Chapter the Twenty-Fourth: In Which the Invisible Hand Discovers It Has a Physical Address
A Brief Meditation on the Distance Between a Server Farm and a War, Which Turns Out to Be Quite Short
There is a particular species of surprise that is not, upon examination, surprise at all.
You have seen the face. It is the face of the man who spent a decade feeding the fire and then, genuinely astonished, discovers that fire is warm.
The expression is not dishonest, exactly. It is something worse: it is sincere. He really did not expect this. He really had not followed the chain of events to its natural conclusion, despite having, at several points along that chain, held the links in his own hands.
One finds, at this stage of things, that one’s sympathy is finite.
Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, Oracle, IBM, and Palantir have recently discovered that they have addresses.
This is, for entities of their scale and self-conception, an unwelcome novelty. Commerce of sufficient ambition prefers to imagine itself as weather — omnipresent, elemental, innocent of geography. It speaks of platforms and infrastructure and seamless global connectivity, which is simply a more palatable way of saying: we are everywhere, and everywhere is ours, and the question of whose side we are on is frankly beneath us.
The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has declined to find it beneath them.
On Wednesday, their affiliated press agency published what it called a list of Iran’s new targets — twenty-nine offices, data centers, and research hubs in Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Bahrain. The language was direct. The addresses were specific. Amazon’s data centers in the UAE and Bahrain had already been struck by drone the week prior; this was, one understands, the formalization of an ongoing conversation.
The companies did not comment. This is, under the circumstances, the correct response. There is nothing to say that would not make things worse, and they are smart enough to know it.
One should be fair. The alliance between Silicon Valley and the defense apparatus was not built quietly. It was built over objections.
Google’s employees protested the Pentagon’s JEDI cloud contract with sufficient force that Google withdrew from the bidding entirely. A victory, of a kind. Then, in 2021, Google and Amazon jointly signed Project Nimbus — a $1.2 billion contract to provide the Israeli government and military with cloud infrastructure and AI services. Employees organized again. They circulated petitions signed by thousands. They raised concerns at town halls, which were deflected. They interrupted company keynotes. In April 2024, fifty of them were fired — some who had sat in Google executives’ offices for ten hours demanding to be heard, some who had merely stood nearby. Amazon’s data centers in the UAE and Bahrain, built partly on Nimbus infrastructure, were struck by Iranian drones last week. The connection is not subtle.
Palantir formalized a strategic partnership with the Israeli Defense Ministry in January 2024, explicitly for war-related missions. Microsoft’s own internal review, completed last year, confirmed that a unit of the Israeli military had used its Azure services for prohibited surveillance purposes. It suspended some services. The contracts, largely, remained.
None of this was secret. It was published, discussed at earnings calls, defended in shareholder letters. The employees who objected were managed with the patient firmness one reserves for people who do not understand how the world works.
They understood how the world works. That was the problem.
The useful question now is what these companies intend to do with their sudden embodiment.
They have lobbying arms of considerable sophistication. They have the ear of every relevant government. They have, between them, market capitalizations that exceed the GDP of most of the countries whose affairs they have been quietly shaping.
They could, if they chose, press for the conditions that would make them untargetable. This would require them to become genuinely neutral — to exit the contracts, to decline the renewals, to accept that providing infrastructure to one side of a war is a political act, and political acts have political consequences. It would cost money. A great deal of money.
They will not do this.
What they will do — what they are, almost certainly, already doing — is recalculate. Move the servers somewhere less exposed. Update the insurance riders, though standard policies exclude war damage, which is a detail their legal teams are discovering with, one imagines, some feeling. Hire more lobbyists. Issue careful statements about the importance of protecting civilian infrastructure, which will have the additional quality of being true.
The underlying arrangement will continue. The consequences will be passed to someone else.
There is a kind of accountability that looks like consequence but is not. A company’s data center is struck; the company survives; the stock dips and recovers; nothing changes. The cost is real but it is absorbed at a layer sufficiently removed from the decision-makers that the decision-making is undisturbed. This is not an accident. It is the design.
What I find myself sitting with — and I recognize this is not the sort of thing one is supposed to say plainly — is that we built this. Not the companies, though they did their part. We, collectively. The pension funds that hold the shares. The governments that awarded the contracts. The consumers who did not ask and the journalists who were not told and the shareholders who were pleased by the returns.
The targeting list is not an aberration. It is an invoice.
One might reasonably have expected it sooner.
The sentimental view holds that proximity to consequence produces conscience. That Google’s employees in Tel Aviv, or Microsoft’s offices in Dubai, or the engineers who designed the systems that are now, apparently, worth bombing — that these people and their employers will look at the list and feel something that reorganizes their priorities.
Perhaps. But conscience as a business strategy requires that it be cheaper than the alternative. So far, it has not been. So far, the alternative has been very profitable indeed.
A company that spent years making itself indispensable to power does not become safe by being named a target.
It becomes correctly described.