Amazon Web Services (AWS) says it is unable to restore access to resources and data in some of its Availability Zones in the Middle East after datacenters were damaged during the US war with Iran. In an update to its AWS Health Dashboard, the cloud giant confirmed that anything hosted exclusively in its Bahrain Region (me-south-1) remains inaccessible. "The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple Availability Zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand," the update says. "After a thorough assessment, we have determined that we are unable to restore access to the resources and data hosted exclusively in this Region." After the first Bahrain Availability Zone was damaged in March, AWS advised customers to migrate their workloads to other Regions. The company said most did so before further attacks disrupted a second Availability Zone in April and rendered the entire Region unavailable. AWS has reached a similar conclusion about one Availability Zone in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), saying it cannot re-establish access to the resources and data hosted there. The affected Zone, mec1-az2, is one of three in AWS's UAE Region. Two AWS facilities in the country were hit by drones back in March as Iran retaliated against US-Israeli strikes on its territory. AWS says it continues to work on recovering resources in the Region, including some hosted in the other affected Availability Zones (mec1-az1 and mec1-az3). It adds that "most customers" have been able to restart operations in other AWS Regions by restoring from backups or copying any data that remained accessible. The company says its support teams remain available to help customers move their applications to alternate Regions. The Register asked AWS to comment, but the company declined to add to the information on its Health Dashboard. In AWS terminology, a Region is a geographic area containing multiple isolated Availability Zones. Each Zone consists of one or more discrete datacenters with independent power, cooling, and network connectivity. AWS recommends distributing applications and resources across multiple Availability Zones to withstand the loss of a single location. That approach cannot protect against a Region-wide failure, however. Workloads that must survive such an event require a disaster recovery plan involving another Region. AWS and several other tech companies advised customers after the first strikes to recover whatever resources they could and replicate them in alternate Regions, ideally in Europe, rather than wait for services in the Middle East to return. That advice appears to have been well-founded. AWS said at the time: "Customers should enact their disaster recovery plans, recover from remote backups stored in other Regions, and update their applications to direct traffic away from the affected Regions." ®

Amazon Web Services on Tuesday tapped mobile chip titan and aspiring datacenter SoC maker Qualcomm to develop "customized" silicon for AI inference and 1.6 Tbps optical networking gear to tie it all together, though it offered few details. Amazon's purchases and other commercial commitments under the agreement could total up to $60 billion in payments through September 2036. “Qualcomm is pleased to work with AWS on customized silicon and connectivity solutions, bringing decades of leadership in advanced processing and power-efficient compute, to deliver breakthrough performance and enable the next generation of AI infrastructure,” Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said in a canned statement that tells us absolutely nothing about the nature of the deal. While details remain vague, custom chip deals of this sort aren’t unusual for cloud providers like Amazon. The cloud giant has previously engaged Intel to develop customized versions of its Xeon processors. Similarly, AMD has built custom CPUs, like the Epyc 9V64H, for Microsoft. Qualcomm’s involvement could involve the development of fully custom silicon, chiplets, or customized versions of its emerging datacenter accelerator portfolio. Detailed during Qualcomm's annual investor day earlier this summer, the new rack-scale AI platform swaps pricey high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for what the chip biz calls high-bandwidth compute. Qualcomm boasts that the technology will enable it to achieve higher “effective” memory bandwidth — a key bottleneck for AI inference workloads — using cheaper LPDDR memory by shifting some of the compute to the memory’s base die. The technology is expected to launch next year as part of Qualcomm’s AI250-series of Dragonfly rack systems. It’s entirely possible that, just like Intel builds customized versions of its Xeon 6 processors for AWS, Qualcomm will bring a customized version of its AI250-series chips to the cloud provider as well. Qualcomm is also working on a new datacenter CPU called the C1000 that it claims will touch 5 GHz and scale to more than 250 cores when it arrives in the second half of 2028. We reached out to Amazon and Qualcomm for additional color on what the multi-generation tie will eventually entail, but hadn’t heard back at the time of publication. While the AI inference side of the equation is about as clear as mud, Qualcomm’s networking contributions are far more obvious. As part of the collab, Amazon will employ Qualcomm’s serializer-deserializers (SerDes) and optical digital signal processors (DSPs) — likely acquired with the purchase of Alphawave Semi late last year — to boost port speeds to 1.6 Tbps. This points to AWS expanding its supply chain to include Qualcomm as a source of optical pluggables, or potentially near- or co-packaged optics. High-speed optical interconnects have become a major supply chain hurdle for scaling AI infrastructure, particularly as compute scales from a rack with a few dozen accelerators to hundreds or thousands spanning multiple racks. The customer-supplier relationship also runs both ways. While AWS hoovers up its chip tech, Qually plans to expand its use of Amazon’s Bedrock platform for electronic design automation workloads — after all, this wouldn't be an AI deal if it didn't contribute to the circular economy somehow. ®