Iran targeting hyperscaler data centers would be a decent strategy given how much money is sunk into AI at the moment
Given how heavily nVidia have reinforced their positive position on war, any data center is a valid target. Not even joking.
Literally and completely, wholly valid targets of war.
Thanks Jensen Huang!
Unfortunately it is also pretty profitable for Huang, becuase they don’t own the datecenter, they sold the parts for it, and later they will sell more for the new one.
I agree that in the short-term, NVidia stand to make more money as a destroyed datacenter prompts it’s owners to rebuild it. However, until the armed conflict stops, there might be a pause on datacenter construction in the region - why pay to (re)build a datacenter if it’s probably going to be blown up again? From my (admittedly limited) reading of history, most reconstruction only happens in the years following an armed conflict’s end.
Not how the laws of war work, not even when you don’t like the targets.
The USA launched an illegal war, Iran retaliated illegally (targeting civilian infrastructure, of uninvolved countries), USA is escalating illegally.
American-owned sata centers are actually legal targets, because they’re used to process intelligence and provide strike targets. They’re basically equivalent to a CIA office. Israel also does this.
Got any evidence of that? If so, then I agree targeting them would likely be legal.
Since when was fucking Israel a guide on how to conduct legal war?!? Christ.
American tech companies provide cloud computing and AI services to both the US and Israel, and obviously these services work through data centers, meaning that some data centers somewhere are legal targets, but it’s impossible to know which. I’d argue that this makes all data centers run by relevant companies for cloud computing and similar services valid military targets.
Since when was fucking Israel a guide on how to conduct legal war?!? Christ.
No no, as in: Israel also uses AI assisted targeting like America.
So, would you say Russia is legitimate in striking infrastructure like power plants which are mostly used for civilian purposes but might power military buildings as a small percentage of their use?
Would Iran be justified, if it had a nuclear weapon, of dropping it on Tel Aviv, wiping out the civilian population alongside the Israeli Air Force headquarters?
Proportionality is a key concept in military planning. It’s not the case that one drop of military utility makes something a legitimate target. It’s certainly not if you only know that the minority military use is somewhere among many different locations and just bomb any of them on the off-chance.
Oh, and ok, sorry for the misunderstanding.
So, would you say Russia is legitimate in striking infrastructure like power plants which are mostly used for civilian purposes but might power military buildings as a small percentage of their use?
For starters nothing Russia does in this war is legitimate because the war itself is illegitimate, but that aside: No, because as you said there’s no proportionality. Depriving civilians of power—a human right—is not proportional to cutting off power from a military building that likely has emergency power anyway.
Would Iran be justified, if it had a nuclear weapon, of dropping it on Tel Aviv, wiping out the civilian population alongside the Israeli Air Force headquarters?
See above, the lives of civilians are paramount. The difference between data centers and these examples is that Amazon data centers aren’t necessary for any human rights, nor are they particularly important for civilian life. It’s little damage to civilians for little military gain. If you have five empty luxury resorts and one military headquarters and can’t distinguish between them (or all six are alternately used as military headquarters at random times), I’d say it’s a fair decision to bomb all six. It’s analogous to a factory that makes 90% shoes and 10% bullets. I also want to emphasize the importance of these facilities—AI-based targeting produces orders of magnitude more targets than human intelligence officers, allowing for orders of magnitude more strikes. When you’re running a mass bombing campaign, running out of things to bomb is legitimately a thing that happens.
By this logic, schools are valid targets because they are educating future CIA recruits and Walmart is a valid target because it’s providing the food to fuel them.
Great the US also launched an illegal war in Iraq, ever hear about that Sun Tzu guy? Call me crazy but an illegally invaded country no longer has to follow the rules of war, the whole idea of a social contract.
Nope, that’s not generally how the laws of war work.
I say “work” but because there’s no international police force to arrest anyone for breaking it, this is more like philosophical theorising, but that’s how it’s conceived of, still.
To take the social contract analogy, if someone steals your phone, you generally have the legal right to use reasonable force to get it back, and if the thief gets hurt, tough shit. But if you track him to his house, burn it down and sodomise him, you’re a psycho and going to jail.
Domestic law recognises exceptions for actions that are otherwise illegal to try and rectify another cringe; prosecuting a war in self defence is similarly an exception to the general prohibition on war, but “reasonable force” is analogous to “proportionality” - you don’t get the right to carpet bomb Dubai because you got missiled by the USA.
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What the fuck is an “illegal war”? Are there countries out there who give invaders permission to destroy them?
There are two kinds of legal war: one sanctioned by the UN, and one fought for self defence. Retaliation is generally understood to be self defence, as a deterrent against further attacks.
So Iran’s retaliation has the potential to be legal, but by attacking everyone and their dog, they commit war crimes anyway.
The US and Israel claim the war is self defensive to prevent Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon, but this is not under the purview of self defence, which requires an imminent attack, not an improbable, repeated tale about nukes which could have been dealt with diplomatically. Of course Trump has offered a number of other justifications for the war all of which are even worse.
These are facts, do with them as you please. I see facts are not good enough for the majority who disliked my comment above for having the temerity to point out that Iran, of all countries, was doing something wrong.
It’s politician speak to make the public assume it’s morally just.
Don’t these countries host US bases?
Retaliating with strikes against us bases was not illegal.
yes, bases that are used as springboards for the american air force
And compared to the schools the US/Israel target, far fewer civilians.
Considering the valuations are based on non existent future data centers, I don’t see why they couldn’t continue to be based on nonexistent past data centers.
Enron lives on
I mean, the… ‘funny?’ part… is that there is a significantly greater than 0 chance that that data center was directly involved in target analysis and assignment into the kill chain, for deliniating strikes against Iran.
A number of sites in Iran have been hit, with precision munitions… that make no sense.
Well, they make no sense, unless your man in charge of target assignment… is an LLM.
‘Police Park’.
Its… a park. Mostly empty space.
But it has Police in the name.
So it gets a couple of tomahawks.
… On that note: Gunshots By Computer.
By my reckoning, 2025 was Year Zero.
They need to kill all the major heads behind Palantir, especialy Peter Thiel.
I mean he definitely is
n’tthe AntiChrist.
That album has been feeling more and more relevant
It never wasn’t.
Say your name
Try to speak as clearly as you can
You know everything gets written down
Nod your head
Just in case they could be watching
With their shiny satellite
…
Turn it up
Listen to the shit they pump into your head
Filling you with apathy
Hold your breath
Wait until you know the time is right on time
The end is near
let me know if you can hear this image
If this hypothesis is true, and it does sound plausible to me, it would be interesting to see what counter-analysis emerges, or even if citizens try to change their road address from King Street to Landfill Lane to avoid getting whacked.
I mean… good luck trying to… make yourself innocuous… to a hallucinating machine.
That just makes shit up, sometimes, for no discernible specific reason.
Also I don’t think random people can generally just… change the name of the street they live on.
I’m guessing that even in Iran… maps exist, with road names, and… some kind of centralized authority maintains these names.
I guess you could basically ‘poison’ maps with decoy ‘IRGC Regional HQ’ type names, and then evacuate the surrounding blocks?
We have also seen missile/drone cams of strikes being done on decoy targets… painted silhouettes, fake/prop missile launchers…
Ah, Saul Williams.
If oracle loses enough data centers maybe they will need their people back
If Oracle were deserving of their name, they would have foreseen this whole thing.
They laid those people off precisely to afford more data centers. If they lose more, they’ll have to lay off even more people probably
The next phase of data center evolution had missile defence systems built in. ——Skynet origin story, probably.
If I was China I’d offer a bounty for every data center.
Honestly, if they offered citizenship and a modest pension, they’d have people lining up to take the centers out.
From every part of the world…
Huh? Why? Much of their income is from western data centers housing TikTok, Temu, Alibaba things (including AI), etc. They’re milking the west, doubt they want the communications to downgrade
Replacing all those datacenters is going to be very profitable.
How long until we get a Larry Ellison series on Behind the Bastards?
So the PC parts situation will only get worse.
What about the poor cat femboy IT people that have to service the data centers? 🥺
Those people may work in IT but in my experience most datacenter employees are vanilla as hell
Or the ones that are technophobes when they go home. E.g. “I go home, drink a beer and sit on my lawn with a shotgun for squirrels.”
That was common for me, didn’t make many friends.
It’s oracle. They probably have “anti-dei” hiring rules in secret.
