Iran threatens artificial intelligence data centers “Stargate”

Iran has warned of further attacks on data centers across the Middle East in response to ongoing threats and air strikes from the United States.

The Iranian military said that if the United States goes ahead with its threats to strike its civilian infrastructure, the country will retaliate with strikes against American energy and technology infrastructure in the region, according to a video released late last week and widely shared on Sunday by Iranian military spokesman Ebrahim Zolfaqari.

The video posted by Iran shows an image of the globe, then zooms in on the Stargate data center in the United Arab Emirates with the message: “Nothing remains hidden from our eyes, even though it is hidden by Google.”

Stargate is a $500 billion joint venture between OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle to build AI data centers, announced in January 2025. The initiative originally struggled to get off the ground due to alleged financing issues and costs associated with tariffs, and sought to expand with new data centers internationally.

The latest threat comes after US President Trump threatened to strike Iranian civilian infrastructure, such as power plants and water desalination plants, by the end of Tuesday if Iran does not reopen the Strait of Hormuz, an important global shipping channel that has choked off global supply chain traffic since the start of the war in February.

Many data centers in the region have already been hit by missiles as a result of the war.

Iranian missiles hit Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers in Bahrain and Oracle’s data center in Dubai. Iran also threatened technology companies including Nvidia and Apple by name last week.