More than six months after Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers in Abu Dhabi and Bahrain were attacked by drones, the company has now had to tell customers to move their data to facilities in other regions. The Wall Street Journal reports that AWS has admitted that it's time for customers to jump ship to data centers located elsewhere in the world. In its AWS dashboard update, AWS confirmed "most customers have been able to re-establish their operations in other Regions by restoring backups or copying data that remained accessible. AWS Support remains available to help customers who need assistance moving their applications to alternate Regions."

The move comes as AWS continues repairs on the damaged data centers, but it stopped short of offering a timeline as to when customers can expect either location to be back online. AWS says that it remains committed to supporting its customers in Bahrain, but only said it would provide a further update early next year. It did not offer any specific recovery time frame for the restoration of services. Regarding the UAE, AWS says that it is working to replace affected infrastructure, but again only said it would provide an update on the restoration of services in the coming months.

Both affected data centers became targets for the Islamic Republic of Iran after the United States and Israel launched strikes on that country in February of this year. Months later, the Bahraini data center was struck by cruise missiles, and Iranian state media claimed it had been "destroyed."

The move is bad news for the United Arab Emirates. The U.A.E. has spent years trying to become a world leader in data processing, a pitch that led it to lobby U.S. officials to allow it to buy AI chips for its data centers.

Having made plenty of noise about OpenAI's decision to take a spot in a 5-gigawatt data center complex in May 2025, U.A.E. officials have since seen those plans stall. The WSJ points out that no lease has been signed well over a year later. OpenAI was expected to take 20% of the data center's total capacity, the kind of loss that is sure to sting officials if plans don't get back on track.

For its part, the U.A.E. is clearly well aware of the threat that the ongoing regional instability poses to its ambitions, and it's looking for ways to address the fears of potential partners. Officials have already hinted at the potential for underground data centers. While the move would make an already costly endeavor even more expensive, it could help defend new data centers from drone attacks. Building drone defense systems near data centers is another option.

Drone attacks can be catastrophic for any building, and data centers are no different. The data centers operated by AWS suffered fires and damaged infrastructure as a result of the strikes. In their efforts to fight the fires caused by drone strikes, emergency workers used water, causing further damage.

The Abu Dhabi and Bahrain data centers are relied upon by a variety of businesses in the banking and financial sectors. Those businesses cannot tolerate downtime, especially of the protracted variety. There's little sign of data centers slipping from the crosshairs of drone operators any time soon, either, and AWS is far from unique in finding its data centers under attack.

Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) claimed in April that it had hit a data center linked to Oracle in Dubai. That unit further threatened American tech companies, including Microsoft, Oracle, Alphabet, and Nvidia, this spring. It accused the companies of contributing to attacks on Iran. With that in mind, and with tensions in the Middle East looking unlikely to ease any time soon, it's perhaps unsurprising that AWS has asked customers to move data to safer data centers around the world.

A Reddit user has shared details of a new bot that has beaten the devilishly difficult Gold Stake Black Deck in Balatro, a poker-like video game. The Redditor, who works in the AI industry, says that they have been testing the bot and "obtaining some crazy results" — and they've even shared a YouTube video highlighting how they went about creating the card shark of a bot.

In a post in the /balatro subreddit, user Atol8 (real name Jacopo Attolini) initially claimed the bot was the first of its kind to reliably beat Balatro. They subsequently admitted that "reliably might be a strong word," adding that the bot has "repeatedly beaten Balatro."

Beating Balatro in this instance meant beating the Gold Stake Black Deck, a combination that is widely considered to be the most difficult in the game. On its own, the Black Deck includes +1 Joker slot, but reduces the player's available hands by one per round. The Gold Stake effect introduces cumulative difficulty modifiers from all prior stakes, plus reduced hand sizes and stricter economic penalties.

Combining these two together makes for a brutal economy and more than a little luck, with players relying on strong early-game RNG.

In a post in the /balatro subreddit, user Atol8 (real name Jacopo Attolini) initially claimed the bot was the first of its kind to reliably beat Balatro. They subsequently admitted that "reliably might be a strong word," adding that the bot has "repeatedly beaten Balatro."

Beating Balatro in this instance meant beating the Gold Stake Black Deck, a combination that is widely considered to be the most difficult in the game. On its own, the Black Deck includes a +1 Joker slot, but reduces the player's available hands by one per round. The Gold Stake effect introduces cumulative difficulty modifiers from all prior stakes, plus reduced hand sizes and stricter economic penalties.

Combining these two together makes for a brutal economy and more than a little luck, with players relying on strong early-game RNG.

The bot itself is based on OpenAI's Astra models, which were released earlier this month. GPT-6 Astra has already grabbed headlines, having completed Valve's iconic Portal in 24 hours.

In a GitHub post detailing the ins and outs of the bot, Attolini says that GPT-6 Astra takes care of making strategic decisions based on the deck it has built. But the bot also relies on good old Python for its numerical tools. The legality of each move is assessed by BalatroBot, a separate tool that exposes Balatro game states and controls for external programs to interact with.

As impressive as this is, don't be fooled into thinking this bot played the perfect game. Reddit commenters have been quick to point out that it made some "interesting blunders" throughout its playthrough. Despite that, GPT-Astra is OpenAI's latest flagship model, with the company claiming it offers “a new generation of intelligence,” and “is state-of-the-art on computer use, browsing, software engineering, cybersecurity, science, and professional work.”

Not all bots are great at playing games, though. Just last year, OpenAI's ChatGPT "got absolutely wrecked on the beginner level” while playing Atari Chess. Elsewhere, Google's Gemini didn't even get as far as starting its own chess battle with the Atari 2600 — it ditched the game after deciding that it would "struggle immensely" against the iconic home console. It seems that, sometimes at least, even modern tech can't compete with a 1979 Atari 2600 game.

Anthropic and OpenAI are both facing uncomfortable questions from some large AI customers over concerns about how proprietary data may be used to train AI models. Some companies are so worried that they have begun demanding assurances about how their data is handled or going so far as to place limitations on which models their employees can use, and for which tasks, The Information reports. They fear that models may be trained on their intellectual property and information.

The issue can be traced back to a June change by Anthropic. Following the change to its flagship Fable model's policies, Anthropic can now retain customer data. The company argues that it only does so to ensure that Fable isn't being misused. But some companies have raised concerns that it means sensitive business data will be caught up in the sweep.

While both OpenAI and Anthropic point out that they don't train their models on the information given to them by companies with specific enterprise contracts by default, that doesn't tell the full story. Both companies do collect metadata from the same corporate customers, and while information on exactly what that metadata contains is hard to come by, OpenAI notes that it's only used “to better understand how our services are used." Anthropic also argues that any data it collects about how customers use its products is aggregated and anonymized. And that metadata isn't used to train models.

Regardless, there are still concerns over a perceived lack of clarity about what is collected. Telecoms outfit C Spire has agreements with both OpenAI and Anthropic that prevent either from using its data to train models, the report says.

However, the contracts do allow both OpenAI and Anthropic to collect C Spire technical usage data. C Spire believes that includes information about what applications AI models are connected to as well as usage data. It also worries that the AI companies may collect information about what their models get up to between generating responses.

For its part, OpenAI says that it does not use this "chain-of-thought" data to train its models. But C Spire still believes it needs a better understanding of what data is being collected, the report adds. It argues that neither AI company is being clear in its explanations.

Taking the private approach

One solution to any privacy concerns could be to use air-gapped servers, something aerospace company Northrop Grumman has already chosen to do. The Information reports that the company runs open-source AI models on its own air-gapped servers rather than trusting the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic.

Alternatively, Microsoft is already trying to take advantage of any data privacy concerns by tempting OpenAI and Anthropic customers to its own secure AI platforms. Microsoft's isolated cloud environments run AI models on private servers that don't send any data to external AI companies. But this approach is costly, and the report notes that at least one customer is still considering Microsoft's alternative approach.

Pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk has taken a slightly different approach. While it continues to use Anthropic's Claude for some tasks, it has a ban on allowing any proprietary data to be used by the model.

It's clear that a lack of trust has the potential to cost AI companies real money, and in one instance, it already has. The same report notes that a large U.S. utility company has already canceled its plans to test Anthropic's Fable. The utility company wanted to know if Fable could run its core power infrastructure but ultimately pulled the plug over Anthropic's refusal to agree to a nonrevocable zero data retention (ZDR) policy.

Nvidia has also decided to use Fable for tasks that don't require it to gain access to sensitive data. The company points to the same lack of ZDR guarentees as the reason. Instead, Nvidia uses its own in-house AI solution for tasks that it deems too sensitive for Anthropic's model. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has famously remarked that its employees should use AI tokens worth half their annual salary every year.

Toms Hardware reached out to Nvidia for comment but did not receive one by publication.