Iran Just Put OpenAI’s $30 Billion Data Center in Its Crosshairs

Well, this escalated quickly.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) just released a video threatening OpenAI’s massive Stargate data center under construction in Abu Dhabi. The threat is conditional: if the US attacks Iranian power plants, the IRGC says it will go after US-linked energy and tech companies in the region. And they made sure to show satellite imagery of OpenAI’s facility as an example.

The video, posted on April 3rd via an Iranian state-backed news outlet’s X account, promises “complete and utter annihilation” of those targets. It’s not exactly subtle. The Stargate project is OpenAI’s $500 billion baby (with Oracle, Nvidia, Cisco, and SoftBank along for the ride), and the Abu Dhabi portion alone is a $30 billion bet on AI infrastructure. An October 2025 update showed construction was “well underway” with a goal of deploying 200 megawatts of compute power this year. That’s a lot of GPUs sitting in a very visible target.

There’s a bit of dark comedy here: the IRGC’s video misidentifies Cisco’s chief product officer Jeetu Patel as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. If your intel can’t get the faces right, maybe don’t make threat videos. But the underlying message is clear enough.

This doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Over the weekend, President Trump posted on Truth Social that Tuesday would be “Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day” unless Iran opens the Strait of Hormuz. He also told ABC News the US plans on “blowing up the entire country” if no deal is reached. Iran’s Foreign Ministry responded Monday, saying it’s “determined to defend our national security and sovereignty with all might.”

So we’ve got two sides trading threats, and a half-built AI data center suddenly becomes a geopolitical pawn. I don’t envy OpenAI’s security team right now.

OpenAI hasn’t commented yet. I’m not sure what they’d say. “Please don’t blow up our servers” doesn’t carry much weight when missiles are involved.

The broader point here is uncomfortable: as AI infrastructure becomes more concentrated and visible, it also becomes a target. Stargate isn’t just a data center — it’s a symbol of American tech dominance in the Gulf. And symbols get hit first.