(Bloomberg) -- Satellite imagery shows damage to two Amazon.com Inc. data centers in Bahrain, supporting Iran's claims last week that it struck the sites with missiles.
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The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, through state-backed news agency Tasnim, released high-resolution satellite images showing significant damage to two data centers in the towns of Zallaq and Askar, alleging that they were targeted because of Amazon's support for US military operations. Independent, lower-resolution images from the European Space Agency's Sentinel-2 satellite constellation reviewed by Bloomberg News show damage at both facilities.
"Analysis of Sentinel-2 images shows evidence of damage to both facilities, but does not provide insight into the extent of the damage," said Bloomberg Economics senior geoeconomics analyst Adam Farrar, who has a background in geospatial intelligence. "The apparent timing of the strikes and the locations of the damaged areas are consistent with" images shared via Iranian news agencies.
Amazon declined to comment. Bahrain's National Communication Centre did not respond to a request for comment. The US Pentagon and US Central Command declined to comment.
As militaries increasingly lean on digital technologies and artificial intelligence, data centers have become a strategic target alongside traditional command centers, airfields and bases. Several facilities across the Gulf have been damaged by drones, falling debris and missiles during the Iran war.
US and Iranian forces have largely d hostilities since Friday, but were firing on each other daily for around two weeks until then. While they mainly targeted military sites, civilian infrastructure was also damaged. Along with Kuwait and Jordan, Bahrain bore the brunt of the Islamic Republic's attacks. Bahrain hosts the US's main naval base in the region.
The data center attacks were corroborated by Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, a nonprofit conflict monitor that tracks the war. ACLED reported that on July 24, Iranian forces fired projectiles that hit Amazon's data center in Zallaq, following an earlier attack on 22 July. The Bahrain Telecommunications Co. RJR Data Center in Askar, which hosts AWS cloud infrastructure, was struck on July 18 and 21, ACLED data showed.