Five Things Tech: Data Centers, Wind Farms, Circular Progress, Drone Tech, Ski Jumps on Chips
Everything you should read about Tech right now.
It’s Saturday morning and I have a seemingly wild, but somehow very connected selection of essentials reading on tech.
Iran's targeted cyber strikes on Gulf states' AI data centers, hitting Amazon-hosted services like Abu Dhabi banking and Careem apps, expose how these multi-billion hubs are soft targets in regional conflicts, especially with vulnerable undersea cables, likely redirecting investments to safer spots amid escalating tensions.
Meanwhile, offshore wind farms' radar interference is being flipped into a defense asset for better low-altitude missile detection via shared turbine signals, while Pentagon eyes Ukraine's rapid drone innovations to counter Iran's cheap swarms that outpace legacy U.S. missiles.
Tech's circular swings resurface old ideas in new guises until the right tweak clicks, much like MIT's photonic "ski jumps" beaming light off chips to turbocharge quantum computing by solving on-chip light-trapping woes.
Fascinating how geopolitics and engineering hacks keep reshaping our digital battlegrounds.
Enjoy Five Things Tech! 🤖
Why Iran is targeting the artificial intelligence infrastructure of Gulf countries
Since Amazon is the preferred partner of many companies and governments in the region, the attacks caused immediate disruptions: customers of Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, one of the largest banks in the Emirates, had trouble accessing their online banking services; readers of the business news outlet Enterprise were unable to access its website; and users of the Careem app were unable to order a taxi or food delivery.
Iranian attacks against the digital ecosystems of its Arab neighbors in the Persian Gulf are considered among the first military actions of their kind in the world, and have exposed new vulnerabilities in these countries, including their multi-billion-dollar investment to become a hub for the development of artificial intelligence (AI). For Iran, it has been a cheap and effective way to disrupt public and private services, while for its neighbors in the region, it has served as a warning about their economic diversification strategies.
Those big data centers are easy targets that are hard to defend - and the underwater fiber cables are also a vulnerability in a war. It will be interesting to see how the war in Iran will lead to a rededication of data center investment budgets as it probably now is easier to justify building datacenter in calmer regions.
How Do Wind Farms Interfere With Radar?
Putting surface radar on turbines is something many offshore wind operators do already to track their crew vessels and to detect unauthorized ships within their arrays. Sharing those signals, or even sharing the equipment, can give national defense forces an expanded view of ships moving within and around the turbines. It can also improve detection of low altitude cruises missiles, says Bekkering, which can evade air defense radars.
I wasn’t aware of this issue with nationals security and windparks, but it is good to see that engineers are figuring out how to use windparks as an advantage when it comes to defense.
The Circular Nature of Technology
One unexpected way artificial intelligence has changed my life is by making me nostalgic. Watching the technology sector evolve over the last few decades, I’ve begun noticing something less discussed: many trends in technology repeat in a circular fashion.
What looks like progress is often oscillation. Technology rarely moves in straight lines: it swings between extremes before settling into something more balanced. To express the case for this circularity, I’m going to outline a few examples out of several in different areas of technology.
The interesting thing about tech that oftentimes we need multiple approaches that differ just a tad and then we finally figure out how it works.
Iran adds new urgency to Pentagon’s Ukraine drone deal
The Iranian counterattack with cheap, easily produced drones has exposed a vulnerability for the U.S. and its regional allies, adding new urgency for the Pentagon to close a deal with Ukraine that has been in the works for the better part of a year.
Any agreement on sharing technology to counter Iranian drones could be a boon for the U.S. and many of its closest partners, who are shooting multi-million dollar missiles at $50,000 drones. It also marks one of the few times Ukraine can publicly offer the U.S. something of immediate value as it seeks financial and military support for its four-year campaign against Russia.
Drone tech is evolving so quickly right now, it is so hard to keep up, especially for the legacy companies of the defense industry. The Ukrainians have perfected the release early, release often model of drone tech.
MIT scientists built photonic ‘ski jumps’ that beam light off chips for faster quantum computing
Inside most photonic chips, light races through tiny optical wires. It carries information far faster than electricity can in many conventional systems. But once that light is trapped on the chip, sending it out into open space in a controlled, scalable way becomes much harder. A team led by researchers at MIT and MITRE now says it has built a way around that bottleneck. They did this using microscopic structures that curl upward from the chip surface like ski jumps.
Chip technology is something I do not understand the least bit (pun intended), but I find this utterly fascinating.
That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:
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— Nico