On Tuesday, November 17 at 1 p.m. Eastern Time, Ars Technica will host a live YouTube broadcast titled “Drone attacks and data centers: New Risks for Big Tech.” The session is moderated by the site’s editorial team and features Joseph Jarnecki, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a UK defense and security think tank.
Recent incidents illustrate the emerging threat. In 2026 Iran deployed drones and missiles against Amazon data centers in the Middle East amid the US-Israeli conflict with Tehran, causing months of repair work and the permanent loss of some AWS customer data, according to Ars coverage.
A parallel data-center war unfolded between Russia and Ukraine. Russian forces launched a systematic strike campaign targeting Ukrainian cloud facilities, prompting Kyiv to retaliate with attacks that damaged Russian government servers and AI-focused data centers owned by the Russian tech firm Yandex, as documented in earlier Ars reports.
Jarnecki brings extensive research on cloud resilience under fire. He has examined how Ukraine bolstered its digital infrastructure with Western partners despite simultaneous cyber and kinetic assaults at the onset of the full-scale Russian invasion, and he has analyzed the strategic implications for NATO and European cloud-adoption policies.
The upcoming dialogue will probe why data centers have become prominent military objectives, assess whether physical hardening against drones and missiles is feasible, and explore methods to enhance cloud resiliency during armed conflict. Participants will also consider the policy choices confronting governments and cloud providers as geopolitical risks intensify.
As modern life increasingly depends on uninterrupted cloud services, the discussion underscores the urgency for Big Tech and national security planners to anticipate kinetic threats alongside cyber hazards. Viewers can submit questions during the livestream, shaping a broader conversation about safeguarding digital infrastructure in an era of contested airspace.