Who controls data controls the future

SAN FRANCISCO — In March, Iranian drones targeted three Amazon Web Services facilities in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, hitting two directly and nearly hitting the third. It was the first time a commercial data center had been a military target, yet almost nobody outside specialist circles noticed. They should have. The servers holding a country’s data, and the chips running the artificial intelligence (AI) models on which its economy increasingly leans, are no longer background infrastructure. They are as strategic as ports or power grids — and just as exposed. For most of the last decade, data was something companies mined, and AI was something companies sold — both regulated at the margins through privacy law, if they were regulated at all. This framing no longer works. AI now sits inside finance, defense, health care, and public administration, and it runs on two things most governments do not actually control: the data that train it and the compute that processes it. Countries that ignore this will find their futures being decided in boardrooms where they have no