Iran Threatens Missile Strikes on U.S.-Linked Data Centers Amid Escalating War

Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps escalated its digital warfare campaign this week, releasing a video that named OpenAI's $30 billion Stargate AI data center in Abu Dhabi as a specific target for destruction, widening a conflict that has already knocked Amazon Web Services infrastructure offline across the Gulf and disrupted banking, payments, and cloud services for millions of users.

IRGC Brigadier General Ebrahim Zolfaghari delivered the threat in a video released April 3, warning that "all power plants, energy infrastructure, and information and communications technology of the Zionist regime, and all similar companies within the region that have American shareholders shall face complete and utter annihilation" if the United States proceeded with strikes on Iranian civilian infrastructure. The video then cut to satellite imagery of the Stargate facility in the Abu Dhabi desert, a site largely hidden from standard Google Maps views but visible via night-vision imagery the IRGC used to spotlight it as a priority target.

The Stargate project, backed by OpenAI, Nvidia, Microsoft, and Goldman Sachs, is planned to operate at 1 gigawatt of power and compute capacity. Its first phase of 200 megawatts incorporates approximately 10,000 Nvidia chips. The IRGC video displayed photos of the CEOs from each of those partner companies alongside the facility's coordinates.

The threat followed the first confirmed wartime attacks on commercial data centers in history. Before dawn on March 1, Iranian Shahed drones struck two AWS data centers in the UAE and damaged a third in Bahrain. The strikes took out two of the three availability zones in AWS's UAE region and one in Bahrain, overwhelming the redundancy model the company relies on to maintain continuity during single-zone failures. Banking providers Emirates NBD, First Abu Dhabi Bank, and Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank all reported disruptions, as did ride-sharing platform Careem and payments companies Hubpay and Alaan. Iran's state-run Fars News Agency said the Bahrain facility had been deliberately chosen "to identify the role of these centers in supporting the enemy's military and intelligence," a reference to AWS contracts with the U.S. military, which uses the platform for workloads including running Anthropic's AI model Claude for certain intelligence functions.

On April 1, the IRGC named 18 American technology companies as "legitimate targets," including Microsoft, Google, Apple, Meta, Oracle, Intel, Cisco, Dell, Palantir, and Nvidia, warning that "from now on, for every assassination, an American company will be destroyed." The April 3 video went further by singling out a specific physical facility rather than a corporate brand.

White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly told CBS News that "the United States has been prepared for Operation Epic Fury for some time, and we are aware of all potential Iranian targets." The companies named in Iran's threat have offices, research centers, and cloud infrastructure across the UAE, Israel, and Bahrain but had not publicly confirmed specific protective measures as of Sunday.

Since the conflict began following U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran on February 28, more than 3,000 drones and missiles have been fired on the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Kuwait, according to data compiled by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Analysts at the tech policy research group Just Security noted that because U.S. law requires government and military data to be stored domestically or on Defense Department bases, AWS data centers in the Gulf primarily serve commercial clients, complicating any legal or strategic calculus around treating them as military targets. The UAE has approximately 35 data centers, 42 percent of which are classified as large facilities, representing years of investment in Gulf AI and cloud strategy that experts say is now directly in jeopardy.