Computing infrastructure across Ukraine, Russia, and the Middle East has been drawn into armed conflict, with attacks on these facilities recorded as having knocked out banking networks and hospital systems for periods of time. Data centres in Kyiv came under Russian attack while Ukrainian drone operations targeted a number of comparable facilities on Russian soil over the same period, with Kyiv characterising those outbound strikes as directed at infrastructure generating funds for the ongoing military campaign.
These buildings serve as the physical backbone of an organisation's computing infrastructure, housing the servers and storage systems that keep its data accessible and operational. Analysts note that as more public infrastructure moves onto digital networks, an attack on data-centre operations carries the potential to disrupt military logistics, healthcare delivery, and financial systems simultaneously.
Mehdi Paryavi, who advises the United Nations and leads the International Data Center Authority think tank, argued that attacks on data centres point to a need for Europe to reconsider how it positions its AI infrastructure, adding that a sufficient number of high-value targets brought down in sequence has the capacity to collapse an entire national economy.
Power demands from artificial intelligence systems make data centres a notable consideration in the energy sector. Drone targeting and other battlefield applications have brought AI-assisted technology into active operational use, with Ukraine among the forces deploying such systems in combat.
Paryavi argued that heightened attention to data centres as potential targets has elevated the importance of site selection, while also suggesting that the industry's long-standing habit of choosing locations discreetly and keeping a low profile may no longer be adequate by itself. He gestured, with details withheld on national security grounds, toward protective infrastructure options such as missile-defence installations, underground construction, or reinforced bunker designs, and maintained that the period of situating data centres in improvised or opportunistic locations has drawn to a close.
His core argument centred on the absence of any government that has yet mapped out a dependable route for scaling up AI infrastructure without throttling the very race it aims to advance. When questioned on whether the strikes would prompt European governments to reconsider their AI gigafactory plans — a category of data centre — Paryavi gave an unequivocal affirmative.
A Commission representative confirmed to a broadcast outlet that a procurement process had been opened to establish as many as seven AI gigafactories at various locations across Europe, adding that the application window remained active. Submitted proposals will undergo an evaluation process, after which funding decisions are expected to be reached. Submissions for that round are due by 12 November.
No statement addressed whether plans for data centres would be revisited in light of such facilities being targeted during armed conflict. Paryavi noted that restoring data centre infrastructure after damage carries financial burdens that many nations — Europe among them — may find extraordinarily difficult to reverse.
Paryavi outlined that constructing a single data centre can demand up to $25 billion and roughly three years of build time, and that with hundreds of billions of dollars in assets exposed to potential operational disruption, a deceleration across the sector stands as a plausible outcome. He argued that European nations would be better placed to navigate that situation by acting in concert rather than separately, given that energy availability gaps and a thin pipeline of qualified workers are pressures no single government is positioned to resolve alone.
He put forward the view that clustering data centres into defined zones would make it feasible to establish a unified defensive perimeter around them, and told the audience that consolidating such facilities into hubs represented the most viable path for nations, operators, and host organisations to protect their infrastructure.
