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Iran strikes leave Amazon availability zones "hard down" in Bahrain and Dubai

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Re: Iran strikes leave Amazon availability zones "hard down" in Bahrain and Dubai

#121

This is the part I don’t understand about Elon’s Terafab: What protects it from a missile? Or laser? Better yet: Jeff or Sir Richard hook up one of their ships and just tow away the Terafab… yoink! There are good physics-based reasons to put data centers in space, but the geo-political world isn’t informed merely by physics.

Trying to build things in a way that they have to be resistant to missile and drone stand is not a very reasonable scaling constraint. That's why we need non stupid leaders who don't start pointless wars

Re: Iran strikes leave Amazon availability zones "hard down" in Bahrain and Dubai

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both seem like easy targets. Hitting the datacenters themselves could results in more permanent damage.

No, taking out the transformers, which can have lead times of three to five years, will result in the most long-term damage. You can't just pull one out of storage and drop it into place.

Ukraine has proven otherwise. A lot of European countries pulled them out of storage and gave to Ukraine. Of course there will be a limit to this if you destroy enough of them.

Re: Iran strikes leave Amazon availability zones "hard down" in Bahrain and Dubai

#123
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, taking out the transformers, which can have lead times of three to five years, will result in the most long-term damage. You can't just pull one out of storage and drop it into place.

Ukraine has proven otherwise. A lot of European countries pulled them out of storage and gave to Ukraine. Of course there will be a limit to this if you destroy enough of them.

Europe scraped together some transformers they'd been holding in reserve as spares and hoped they wouldn't need them themselves at some point, but once they were gone, they were gone. https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-bottlenecks-transfor...

Re: Iran strikes leave Amazon availability zones "hard down" in Bahrain and Dubai

#124
post #7

This may have been long discussed, but I feel like this war is the first time I've really thought hard about how big a target data centers would be in any sort of modern peer war and how that's an entirely new thing since the last time it was really on the radar (end of CW) right? We've built trillions and trillions of dollars in infrastructure in the peace time since, and it seems fairly concentrated. AWS is amongst…

Instead of targeting data center itself, it's far easier to target the electrical substation that powers the datacenter. It's relatively simple to do. Transformers require oil to cool themselves, and if the coolant reservoir is damaged, then they overheat and shut off. This exact infrastructure attack occurred in North Carolina in 2022 [0], where someone fired bullets into the coolant reservoirs and caused a several…

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Re: Iran strikes leave Amazon availability zones "hard down" in Bahrain and Dubai

#125
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

War crimes are unlikely to be prosecuted within the USA . On this we agree. Which is why I specifically mentioned the risk of not being able to leave the country, because I'd be willing to wager a bit more than international prosecutions for war crimes are significantly more likely, and would be occuring in a world that is growing noticeably more "America needs to be taught a lesson" in spirit.

Primarily, countries should prosecute their own criminals. That's the whole sovereignty thing. If you don't, and these are international criminals, your country as a whole is what we call a state supporter of terrorism, or some such, if those international crimes have political goals and are directed against other countries and their people as a whole (and don't fit the high bar of self-defense). If the crimes are do…

Actually, we call them "war crimes" and have done since at least WWII.

Re: Iran strikes leave Amazon availability zones "hard down" in Bahrain and Dubai

#126
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Primarily, countries should prosecute their own criminals. That's the whole sovereignty thing. If you don't, and these are international criminals, your country as a whole is what we call a state supporter of terrorism, or some such, if those international crimes have political goals and are directed against other countries and their people as a whole (and don't fit the high bar of self-defense). If the crimes are do…

Actually, we call them "war crimes" and have done since at least WWII.

I'll rephrase my previous post for you, to make it clearer:

Lack of prosecution of high-level war criminals makes your country a state supporter of terrorism. (the claim in the post)

Because that's what US war criminal leaders do. They terrorize entire nation by threatening population's survival via destruction of all their power plants, which I assume includes nuclear fallout from their nuclear power plant.

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