Attacks on data centers in the Middle East may accelerate the revision of global standards for digital infrastructure protection and open up an opportunity for Ukraine to offer the world its own experience of cloud service resilience during wartime, according to Anton Khvastunov, co-founder and CBDO of GigaCloud. He wrote about this in a blog for the Interfax-Ukraine agency.
According to the author, after the strikes on data centers in the region, the requirements for their protection may approach the standards for the protection of military facilities. This could include non-disclosure of location, new security protocols, additional certification, and mandatory data redundancy between multiple sites so that a direct strike on one facility does not completely shut down services.
Khvastunov notes that this situation creates a window of opportunity for Ukraine, as Ukrainian providers have already gained practical experience in operating and protecting data in wartime conditions. He emphasizes that dependence on a single, even very large, infrastructure provider makes data vulnerable, and therefore the market will move towards interoperability and distributed storage of critical information.
The blog also states that in the spring of 2025, the largest players in the Ukrainian cloud market created the Ukrainian Digital Sovereignty Alliance. According to the author, as part of this initiative, participants are working on a model in which the stability of critical digital infrastructure is ensured not by one provider, but by several major market players simultaneously.
The author believes that the topic of digital sovereignty will become increasingly important in Europe and other regions, and attacks on data centers may make data protection one of the key areas of the new technology policy. The full text of the blog is published on the Interfax-Ukraine website.
Source: Anton Khvastunov’s blog “The war for data centers has begun. What does this mean for the world and Ukraine” on the Interfax-Ukraine website.
Chinese short video-sharing service operator TikTok plans to invest $8.8 billion in building data centers in Thailand over five years, TikTok’s Vice President of Public Policy Helena Lersch said during an event in Bangkok on Friday.
In January, Thailand’s Board of Investment announced TikTok’s plans to invest $3.8 billion in the country. It is unclear whether this amount is included in the total amount of investments announced by Lersh. The number of TikTok users in Thailand is over 50 million.
U.S. online retailer Amazon plans to invest $35 billion by 2040 to open several data centers (data centers) in Virginia, which will create at least 1,000 jobs, Governor Glenn Youngkin said. He said a number of locations within the state are being considered for now, with a final decision to be made later, MT Newswires reported.
Amazon is one of the largest private employers in Virginia, where the first Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud data centers were established in 2006. In 2018, the company opened a second headquarters in Arlington, which is located in that state. AWS Director of Economic Development Roger Wener said the division has invested more than $35 billion in Virginia since 2006 and contributed nearly $7 billion to the state’s GRP. For the third quarter of 2022, AWS revenue rose 27.5% to $20.54 billion, while Amazon’s like-for-like total was up 15% to $127.1 billion.
The company’s capitalization has fallen nearly 33% in the past 12 months (to $992 billion), while the Nasdaq stock index is down just over 19%.
