Your Risk If The US Bombs Chinese Datacenters
We are living in a completely different era of data and cybersecurity threats. Typically, we expect that there are physical threats such as disasters, even possible theft or attempted breakins at facilities and of course, the cyber attacks. Those are all fairly manageable with careful planning and attention. But what first got the game changing is the Israel-US war on Iran. Iran began attacking datacenters from Oracle, Amazon and others, citing their military use of AI as being an operational part of the war effort.
The US has made a lot of commentary about AI, wanting to be the leader in it, wanting to prevent any other nation from being a leader or competitor, wanting more military AI options from Anthropic; but now the US says they are planning to strike competitor datacenters in China.
The United States should start preparing for scenarios where extreme measures must be taken to stop China from achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), according to a former White House official, including state-backed espionage and military strikes on Chinese data centres. — https://www.scmp.com/news/us/article/3366284/us-urged-consider-military-strikes-stop-china-achieving-agi-first
This a game changer because it goes beyond just a regional conflict where Russia and Ukraine have targeted IT infrastructure but those skirmishes never targeted international companies or services. We have a precedent in the Israel-US war of Iran attacking datacenters and now the US says it is not only prepared, but planning to attack Chinese datacenters.
Why should you care if you’re not involved with a US war or infrastructure in China or the Gulf? Because the collateral damage will be worldwide, if the US strikes a Chinese datacenter then US based companies and datacenters could be attacked, either directly or via cyberattacks. And because a lot of companies around the world, use US based services, they have a strong chance of being impacted no matter where they host. Regardless of the locations or players, one should no longer expect that “I’m not in that area” and that you’ll be immune to the war on datacenters.
How can you secure yourself?
You need to place yourself in multiple neutral and secure locations around the world. Smart HNWs and companies use services like Techrich to build private and secret datacenters that are essentially “off grid” and “off the radar” compared to huge hyperscale cloud operations that are likely to be targeted. Regardless of what you choose, it would be unwise to continue using US exposed assets and services for your IT infrastructure. Europe is also another place to generally avoid as it is within Russia’s range and strike list due to many of its neighbours joining the war effort against it.
I made a video of the strikes that have occurred with AWS in the UAE and Gulf below.
