Iran threatens ‘Stargate’ AI data centers

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.

Iran’s military said that if the U.S. went ahead with its threats to hit its civilian infrastructure, the country would retaliate with its own strikes against U.S.’ energy and tech infrastructure in the region, according to a

video released late last week

and

shared widely on Sunday

of Iranian military spokesperson Ebrahim Zolfaghari.

The video released by Iran shows an image of a globe, then zooming in on the Stargate data center in the United Arab Emirates with the message of “nothing stays hidden to our sight, though 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

funding troubles

and

costs associated with tariffs

, and

sought to expand

with new data centers internationally.

The latest threat comes after

U.S. President Trump

threatened to strike Iran’s civilian infrastructure, like power plants and water desalination plants, by the end of Tuesday if Iran doesn’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a critical global shipping channel that has choked global supply chain traffic since the start of the war in February.

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

Iranian missiles

struck Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers

in Bahrain and

an Oracle data center in Dubai

. Iran also

threatened tech companies

including Nvidia and Apple by name last week.