24/04/2026
News Update: Iran has directly threatened to destroy the Stargate AI data center in Abu Dhabi, one of the largest AI infrastructure projects ever built outside the United States. The IRGC released a video showing satellite imagery of the facility and stated it would destroy the site completely. The video also displayed images of executives from companies involved in the project, including OpenAI's Sam Altman and Nvidia's Jensen Huang.
Stargate UAE is a joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle, NVIDIA, Cisco, SoftBank, and Abu Dhabi-based G42. The facility is designed with the first phase at 200 megawatts, building toward a full 1-gigawatt compute cluster within a larger campus that could eventually reach 5 gigawatts, with over $30 billion in investment. The first phase is expected to go live in 2026.
The threat follows real strikes that already hit the region. In March, Iranian drones damaged two AWS data centers in the UAE and one in Bahrain, causing outages across banking and cloud services. The IRGC has also named 18 U.S. tech companies as legitimate targets, including Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, NVIDIA, Tesla, Intel, Cisco, Oracle, Dell, HP, IBM, JPMorgan Chase, General Electric, Boeing, and Palantir, along with two Middle Eastern companies: G42 and Spire Solutions.
This is the first conflict where commercial data centers have been deliberately targeted during wartime. For years the Gulf positioned itself as a neutral hub for global AI infrastructure. That assumption is now being tested in real time, with billions in planned investments facing unprecedented strategic risk.
Source: Tom's Hardware. (2026). Iran threatens 'complete and utter annihilation' of OpenAI's $30B Stargate AI data center in Abu Dhabi.