Data centres are the new front line and Europe’s AI factories should slow down, says UN adviser

Data centres in Ukraine, Russia and the Middle East have become crucial targets in conflict that can temporarily bring down a country’s economy and public facilities such as banks and hospitals.

Russia has struck data centres in Kyiv and Ukrainian drones hit back at multiple data centres in Russia in recent weeks, in attacks Kyiv has described as aimed at places that provide revenue streams for Moscow’s war machine.

The military targeting of data centres should prompt Europe to rethink where it builds its AI infrastructure, said Mehdi Paryavi, an adviser to the United Nations and founder of the International Data Center Authority (IDCA) think tank.

“When you hit enough important targets, you can take down the entire economy,” he told Euronews Next.

As societies digitise, taking down a data centre can mean “paralysing the functions of military, healthcare and finance”.

Data centres are the physical facilities where a company can house its servers and data. They are also crucial to artificial intelligence as they supply the massive amounts of energy it needs.

They become especially important in warfare as Ukraine uses AI for drone targeting as well as other military uses.

The new target on data centres should make countries consider more where they build them, Paryavi said, but he argued the industry’s long-standing advice to choose sites carefully and keep their locations quiet may no longer be enough.

“Maybe you need iron domes, maybe you need to build them underground, or you need to build bunkers,” he said without getting to specifics due to national security reasons.

But “the days that you would just build data centres in random locations are over,” he said.

He also acknowledged that no country has a solid answer to how to do that without slowing the race to build AI capacity.

A European hub

Asked whether the strikes will make European governments rethink their plans for AI gigafactories, a type of data centre, Paryavi said: “100%”.

When asked about Europe’s plans for data centres, a spokesperson from the European Commission told Euronews Next that it launched a tender to establish up to seven AI gigafactories across Europe.

“The call is still open. Once closed, the proposals will be evaluated and then the award decisions will be taken,” it added. The call will close on November 12.

However, there was no specific comment about whether the targeting of data centres in warfare would change any data centre plans.

The economic cost to data centre damage can also be astronomical and “almost irreversible” to replace for many countries, including Europe, said Paryavi.

Data centres can cost up to $25 billion each and take up to three years to build.

“Europe cannot afford to finance hundreds of billions of dollars of assets and then somebody takes them out,” Paryavi said. “I project that the whole thing [the building of data centres] has to slow down.”

He urged European states to act as a bloc, saying no single country could do it alone, as combined with the security risks are global energy shortfalls as well as a lack of trained workers.

Rather than having scattered data centres, he advised building them in concentrated areas so you could build an iron dome to protect them.

“Building data centres and digital hubs is the only way a nation or a hub or data centre companies can secure themselves,” he said.