These data centers are CoLoed by AWS but not owned by them - the actual DC is owned and operated by UAE's G42 and Etisalat.
Edit:
I also disagree with the takeaway in this article.
If dual use civilian infrastructure can be viewed as a valid target and compartmentalization of relations is no longer viewed as a justification for neutrality, we have returned to the era of total war.
Iran's argument is that the UAE+Qatar are combatants because they have based American troops despite also allowing IRGC basing and bypassing of sanctions.
If this logic (which imo is very flawed) makes the UAE+Qatar valid targets and combatants, then the US is justified in striking Iran as Iran has been directly aiding and abetting Russia's invasion of Ukraine with troops in Crimea conducting drone strikes [0] and providing ballistic missiles to Russia to strike Ukraine [1].
By extension, this means all foreign relations have to be bipolar, which means admitting we are in a de facto World War (something which Fiona Hill has brought up literally hours before the Iran War began [2]).
How many times must we trundle underfoot this lazy canard that HN is social media. A link aggregator with comments is not what anyone thinks of for that term.
I mean, there is discussion and a sense of community here. I’m not sure what exactly defines social media, but this is more than just a link aggregator.
> there is discussion and a sense of community here
That's been true of discussion forums for longer than the Internet has been available to the public. I was on discussion forums over dialup in the 1980s. The term "social media" didn't even exist yet, nor did the business model of trying to monetize people's online data.
Old forums weren't called social media. I think for it to be social media it has to be about your social graph, here on HN I almost never read peoples names and I don't really connect with people so it isn't social media, its just media with comments.
If I could subscribe to peoples feeds and such then it would be social media, but HN doesn't have that feature.
There's a massive whitewashing of what "social media" is. I don't feel there's one singular definition but I could be wrong, maybe I am the one who missed the boat. But I'd really love to see it quantified more
eg "Social media leads to addiction!" - ok take Facebook
Are you referring to
a) non-chronological feeds? Who knows what posts you'll actually find? You come back for more. You can't just log off for a week and come back and the most recent posts are there (you don't even see everything, the platforms regularly hides stuff). That's certainly addiction
b) fake notifications? That's fraud, and certainly addiction
c) the corollary of a), you don't know who's seen your posts so your mental model gets shaped. That's certainly addiction
I would say "social media" is a site that is trying to monetize your data, and using convenience as a lure to get you to give it your data to monetize. ("Data" here includes everything you post there.)
I would say social media is any website where the connections between the participants are as important or even more important than the content. As soon as you get 'followers' it is game over.
> Was Facebook social media before it started adding ads or not?
AFAIK it's had ads for practically its entire existence, and other than venture capital investments, ads have always been virtually its entire revenue.
Iranian troops are also in Crimea leading offensive drone operations [0] for Russia, as well as delivering ballistic missiles for Russia to use against Ukraine [1].
> In the near future, war might be about who can build faster/better and hit the other economy more effectively
This has been the assumption for over a decade now.
> those who can't produce any more drones, lose
Already the norm. Even the Taliban has been operating a drone mass production program for a couple years now [0][1].
> If one side economy collapses and their manufacturing collapse, then what is left? they could easily kill the people, but other nations won't allow it, so it will stop at economical defeat
This abstraction of warfare isn't as peaceful as you make it out to be. Operationally, you still need to take out dual use infra which in a number of cases is civilian in nature.
The reality is, countries have increasingly accepted that civilian casualties will occur and it doesn't matter because they don't impact tactical goals.
Yes, but what you are missing the cost of total elimination of the other side.
For example, in Iraq, Saddam was able to use chemical weapons and wipe out the resistance, this is no longer an accepted solution by majority of people on earth.
So there is no real way to actually win a war. If you can't kill or enslave the other population, and the world is not accepting refugees, if you hit one economy completely you might the global economy. So what do you do? there is actually no real way to win a war as those constraints become strong and stronger. You are left with the only option of nulling the other's economy down and hope they would resign, by better co-ordinating your drones and managing your economy, which is a video game in the real world.
> You are left with the only option of nulling the other's economy down
How do you (detest this phrasing, it very glib) null the other side?
Most weapon systems aren't developed in entirely separate supply chains - they use off-the-shelf components that are available for commercial usecases as well.
To successfully take out an opponents operational capacity when they are using dual use technology means the barrier between "civilian" and "military" is nonexistent.
It basically means the return to total war doctrine.
My point is that this assertion is wrong - "they could easily kill the people, but other nations won't allow it, so it will stop at economical defeat".
It is predicated on the assumption that the new (but in reality old) iteration of war would lead to less civilian casualties.
How is it really old when we have completely new AI/Robotics enabled warfare that would allow nations in the not distance future (not today) to engage in a war without human involvement? We never had anything like this before?
How would a war like this look like? what does winning really mean? and if your entire drone army depends on a global economy of suppliers, then you can easily cut off.
How is it that old? we never had wars like this..sorry, this is very stupid argument.
They are. EW and IR C-UAS has been productionized over the past decade in most countries, but there are still supply chain and cost blockers around power electronics and they tend to be treated as a last resort because of their indiscriminate nature.
Only if one understands the different failure modes, but either way the average HN reader shouldn't try this at home or you'll get in trouble with radio spectrum pollution.
Apologies for the sarcasm. I appreciate the drive for renewables the current AI DC buildout brings with it.
I have real fears that building materials will experience the same inflationary pressures computer memory is currently experiencing. The U.S. TSMC and Intel fab construction alone in the last couple years has had an outsized impact on building costs.
The US construction industry does about 3 trillion in revenue per year. Those two fabs are something like 20 billion per year. 2% is a lot but markets can handle that just fine. Local markets will have higher prices.
Civil Engineering is hard, and concrete is a perfect example of how something as "simple" as concrete in reality requires significant interdisciplinary collaboration with domain experts in ChemE, MatSE, Physics, Applied Math, and CS.
Some of the most robust HPC applications I saw back when I was an undergrad were done by Civil and Structural Engineers in the ONG space.
That’s funny because I don’t see civil engineers being “glazed” much online. Usually they’re the butt of jokes and ridicule from other engineering majors who perceive civil engineering as less ‘rigorous’ than other disciplines. I’m curious where you see this civil engineering “glazing”?
They're usually held up to as the pinnacle of "real engineers" in discussions where software people are trying to portray software as insufficiently rigorous.
Yeah the other varieties of "real engineer" think of them about the same way that NPs think of MDs.
G42 isn't American - it's Emirati. But it doesn't matter.
Iran is only burning additional bridges with it's neighbors which has only incentivized them to take a much more hardline stance against the Islamic Republic.
The fact that they alienated Qatar last week is truly mindboggling though - it was QatarEnergy that was subsidizing NOIC and Qataris with clan ties in Iran like Saad al Kaabi who were some of the biggest proponents for Qatar-Iran normalization have been sidelined.
It has also now aligned the Gulf States with Ukraine [0], and now reduces Iran to become a mere extension of Russia, and arguably converts this conflict into a second theatre of the Russia-Ukraine War, which in my opinion has become a de facto world war.
> Iran is only burning additional bridges with it's neighbors..
If you are permitting your airspace to carry out continual bombing campaigns causing massive casualties and also host enemy bases, then the "bridges" have already been burnt and you are a belligerent in the War.
Did Iran really have allies in Arab Sunni ruled countries though? Pretty much all of them already see non-Arab Shia Iran as an enemy, and have for a long time. The only real mystery is how the region hasn't imploded already with all the historical tension between these countries.
> Did Iran really have allies in Arab Sunni ruled countries though
Yes. Qatar due to Iran's support of the Thani family during the tumultuous 1990s [0] and the blockade [1], Sudan under Bashir [2] and now under the Army [3], Tunisia [4] due to ties with Ennadha, Algeria until 2025 [5] due to Morocco and Israel's close defense cooperation, and Kuwait due to economic and clan ties [6].
> Pretty much all of them already see non-Arab Shia Iran as an enemy
Only those states directly aligned with Saudi or the UAE (they are not the same team) view Iran with hostility becuase of Saudi Arabia and Iran's perennial rivalry over the MidEast.
Iran on the other hand protected the Thani family during the failed 1996 countercoup, as well as collaborated with Qatar on extracting LNG from the Gulf.
In the real world, countries compartamentalize relations and are not binary in nature.
This is how India can both arm Israel [0] as well as transit Hormuz with Iranian backing [1] and continue to operate Chabahar Port [2] despite neighboring Konarak Port being hit [3].
When countries break this norm of compartmentalization, that is when they become actively belligerent.
Also, by this logic (which is flawed), we would be justified in striking Iran, as Iran has aided and abetted Russia in their war against Ukraine, thus Iran can arguably be treated as another front of the larger US-Russia and by extension US-China conflict.
I realize Qatar is in an "it's complicated" relationship, it's just amusing to me that people feign shock that Iran would consider them fair game while omitting the detail of them kinda being a client state hosting a huge US military base.
The thing is, if we accept the norms that Qatar can be targeted for kinetic action by Iran for hosting US assets or by the US for hosting Iranian assets, then that opens a MASSIVE can of worms.
This means Ukraine has the precedent in place to target the Chongqing–Xinjiang–Europe railway in Russia in retaliation for Chinese support of Russia [0].
This also means all of Europe is fair game to be striked by Russia in retaliation for supporting Ukraine [2].
This also means South Korea considering rearming Ukraine [4] due to North Korean involvement in the Ukraine War could make it a direct belligerent against Russia.
This is why sentiments hardened globally and especially amongst Gulf States once they were targeted by Iran.
Accepting that nations like Qatar, Turkiye, and Azerbaijan that have an avowed policy of compartmentalized relations are fair game to strike means we have to accept we are in a de facto World War.
The attempted strike on Diego Garcia was similarly destabilizing in it's implications [5]
Hosting US assets actively being used in war vs Iran = being active co-belligerents. Host countries no longer neutral when they don't adhere to duty of abstention (Hague Convention V). This not even Iran using deniable proxies, this is Qatar allowing sovereign territory to facilitate attack on Iran, which unambiguously makes them legitimate target. Ditto with Diego Garcia.
In the same way railway in RU already legitimate target for UKR because in RU soil. If EU sending out sorties from NATO bases to hit RU then they too would be active belligerents. There's no compartmentalizing using territory to shoot someone else.
The norms of compartmentalization I have mentioned are orthogonal to The Hague conventions and frankly they do not matter in a world which has de facto moved away from being rules based.
Additonally, by that logic it is acceptable for Ukraine to conduct kinetic action against Chinese assets in Russia, which they have held back against despite Chinese support for the Russian MIC.
Also, I told you years ago to not chat with me on this platform. We do not align and I have found it tiresome discussing with you. I have ignored and steered away from commenting with you and I ask you to do the same for me.
It's acceptable, as I said, targets in RU soil legitimate. Of course the UKR has their own calculation on what PRC interests in RU they're able to hit that's not counterproductive - PRC support for RU MIC can be much more than what it is.
Even if we accept moving from "rule based" doesn't discount realist/rational based which rule based is derived from. It is not hard to understand allowing your house to be used to shoot at someone else = your house is now legitimate target. Expecting immunity under those conditions is strategic fantasy, especially when IR hitting GCC countries is arguably not counter-productive.
> The thing is, if we accept the norms that Qatar can be targeted for kinetic action by Iran for hosting US assets or by the US for hosting Iranian assets, then that opens a MASSIVE can of worms.
None of your examples are actually analogous, they are all more distant support than hosting a base from which direct attacks are carried out except for the first one in which the "can of worms" is justifying attacks on a state that it is already a direct belligerent (and in fact the aggressor) because of third-party support, which, on the other hand, is not analogous for the opposite reason—it is very much not necessary to invoke any third-party action to justify that. The direct belligerence already justifies that.
There’s no “precedent” needed, Russia and Ukraine are simply choosing not to do certain things to avoid widening the war in the ways you mention, because they don’t think that would be to their advantage. The precedent is there already, it’s not like either country is looking at Iran and going “oh wow, I didn’t know that was an option!”
> Iran always seems like they have more enemies than friends
Because the core of the Iranian Revolution is quite similar to Maoism [0] but also very interested in exporting the revolution abroad.
You have to remember that the Iranian Revolution only happened in 1979, and most of Iran's modern leadership were foot soldiers and even leadership during Iran's Cultural Revolution [1] in the 1980s (eg. Rouhani, Larijani, Aref, Arafi).
Imagine if China today was ruled by active Red Guard, or if the 1976 autocoup failed - that's Iran, but with a dose of Islamism.
> I guess I overplayed the Shia/Sunni divide.
Yep. In fact, a number of Sunni states saw contemporary attempts to mimic the Iranian Revolution such as in Saudi Arabia with the Kaaba Siege, the Afghan Revolution in 1979 which led to the Soviet Occupation, and the burning the US Embassy in Islamabad in 1979 [2].
I took a Chinese course in Beijing with the son of an Iranian diplomat as a classmate and we did not gel, but frankly thats my only experience. The funny thing was that the guy was a huge womanizer/drinker, which I also hear is normal for Iran. Iranians actually seem quite liberal by Muslim standards (if it wasn't for the whole revolutionary guard/cleric leadership, again by my limited maybe outdated experience), which is weird when our side has the KSA, one of the most conservative countries on earth.
It is a pity really, Iran is on my bucket list for food, culture, and natural beauty. More so than any other country in that area, its too bad about the whole "death to America" thing.
> son of an Iranian diplomat as a classmate and we did not gel, but frankly thats my only experience. The funny thing was that the guy was a huge womanizer/drinker, which I also hear is normal for Iran
It's similar to China in that regard - rhetoric doesn't matter and you always look out for number one.
There's a reason why socially speaking China's Harvard remains Harvard even despite Peking and Tsinghua becoming global tier institutions, and why leadership who should supposedly be earning a couple thousand dollars a year are chauffeured in Audi A8s with full protocol in Beijing.
Most normal people are chill and average, but there's still a whole separate world of people within a small selectorate.
> which is weird when our side has the KSA, one of the most conservative countries on earth
KSA has socially liberalized as well, and the same style of hijab as you would see in Iran is the norm.
That said, unlike Iran's incumbent leadership, MBS and much of the governmental apparatus is highly likely to liberalize in the UAE manner in the next 3-5 years. The main blocker has been succession - MBS isn't officially king yet, as King Salman continues to reign.
That said, it would still remain an authoritarian state.
> It is a pity really, Iran is on my bucket list for food, culture, and natural beauty. More so than any other country in that area, its too bad about the whole "death to America" thing
> The fact that they alienated Qatar last week is truly mindboggling though
I mean Qatar did just give a really expensive plane to the guy who unilaterally assassinated the Iranian supreme leader and is bombing their country to smithereens.
> US tech companies have large manufacturing footprints in the region
Yes in Israel and part of the West Bank (the Mellanox founder tried to expand Nvidia's footprint in the region - as in hiring in the West Bank and Gaza - until his daughter was murdered at Nova).
Outside of Israel, not really excluding data centers which are leased.
That said, most tech companies have already been operating in Israel for decades under constant barrages already (eg. Had a family friend who was working at the Intel fab when Hezbollah was attempting to shell it during the 2006 war and the AWS skyscraper was targeted by an ISIS suicide bomber 2 years ago but foiled).
In most cases, we in the US were already being targeted by Iranian APTs before this conflict and before 2023.
> if the Iranians can pull this off, they would discourage further investment in Israel
For much of tech, the calculus hasn't changed for investing in Israel. It's hard to find similar ecosystems for cybersecurity, defense tech, chip design, and some aspects of material sciences.
And those regions that are complementary (eg. Czechia, Poland, India), the companies are either Israeli operated or Israeli funded.
I think it highlights the real and moral risks to doing business in Israel. Israel was a state created by ethnic cleansing, it was never a good idea to attempt to create a tech industry there. Hopefully Iran reverses many of these poorly made decisions from tech giants.
According to the article as well as blind, the main teams hit were associated with Cerner (EHR) and NetSuite (ERP).
Oracle's AI spend is part of Oracle Cloud.
That said, I guess it can be argued that Cerner and NetSuite being on the chopping block can be attributed to AI because now procurement has the choice to either build in-house via an Anthropic or OpenAI SI like Accenture or TCS or they can negotiate better purchasing terms from a best-in-breed product in HRM and ERP like SAP instead.
I also find it interesting how American and European HNers are much more negative about AI compared to their Chinese, Indian, and Israeli peers even though they have a significant amount to lose as well.
> That said, I guess it can be argued that Cerner and NetSuite being on the chopping block can be attributed to AI because now procurement has the choice to either build in-house via an Anthropic or OpenAI SI like Accenture or TCS or they can negotiate better purchasing terms from a best-in-breed product in HRM and ERP like SAP instead.
Cerner isn't an EHR, it's an EMR. EHR == Electronic Health Record. Your FitBit data is an Electronic Health Record. EMR == Electronic Medical Record. Your doctor's records, how much blood thinner that nurse is supposed to give grandpa, and whether or not he's a fall risk are things you'd put in an EMR.
You can't just vibecode your way to replacing an EMR. Cerner Millennium has a shrinking, but substantial, footprint at healthcare systems across the country and around the globe. There are 25+ years of bugfixes, caveats, architecture, and other pieces of knowledge to be tracked and accounted for, and you must do so, because if you don't, people under the care of doctors could die.
It's also worth noting that the DoD uses Millennium for active service members, and I think they also use it for TriCare. American taxpayers are on the hook for dealing with the problems that Oracle's cost cuts will produce.
> You can't just vibecode your way to replacing an (sic) EMR
Absolutely, but you can now demand a market leader like Epic to give you a significantly better discount (eg. 20-30% over the 10% you may have previously been offered).
And that is the crux of the "SaaSpocalypse" and why you are seeing targeted layoffs in Oracle specifically for their ERP and EHR products.
> It's also worth noting that the DoD uses Millennium for active service members, and I think they also use it for TriCare. American taxpayers are on the hook for dealing with the problems that Oracle's cost cuts will produce
Absolutely, but they were already on the hook for that before Cerner became a part of Oracle.
> Absolutely, but you can now demand a market leader like Epic to give you a significantly better discount (eg. 20-30% over the 10% you may have previously been offered).
Is this on the grounds that you can do it yourself?
What larger procurement teams are saying is "we would rather pay Accenture+Anthropic $50M for 2 years and if they fail, sign a $75M contract with Epic in 3 years instead of spending $150M for 5 years".
Even at the lower ends of the funnel, companies are now extracting significant discounts from market leaders as well as their incumbent vendors becuase they are quote shopping.
Oracle isn't in a position to push back because it isn't a market leader in the segments that NetSuite and Cerner compete in, which makes discount even more critical, which means margins management also becomes significantly more critical.
From what I remember, EMRs - particularly parts that do things like manage blood banks and medication dispensers - aren't just something you can have a team of consultants from Accenture vibecode, or even plancode. In several countries, they fall under the same regulations as medical devices and are subject to the same scrutiny.
I wouldn't want to be the hospital executive sitting for a deposition on a medical malpractice suit, explaining how instead of using Epic or Cerner or whomever, they decided to let AI and a bunch of recent college grads from the lowest bidder consulting firm replace a known system. Sounds like a good way to wipe out whatever you saved in costs with court judgments.
Also, switching EMRs is a huge pain in the ass. When I was a fresh-faced employee at an EMR company they sent me and other employees out to help deploy a new system in a client's hospitals in another city. This took a small army of employees, contractors, travel nurses, and consultants to do. Your ass was up at 3 AM, back at your hotel room at 8 PM. Nurses didn't care about what your program did, they wanted it a certain way and they wanted it fixed now. You're hopefully not going to have the hospital leadership saying, "Yeah, you can try this and if you fail, we'll switch again in three years". I can't imagine many healthcare systems doing that, particularly if the physicians are a major component of management.
All of what you are saying is absolutely true, but frankly doesn't matter at the executive level.
If it is a board priority to extract favorable terms from vendors (and it absolutely is right now), we will get it done consequences be damned. If you can't do it, we'll fire you and replace you with someone else. You saw this with enterprises making 12-18 month roadmaps to completely tear out VMware ESXi and migrate to Nutanix.
Unlike Broadcom which has a much more diversified business and purchased actual market leaders which allows them to be so vicious, Oracle's SaaS products have a much weaker hand as the headline of churn is much more destabilizing for a market laggard like Cerner or NetSuite than choosing to drop from 90% gross margins to 40% gross for strategic customers - and purchasers know that.
As such, as a business who is not in a position to protect against strongarming purchaser you need to preemptively build additional margins slack where possible, and it is in this vein that the NetSuite and Cerner layoffs happened today.
No one has, but every buyer is using this line across vast swathes of Enterprise SaaS to extract the most competitive quote available from either the dominant player or their existing vendor.
It doesn't matter if the customer is serious because the general sentiment across the board amongst procurement teams is that existing quotes are too high, and that they want to maximize discounting where possible.
If you are a non-dominant player in a market segment as Oracle is in ERP and EHR, you lack leeway to better manage margins pressures and win in a price war.
It is in this vein that mass layoffs like the one Oracle announced occur.
Why pay a premium for a tier 2 product when I can buy the tier 1 product on a discount?
There was an interesting scandal in Sweden where Oracle managed to sell the Millenium system to a regions hospitals even though they did not fulfill the requirements, and then when it inevitably crashed and burned they had to do an emergency rollback to the previous system after just a few days.
Both Cerner (EHR) and NetSuite (ERP) were laggards in their market segments for years.
If I'm the Director of Enterprise Applications and have a budget allocated to procurement, I have no reason to purchase a laggard product like Cerner or NetSuite even with the Oracle bundle when SAP is giving significant discounts because OpenAI, Anthropic, and GCP are offering partnerships with systems integrations like Accenture or Deloitte to fully build out and manage your own hyperspecific ERP or EHR.
There's no reason to keep investing in products in a market that was already past it's growth stage pre-AI with a clear market winner, especially now that there is downstream pressure that makes build much more attractive than buying an inferior product.
Based on your response, I doubt you even cared to read my entire post.
Edit: can't reply
> I didn't read it because it didn't exist yet, you added it in an edit
It did when I posted. The only edit I made after you posted was fixing HRM to EHR.
> You're not even disagreeing with my response, merely elaborating the mechanism behind it. This is bad faith posting.
I strongly disagree. My entire thesis is that Cerner and NetSuite were bad businesses. If a business is bad you kill the business.
Anyone with even a passing familiarity with EHR systems will know that nobody wants to build their own. I once worked for a large hospital system that abandoned a decades old institutionally built and maintained system for Epic. The choice was celebrated by almost everyone who worked there.
The value is in the “system” itself. The tooling, plugins, knowledge that your staff has the familiarity and skills so as to not require retraining, the interoperability of data with other systems and vendors.
The idea that AI is going to enable a variety of bespoke competitors is truly laughable!
Edit:
I also disagree with the takeaway in this article.
If dual use civilian infrastructure can be viewed as a valid target and compartmentalization of relations is no longer viewed as a justification for neutrality, we have returned to the era of total war.
Iran's argument is that the UAE+Qatar are combatants because they have based American troops despite also allowing IRGC basing and bypassing of sanctions.
If this logic (which imo is very flawed) makes the UAE+Qatar valid targets and combatants, then the US is justified in striking Iran as Iran has been directly aiding and abetting Russia's invasion of Ukraine with troops in Crimea conducting drone strikes [0] and providing ballistic missiles to Russia to strike Ukraine [1].
By extension, this means all foreign relations have to be bipolar, which means admitting we are in a de facto World War (something which Fiona Hill has brought up literally hours before the Iran War began [2]).
[0] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/24/iranian-milita...
[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-12/iran-is-s...
[2] - https://xcancel.com/FrankRGardner/status/2027098560647348410...
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