Data Centers on the 21st Century Battlefield
Alex Rough
September 5, 2025
The most decisive infrastructure of the twenty-first century isn’t an aircraft carrier floating in the Pacific or buried in a missile silo. It hums quietly inside the walls of a data center.
These sprawling facilities now anchor military power, economic clout, and geopolitical leverage. But they were never designed for an era defined by great-power competition, cyber sabotage, and the relentless demands of AI. Their enormous energy footprint and physical vulnerability leave them both indispensable and exposed.
Data centers are no longer just commercial utilities. They are strategic assets. Recognizing them as such means building doctrine, policy, and investment equal to their weight in global power.
Here, I will explore how data centers moved from commercial utilities to national security assets, why current defenses leave them exposed, and what has to change to harden them in an era of accelerating global competition.
The Digital Front Line
https://warontherocks.com/2025/09/data-centers-on-the-21st-century-battlefield/
