The next war may not begin by destroying an airbase, sinking a warship, or disabling a command post. It may begin by taking down the computing infrastructure that enables all three to operate. From Russian strikes on Ukrainian data centers to attacks on cloud infrastructure in the Middle East, a new reality is emerging: the physical infrastructure powering artificial intelligence, intelligence fusion, and military decision-making is becoming a strategic target.
In an age when decision advantage increasingly depends on computational power, the ability to protect and sustain compute may become as decisive as the ability to deliver firepower.
For more than a century, military planners have targeted the infrastructure that sustains an enemy’s ability to fight. Rail networks moved armies. Oil refineries fueled them. Power stations energised factories. Communications hubs connected commanders to forces in the field. Today, data centers are the new vulnerability to protect or to attack, creating a new cost calculus in war.
Ukraine’s recent strikes against major Russian data centers suggest that Kyiv understands this fundamental reality of twenty-first-century warfare.
The most important infrastructure supporting national power is no longer confined to factories, ports, pipelines, and electrical grids. Increasingly, it resides inside vast facilities filled with servers, storage systems, and advanced computing hardware. Wipe out a data center, and if there is no backup or resilient infrastructure, you strike a centre of gravity for your adversary.
These facilities are not simply commercial assets. They are becoming legitimate high-payoff targets in modern conflict. Recent attacks on Russian facilities supporting companies such as Yandex, Sberbank, and VKontakte demonstrated how disruption of digital infrastructure can ripple across banking, communications, cloud services, navigation, e-commerce, and AI development. The message is unmistakable: data centers are on the prioritized target list.
Why data centers matter
The significance of data centers extends far beyond internet services. They have become the physical foundation of the digital economy and, increasingly, the digital battlefield. Governments store information there. Financial systems operate through them. Military organizations depend on their cloud services and computational capabilities. Artificial intelligence systems require their processing power.
In many respects, modern data centers perform the function that oil refineries performed during the industrial age: they convert a raw strategic resource (i.e., data) into usable power. Artificial intelligence systems depend on three fundamental inputs: data, computing power, and algorithms. Data centers increasingly concentrate all three. They house the servers that store massive data repositories, provide the computational infrastructure necessary to train and operate large language models, and support the cloud architectures upon which governments, corporations, and military organizations increasingly rely.
Destroying a refinery degrades fuel production; destroying a data center degrades information production. The military implications are becoming impossible to ignore if your key warfighting functions are performed on digital systems.
The AI connection
Much of the discussion surrounding these attacks has focused on their potential impact on Russian artificial intelligence development.
Several analysts have argued that attacks against facilities housing advanced computing systems could significantly delay AI-related initiatives by damaging infrastructure that is difficult to replace, particularly where sanctions and export controls limit access to advanced processors and supporting technologies.
This represents a profound shift in military thinking. Historically, wars focused on destroying an adversary’s ability to manufacture physical goods. In the coming decades, nations may increasingly seek to destroy an adversary’s ability to collect, process, store, and exploit information. The infrastructure that transforms data into intelligence, economic power, and military advantage is becoming a critical vulnerability.
Strategic effects beyond AI
The value of attacking data centers lies not only in their connection to artificial intelligence. A successful strike can generate cascading effects across multiple sectors simultaneously. Banking systems experience outages. Commercial transactions are delayed. Cloud services become unavailable. Communications networks degrade. Logistics systems lose visibility. Government databases become inaccessible. Public confidence erodes. Think back to the world-wide AWS outage in October of 2025 that disrupted thousands of businesses and some surprisingly ordinary aspects of daily life. People could not access their bank accounts, message their families on popular social media apps, and control their Ring cameras at their own homes.
Few targets offer such broad systemic effects. An attack that destroys a power station affects electricity. An attack that destroys a major data center can affect nearly every digitally enabled function of a modern state. For military planners seeking maximum strategic effect per strike, that changes the cost-benefit calculation dramatically. Data centers increasingly offer the prospect of disproportionate impact from relatively limited attacks. Cyber defenses, moreover, cannot protect a facility against a kinetic strike that renders the site worthless.
What this means for future warfare
The emergence of data centers as high-payoff targets has implications far beyond Ukraine and Russia. Every technologically advanced nation has become dependent on increasingly concentrated digital infrastructure. The drive for efficiency has encouraged the construction of enormous, centralized facilities capable of processing vast quantities of information. From a commercial perspective, concentration makes sense. From a military perspective, concentration creates vulnerability.
The lesson is not confined to data centers. It applies across much of the emerging AI ecosystem. Cloud computing hubs, hyperscale server farms, fiber-optic exchange points, satellite ground stations, and AI training facilities are all likely to become more prominent targets in future conflicts. The battlefield is expanding into the physical infrastructure of the digital economy. Future campaigns may seek not merely to destroy military units, but to disable the information architecture that sustains national power.
Protecting data in an era of precision strike
The most important question is no longer whether data centers can be targeted. Ukraine, Russia, and Iran have demonstrated that they can. The real question is how nations will protect them. The answer will likely resemble the evolution of critical military infrastructure during the Cold War.
First, redundancy will become essential. Critical data and computing workloads need failover copies that can take over immediately, so that losing a single site is an inconvenience rather than a catastrophe. No single strike should be able to create strategic paralysis. Cloud adoption is therefore no longer a choice but an imperative to address now.
Second, dispersion will become increasingly important. Having failover copies is not enough if they sit in a handful of massive sites, because concentrating national digital capacity in a few locations creates unacceptable risk. Spreading that capacity across many smaller, geographically separated facilities makes it far harder to disable with a single strike. Distributed architectures will become a security requirement rather than merely a technical preference.
Third, critical facilities will require physical hardening. Data centers supporting nationally important functions may increasingly resemble command bunkers rather than commercial office parks.
Yet protecting data through redundancy, dispersion, and hardening is not purely a technical question, since how data centres are financed and where they are allowed to be built will shape whether resilient capacity actually emerges.
Heavily debt-financed build out has left some sites underused while others report shortages, and public concern over power, land, and local impacts has delayed or halted some projects. Without taking a view on those debates, planners cannot assume commercial build-out alone will deliver the redundant, dispersed, and hardened capacity that reduces strategic risk.
The logic is straightforward. For decades, militaries have had protected aircraft in hardened shelters, command centers in bunkers, missile forces in underground complexes, and communications nodes in hardened facilities. As the infrastructure that stores and processes data becomes strategically decisive, it may require the same degree of protection. The future hyperscale data center may look less like a warehouse and more like a fortress underground and not findable on an online map.
The next strategic terrain
Military history is, in many respects, a history of identifying and attacking the sources of national power. Coal powered the industrial age. Oil powered the mechanized age. Data powers the information age.
The recent Ukrainian strikes suggest that military planners are beginning to recognize a new reality: the physical infrastructure behind data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence has become strategically decisive. Nations that continue to view data centers as purely commercial assets are looking at them through a peacetime lens. Nations that view them as strategic infrastructure are looking at the future. In the next conflict, the decisive frontline won’t be drawn across trenches, but through server racks.
Matthew Van Wagenen is a retired major general in the U.S. Army, previously served as the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations (DCOS OPS) in the NATO Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE). Arnel P. David and Amanda Gustave are teammates serving in the Digital Lethality Branch of the NATO Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE). The views and opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect any entity or organization of the US Government or NATO.
