Who controls data controls the future

In March, Iranian drones struck three Amazon Web Services facilities in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, damaging two directly and narrowly missing the third. This marked the first instance of a commercial data center being targeted by a military, yet it received little attention from the public. It's high time that this incident gained more recognition.

The servers containing a nation's data, as well as the chips powering the artificial intelligence (AI) models crucial to an economy's growth, are no longer mere background infrastructure. They have become as strategic as ports or power grids, and just as vulnerable. For much of the past decade, data was something businesses extracted, and AI was something companies produced — both were subject to regulation, albeit sparingly.

However, this perspective is no longer valid. AI is now an integral part of finance, defense, healthcare, and public administration, and it relies on two resources that most governments simply do not possess: the data used to train it and the computing power required to process it. Nations that overlook this fact risk having their destinies determined in boardrooms where they have no influence.