're not gone. But how many people and companies actually have full functional decentralized clones of all programs and data? How many people and companies have devices that are locked to remote hosts they expect to check in on at least once in awhile even if they're not "cloud dependent"? What if all that was literally gone, a few thousand missiles or drones and data centers are all just completely erased including tape backups, everything, suddenly we're in a world where all that compute and data is poof. And without hurting anything else, no traditional war crimes either, no power or direct food or transport disruptions. Everyone is fine and healthy, except with this huge societal exocortex gone.
  - nostrademons 6mo ago
    Any cloud engineer worth their salt is going to have their programs be stateless and their data replicated across multiple data centers. Many cloud engineers are not worth their salt, but working in Big Tech, this has been table stakes for 20+ years. There are regular disaster drills, both scheduled and unscheduled, that test what happens when a datacenter disappears. Ideally everything transparently fails over, and most of the time, this is what happens. The bigger problem is that a war is likely to hit multiple levels of infrastructure at the same time. So the datacenters will come under attack, but so will the fiber cables, and the switching apparatuses, and the power plants, and likely also the humans who maintain it all. High-availability software is usually designed for 1-2 components to fail at once and then to transparently route around them. If large chunks of the infrastructure all disappear at once, you can end up in some very weird cascading failure situations.
pvtmert 6mo ago
Agreed that Govt/Military runs on AWS/Azure/whatever. They care about "security" in a "virtual" sense, but I presume soon we'll see requirements like: "Must Have: Missile Defence Perimeter" next to the "Must be FIPS compliant".
- dgxyz 6mo ago
  My partner works in that space. Sovereignty and self-sufficiency are big topics. The US centric cloud at least is killing itself through geopolitical risks for gov customers outside the US. Literally number one operational risk now.
  - mystraline 6mo ago
    Yep. Look at my last comment. Its exactly how to mitigate risk related to the nation you're in, in a data sense. The country opposing the country you're in won't extradite.
trhway 6mo ago
>We've built trillions and trillions of dollars in infrastructure in the peace time since, and it seems fairly concentrated. and thus is easily defended. It would be a pocket change - tens of millions - for AMZN to put say a Rheinmetall Skyshield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyshield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyshield at the data center.
- afiori 6mo ago
  Considering how hard US military bases and radar systems have been hit (and those are not city-sized target) I am unconvinced that even AMZN's pocket change could realiably protect against the kind of attacks we see in this war
  - trhway 6mo ago
    How they were hit? Multiple drones overwhelming relatively small number of air defense systems. Systems like Patriot are great against several very capable targets like ballistic missiles. Such (expensive centralized) systems do much worse against multiple widespread targets like an armada of low flying low speed drones (add to that low speed cut-off filter to avoid hitting general aviation and the likes). Point defense systems like Skyshield (or even that very old and cheap - $2M - Gepard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flakpanzer_Gepard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flakpanzer_Gepard ) work wonderfully against all those drones coming in. Heck, even just soldiers with MANPADs would have easily shot down those drones (you just have to distribute those soldiers to all those strategic objects which hasn't been done) We have classic situation here - everybody have been watching Ukraine war for 4 years, yet nobody has prepared for such style of war. >I am unconvinced that even AMZN's pocket change could realiably protect against the kind of attacks we see in this war No even low flying slow drone - pretty typical situation of top Russian cruise missile shot down by Gepard https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/zdbvim/a_ukrainian_gepard_shooting_down_a_russian_cruise/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/zdbvim/a_ukr... Also AMZN has its own drones dept - in "hot" zones in "hot" times they can put several people with drones (in the high speed configuration) to be used for interception. This is basically how Ukranians have been doing, and that is an experience they are now exporting to the Gulf states. https://www.hisutton.com/Ukrainian-Interceptor-Drones.html https://www.hisutton.com/Ukrainian-Interceptor-Drones.html
nostrademons 6mo ago
In any significant war the Internet is going to go down. That's what has happened empirically in countries undergoing significant wars or social unrest, like Russia, Iran, Yemen, Ethiopia, Syria, Myanmar, and Afghanistan. While IP packet routing itself may have been designed to survive a nuclear war, there have been many centralized systems built on top of it (DNS? Edge caching? Cloudflare? Big Tech) that are essential to the functioning of what we know of as the Internet. If your threat model includes war and you want to have some of the conveniences of the Internet, you should make plans for how to host local copies of data and develop local-scale communications for the people you regularly talk with. The Internet is too big of a security and propaganda risk for governments to allow it to continue to exist when they are engaged in a real existential war.
- bobmcnamara 6mo ago
  Some systems are anycast and available in many datacenters for bandwidth cost reasons. Netflix used to deploy content caches in ISP edges. But any single central point of failure might break them. Things like, is this account paid? Dunno!
  - UltraSane 6mo ago
    Netflix and Youtube both still use caches in ISP edges. The internet would melt without them.
- gmerc 6mo ago
  Which is why bitcoin was always a ready really dumb idea as “end times hedge”
  - sph 6mo ago
    In the "end times" where computers stop working and we don't even have electricity, your dollars in your digital bank account will be equally useless, and dollar banknotes will be used as fire starter. Bitcoin was never designed as a post-collapse currency.
yyyk 6mo ago
There are ways to shield data centers if one is serious about it... e.g. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/oracle-opens-first-2-cloud-data-centres-israel-2021-10-13/ https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/oracle-opens-first...
- roryirvine 6mo ago
  Oracle are actually subletting part of Bynet's new-ish Har Hotzvim facility which has 2,400 racks but is probably power-constrained - I believe it had 16 MW when it went live, with passive provision for doubling that. Even if it's since been upgraded, that's still only 13 kW per rack which is pretty stingy these days. As a very rough rule of thumb building down is about 4x more expensive than building up. So probably worth doing if you're Shin Bet (who I believe also have space in the same dc), but for the likes of Oracle it's only going to be used to serve clients with specific security requirements. Think of it as a halo project - more of a marketing exercise than something that's actually going to be used by the average customer. The same goes for datacentres hosted in cold war bunkers etc - they always end up being too constrained in one way or another to be useful. The big facilities end up being built above ground and rely on geographic redundancy rather than trying to make themselves (literally) bomb-proof.
x0xMaximus 6mo ago
I recently wrote a little on this https://generalresearch.com/detail-oriented/how-to-seed-a-cloud/ https://generalresearch.com/detail-oriented/how-to-seed-a-cl... While we're completely at the mercy of datacenters that we can colo out racks / power / upstreams from, it's a worthy discussion for any technology company that wants some amount of digital sovereignty over their presence online and ability to provide their service independent of a hypervisor / cloud provider (or even just a centralized location). The best option is simply to anycast from any many distinct countries that are either neutral, or unlikely to be involved with any global or regional conflicts at any given time. You don't want them getting bombed at the same time!
kjellsbells 6mo ago
Ironically,the classical target, Washington DC, is less than 25 miles down a very simple highway to Northern Virginia's massive datacenter alley. Our national defense is ultimately predicated on heavy ordnance not being able to show up undetected in this part of the world. Hence the path preferred by attackers of burrowing into Azure signing keys or ransomware attacks on the grid. Much less hardware to transport.
- fragmede 6mo ago
  Iran doesn't, but whether or not China and Russia have nuclear subs parked off the East Coast is anyone's guess.
shreyssh 6mo ago
[dead]
ramshanker 6mo ago
Building blast resistant is a common practices for Refinery control rooms. The same methodologies can be employed for data centers as well. 1 blast can be expensively guarded againt. However designing anything above ground for sustained barges is practically/commercially prohibitive. Underground is only option. PS: Civil Engineer. Designed few of those Gas explosion resistant control rooms.
- sfifs 6mo ago
  Wouldn't it me much more effective and efficient to have a mechanism to simply not pick leaders who choose war?
  - christophilus 6mo ago
    History suggests we’ll have wars periodically, probably for as long as humans exist.
    - iridjfndi38dd 6mo ago
      Progress is possible, it just requires retaining lessons from the past, and education Without those, yes, we remain unevolved and the argument — we are powerful apes is indeed valid Price of Peace 1945 (Beveridge) https://ia601505.us.archive.org/17/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.276047/2015.276047.The-Price.pdf https://ia601505.us.archive.org/17/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.2... And Price of Peace 2020 (Carter) https://www.amazon.com/Price-Peace-Democracy-Maynard-Keynes/dp/0525509038 https://www.amazon.com/Price-Peace-Democracy-Maynard-Keynes/... Should be required reading
  - voidfunc 6mo ago
    Sure but thats really fucking hard tho.
  - adrianN 6mo ago
    Most people on the planet did not pick Trump or Putin or any of the other leaders who recently chose to start a war.
  - 6mo ago
B1FF_PSUVM 6mo ago
> I've really thought hard about Yeah. Financialize the economy presupposing a global open market, then subvert, boycott and bomb said market. So clever.
sysguest 6mo ago
hmm maybe aws should make datacenter locations secret? I mean, why even publish those locations? if this is purely for PR, they can publish fake locations... if this is for VIP visits... well you can always send private invitations
- themadturk 6mo ago
  But aren't they pretty hard to hide? I mean, they cover a lot of grounds, they have lots of infrastructure leading right to them...even if someone makes a few wrong guesses, it's going to be easy to find where the data centers are.
- esseph 6mo ago
  > hmm maybe aws should make datacenter locations secret? Open source intelligence today rivals the best of any nation. That would be virtually impossible to hide for long.
- Hikikomori 6mo ago
  >Disclaimer: Please be aware that Amazon Web Services does not list its data center locations publicly. Hence all AWS listings in our database are based on publicly available information from third parties, open databases, property registries, construction applications, permits, tenders, news coverage and our custom research. There may be incorrect or outdated locations, as well as locations missing. AWS doesn't disclose their locations.
bit1993 6mo ago
One more reason for P2P decentralized tech.
gmerc 6mo ago
Then ask yourself why is the US so aggressively trying to switch the world to a martial stance. It’s a rhetorical question, of course, because we all know it’s because China is winning the traditional economic game on the manufacturing the McKinsey and Bain class sold out for decades and therefore military will have to become the new leadership measuremen, only appreciating as an asset in a less safe dog eat dog world. The Thiels and friends who came up with this shit of course have their own infrastructure in their end time bunkers, but however stupid this gambit sounds, it’s what’s being played right now.
whiplash451 6mo ago
> Nobody even directly dies People almost directly start dying if data centers go down. Not in the minutes, but within days definitely
dvfjsdhgfv 6mo ago
Tangentially related but Iran wasn't much of a threat to the USA before Trump decided to attack it. And apart from Israel, nobody is backing this war. The sooner he realizes it makes zero sense, the better for the whole world. It seems that apart from Russia and the USA, other countries are not so eager to start wars. And what is happening now is a bitter lesson also for China: starting a war is easy, winning it is nearly impossible. So I hope we won't really start to build all infra in under-earth bunkers after all.

by xoa 6mo ago

asdff 6mo ago

The way everything is so overleveraged on the success of these companies being packed into ETFs, it would probably take down the whole economy. You'd be able to shut down even more manufacturing without even destroying it just from economic forces. That is unless the US responds by nationalizing everything, which they won't. They'd rather it go to smithereens so someone has a chance to be made wildly rich rebuilding.

georgemcbay 6mo ago

> the first time I've really thought hard about how big a target data centers would be in any sort of modern peer war Given the rapid and increasing rise of AI use in actually fighting wars, I suspect data centers won't just be a big target, they will eventually be the #1 priority target. Taking them offline won't just be of interest in terms of economic damage, it will be a direct strategic goal toward militarily winning the conflict.

PaulDavisThe1st 6mo ago
Until it is clear that the use of AI in "actually fighting wars" doesn't put senior military people at risk of never being able to leave their own country again for fear of prosecution for war crimes, I'm not so sure that the "rapid and increasing rise" is going to actually be a thing.
- georgemcbay 6mo ago
  > Until it is clear that the use of AI in "actually fighting wars" doesn't put senior military people at risk of never being able to leave their own country again for fear of prosecution for war crimes I don't believe that's a real concern that the senior military people have anymore. War crimes are legal in 2026. That ship has sailed (and was double tap struck by the US Navy). Nobody is doing anything about it.
  - edgyquant 6mo ago
    War crimes have never been anything more than a way the west can punish its enemies. It’s hilarious people think this norm continuing is some refutation of the system as designed.
    - georgemcbay 6mo ago
      > War crimes have never been anything more than a way the west can punish its enemies That's a fair point, the major change isn't that we suddenly started committing war crimes, it is that we've dropped all pretenses of trying to justify why what we did isn't one.

mooreds 6mo ago

Don't forget underseas cables: https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ https://www.submarinecablemap.com/

ghywertelling 6mo ago
How about using drone submarines to cut optic fibre undersea cables? Can geolocation coordinates be beamed to submarines deep under water?
- rcxdude 6mo ago
  Communicating with submarines that are deep underwater is pretty hard. There are techniques like ELF (Extremely Low Frequency) but they require a small power station to transmit a few characters a minute.

tristanj 6mo ago

Instead of targeting data center itself, it's far easier to target the electrical substation that powers the datacenter. It's relatively simple to do. Transformers require oil to cool themselves, and if the coolant reservoir is damaged, then they overheat and shut off. This exact infrastructure attack occurred in North Carolina in 2022 [0], where someone fired bullets into the coolant reservoirs and caused a several day power outage. The perpetrator was never caught. It's speculated a foreign actor did this to gauge the response in a future wartime scenario. Most data centers have a dedicated electrical substation that powers it, so it's possible to target the data center without affecting anywhere else. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore_County_substation_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore_County_substation_attack

xoa 6mo ago
>Instead of targeting data centers, it's far easier to target the electrical substation that powers the datacenter That has a lot of collateral damage that may or may not be desirable though. Simultaneously it might have quite a different long term effect right? If all the actual computers are unharmed they can be powered in other ways in an emergency, even if at much higher cost. Or powered back up later, the time lost might be militarily very significant but they're not gone. But how many people and companies actually have full functional decentralized clones of all programs and data? How many people and companies have devices that are locked to remote hosts they expect to check in on at least once in awhile even if they're not "cloud dependent"? What if all that was literally gone, a few thousand missiles or drones and data centers are all just completely erased including tape backups, everything, suddenly we're in a world where all that compute and data is poof. And without hurting anything else, no traditional war crimes either, no power or direct food or transport disruptions. Everyone is fine and healthy, except with this huge societal exocortex gone.
- nostrademons 6mo ago
  Any cloud engineer worth their salt is going to have their programs be stateless and their data replicated across multiple data centers. Many cloud engineers are not worth their salt, but working in Big Tech, this has been table stakes for 20+ years. There are regular disaster drills, both scheduled and unscheduled, that test what happens when a datacenter disappears. Ideally everything transparently fails over, and most of the time, this is what happens. The bigger problem is that a war is likely to hit multiple levels of infrastructure at the same time. So the datacenters will come under attack, but so will the fiber cables, and the switching apparatuses, and the power plants, and likely also the humans who maintain it all. High-availability software is usually designed for 1-2 components to fail at once and then to transparently route around them. If large chunks of the infrastructure all disappear at once, you can end up in some very weird cascading failure situations.

pvtmert 6mo ago

Agreed that Govt/Military runs on AWS/Azure/whatever. They care about "security" in a "virtual" sense, but I presume soon we'll see requirements like: "Must Have: Missile Defence Perimeter" next to the "Must be FIPS compliant".

dgxyz 6mo ago
My partner works in that space. Sovereignty and self-sufficiency are big topics. The US centric cloud at least is killing itself through geopolitical risks for gov customers outside the US. Literally number one operational risk now.
- mystraline 6mo ago
  Yep. Look at my last comment. Its exactly how to mitigate risk related to the nation you're in, in a data sense. The country opposing the country you're in won't extradite.

trhway 6mo ago

>We've built trillions and trillions of dollars in infrastructure in the peace time since, and it seems fairly concentrated. and thus is easily defended. It would be a pocket change - tens of millions - for AMZN to put say a Rheinmetall Skyshield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyshield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyshield at the data center.

afiori 6mo ago
Considering how hard US military bases and radar systems have been hit (and those are not city-sized target) I am unconvinced that even AMZN's pocket change could realiably protect against the kind of attacks we see in this war
- trhway 6mo ago
  How they were hit? Multiple drones overwhelming relatively small number of air defense systems. Systems like Patriot are great against several very capable targets like ballistic missiles. Such (expensive centralized) systems do much worse against multiple widespread targets like an armada of low flying low speed drones (add to that low speed cut-off filter to avoid hitting general aviation and the likes). Point defense systems like Skyshield (or even that very old and cheap - $2M - Gepard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flakpanzer_Gepard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flakpanzer_Gepard ) work wonderfully against all those drones coming in. Heck, even just soldiers with MANPADs would have easily shot down those drones (you just have to distribute those soldiers to all those strategic objects which hasn't been done) We have classic situation here - everybody have been watching Ukraine war for 4 years, yet nobody has prepared for such style of war. >I am unconvinced that even AMZN's pocket change could realiably protect against the kind of attacks we see in this war No even low flying slow drone - pretty typical situation of top Russian cruise missile shot down by Gepard https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/zdbvim/a_ukrainian_gepard_shooting_down_a_russian_cruise/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/zdbvim/a_ukr... Also AMZN has its own drones dept - in "hot" zones in "hot" times they can put several people with drones (in the high speed configuration) to be used for interception. This is basically how Ukranians have been doing, and that is an experience they are now exporting to the Gulf states. https://www.hisutton.com/Ukrainian-Interceptor-Drones.html https://www.hisutton.com/Ukrainian-Interceptor-Drones.html

nostrademons 6mo ago

In any significant war the Internet is going to go down. That's what has happened empirically in countries undergoing significant wars or social unrest, like Russia, Iran, Yemen, Ethiopia, Syria, Myanmar, and Afghanistan. While IP packet routing itself may have been designed to survive a nuclear war, there have been many centralized systems built on top of it (DNS? Edge caching? Cloudflare? Big Tech) that are essential to the functioning of what we know of as the Internet. If your threat model includes war and you want to have some of the conveniences of the Internet, you should make plans for how to host local copies of data and develop local-scale communications for the people you regularly talk with. The Internet is too big of a security and propaganda risk for governments to allow it to continue to exist when they are engaged in a real existential war.

bobmcnamara 6mo ago
Some systems are anycast and available in many datacenters for bandwidth cost reasons. Netflix used to deploy content caches in ISP edges. But any single central point of failure might break them. Things like, is this account paid? Dunno!
- UltraSane 6mo ago
  Netflix and Youtube both still use caches in ISP edges. The internet would melt without them.
gmerc 6mo ago
Which is why bitcoin was always a ready really dumb idea as “end times hedge”
- sph 6mo ago
  In the "end times" where computers stop working and we don't even have electricity, your dollars in your digital bank account will be equally useless, and dollar banknotes will be used as fire starter. Bitcoin was never designed as a post-collapse currency.

yyyk 6mo ago

There are ways to shield data centers if one is serious about it... e.g. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/oracle-opens-first-2-cloud-data-centres-israel-2021-10-13/ https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/oracle-opens-first...

roryirvine 6mo ago
Oracle are actually subletting part of Bynet's new-ish Har Hotzvim facility which has 2,400 racks but is probably power-constrained - I believe it had 16 MW when it went live, with passive provision for doubling that. Even if it's since been upgraded, that's still only 13 kW per rack which is pretty stingy these days. As a very rough rule of thumb building down is about 4x more expensive than building up. So probably worth doing if you're Shin Bet (who I believe also have space in the same dc), but for the likes of Oracle it's only going to be used to serve clients with specific security requirements. Think of it as a halo project - more of a marketing exercise than something that's actually going to be used by the average customer. The same goes for datacentres hosted in cold war bunkers etc - they always end up being too constrained in one way or another to be useful. The big facilities end up being built above ground and rely on geographic redundancy rather than trying to make themselves (literally) bomb-proof.

x0xMaximus 6mo ago

I recently wrote a little on this https://generalresearch.com/detail-oriented/how-to-seed-a-cloud/ https://generalresearch.com/detail-oriented/how-to-seed-a-cl... While we're completely at the mercy of datacenters that we can colo out racks / power / upstreams from, it's a worthy discussion for any technology company that wants some amount of digital sovereignty over their presence online and ability to provide their service independent of a hypervisor / cloud provider (or even just a centralized location). The best option is simply to anycast from any many distinct countries that are either neutral, or unlikely to be involved with any global or regional conflicts at any given time. You don't want them getting bombed at the same time!

kjellsbells 6mo ago

Ironically,the classical target, Washington DC, is less than 25 miles down a very simple highway to Northern Virginia's massive datacenter alley. Our national defense is ultimately predicated on heavy ordnance not being able to show up undetected in this part of the world. Hence the path preferred by attackers of burrowing into Azure signing keys or ransomware attacks on the grid. Much less hardware to transport.

fragmede 6mo ago
Iran doesn't, but whether or not China and Russia have nuclear subs parked off the East Coast is anyone's guess.

shreyssh 6mo ago

[dead]

ramshanker 6mo ago

Building blast resistant is a common practices for Refinery control rooms. The same methodologies can be employed for data centers as well. 1 blast can be expensively guarded againt. However designing anything above ground for sustained barges is practically/commercially prohibitive. Underground is only option. PS: Civil Engineer. Designed few of those Gas explosion resistant control rooms.

sfifs 6mo ago
Wouldn't it me much more effective and efficient to have a mechanism to simply not pick leaders who choose war?
- christophilus 6mo ago
  History suggests we’ll have wars periodically, probably for as long as humans exist.
  - iridjfndi38dd 6mo ago
    Progress is possible, it just requires retaining lessons from the past, and education Without those, yes, we remain unevolved and the argument — we are powerful apes is indeed valid Price of Peace 1945 (Beveridge) https://ia601505.us.archive.org/17/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.276047/2015.276047.The-Price.pdf https://ia601505.us.archive.org/17/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.2... And Price of Peace 2020 (Carter) https://www.amazon.com/Price-Peace-Democracy-Maynard-Keynes/dp/0525509038 https://www.amazon.com/Price-Peace-Democracy-Maynard-Keynes/... Should be required reading
- voidfunc 6mo ago
  Sure but thats really fucking hard tho.
- adrianN 6mo ago
  Most people on the planet did not pick Trump or Putin or any of the other leaders who recently chose to start a war.
- 6mo ago

B1FF_PSUVM 6mo ago

> I've really thought hard about Yeah. Financialize the economy presupposing a global open market, then subvert, boycott and bomb said market. So clever.

sysguest 6mo ago

hmm maybe aws should make datacenter locations secret? I mean, why even publish those locations? if this is purely for PR, they can publish fake locations... if this is for VIP visits... well you can always send private invitations

themadturk 6mo ago
But aren't they pretty hard to hide? I mean, they cover a lot of grounds, they have lots of infrastructure leading right to them...even if someone makes a few wrong guesses, it's going to be easy to find where the data centers are.
esseph 6mo ago
> hmm maybe aws should make datacenter locations secret? Open source intelligence today rivals the best of any nation. That would be virtually impossible to hide for long.
Hikikomori 6mo ago
>Disclaimer: Please be aware that Amazon Web Services does not list its data center locations publicly. Hence all AWS listings in our database are based on publicly available information from third parties, open databases, property registries, construction applications, permits, tenders, news coverage and our custom research. There may be incorrect or outdated locations, as well as locations missing. AWS doesn't disclose their locations.

bit1993 6mo ago

One more reason for P2P decentralized tech.

gmerc 6mo ago

Then ask yourself why is the US so aggressively trying to switch the world to a martial stance. It’s a rhetorical question, of course, because we all know it’s because China is winning the traditional economic game on the manufacturing the McKinsey and Bain class sold out for decades and therefore military will have to become the new leadership measuremen, only appreciating as an asset in a less safe dog eat dog world. The Thiels and friends who came up with this shit of course have their own infrastructure in their end time bunkers, but however stupid this gambit sounds, it’s what’s being played right now.

whiplash451 6mo ago

> Nobody even directly dies People almost directly start dying if data centers go down. Not in the minutes, but within days definitely

dvfjsdhgfv 6mo ago

Tangentially related but Iran wasn't much of a threat to the USA before Trump decided to attack it. And apart from Israel, nobody is backing this war. The sooner he realizes it makes zero sense, the better for the whole world. It seems that apart from Russia and the USA, other countries are not so eager to start wars. And what is happening now is a bitter lesson also for China: starting a war is easy, winning it is nearly impossible. So I hope we won't really start to build all infra in under-earth bunkers after all.