Iran warns of plans to target OpenAI's Stargate data center located in Abu Dhabi | TNW

      In summary: Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has posted a video warning of “complete and utter annihilation” of OpenAI’s $30 billion Stargate AI campus in Abu Dhabi, identifying the facility specifically for the first time and indicating it will retaliate if the U.S. follows through on threats against Iranian civilian infrastructure.

      A senior official from the IRGC has threatened to obliterate OpenAI’s primary AI data center in Abu Dhabi, showcasing a video that starts with a blurred satellite image of the desert location and transitions to clear night-vision footage of the expansive Stargate campus. The screen displays the message: “Nothing stays hidden to our sight, even if concealed by Google.”

      The video, released on April 3, 2026, by Brigadier General Ebrahim Zolfaghari of the IRGC, signifies a marked shift in Iran's stance. Just days prior, the Guards had identified 18 U.S. tech firms as legitimate military targets, such as Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla, without specifying any particular site. The Stargate video marks the first occasion where the IRGC has threatened destruction of a specific installation.

      Zolfaghari stated that the strike would occur if the U.S. acts on President Donald Trump's threat to bomb Iranian power plants and desalination facilities. Although the threat is conditional rather than immediate, it follows a month of escalating tensions: the U.S.-Israel joint military campaign, which began on February 28, 2026, has already led to Iranian retaliatory attacks against Gulf energy infrastructure, military sites, and notably, commercial data centers.

      What is Stargate UAE?

      Stargate UAE serves as the international flagship of the $500 billion Stargate joint venture involving OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and Abu Dhabi's sovereign investment entity MGX. The campus, being developed and financed by the UAE AI firm G42, spans approximately 19 square kilometers of desert located south of Abu Dhabi and will be co-managed by OpenAI and Oracle. SoftBank's investment in the project was partially supported by a $40 billion bridge loan arranged with financial institutions including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and three Japanese lenders in late 2025.

      The initial phase of the facility involves a 200-megawatt compute cluster utilizing Nvidia Grace Blackwell GB300 systems, expected to be operational by late 2026. Plans for the campus include a full capacity of 1 gigawatt, with the UAE’s AI minister estimating total construction costs to exceed $30 billion as of January 2026. The facility may accommodate up to 500,000 Nvidia GPUs, although this figure remains unverified. If completed according to the design, Stargate UAE would represent the largest concentration of AI computational capacity outside the United States.

      Cisco is providing the zero-trust networking and connectivity infrastructure; Oracle is overseeing cloud operations; Nvidia is the main chip supplier. The UAE government, via G42, handles the construction and land concerns, while OpenAI is responsible for model training and inference tasks.

      A conflict already affecting the server room

      The threat to Stargate is not merely hypothetical as it may have seemed half a year ago. In the early hours of March 1, 2026, Iranian Shahed drones targeted two Amazon Web Services data centers in the UAE and damaged a third in Bahrain, taking two of the three availability zones in AWS’s ME-CENTRAL-1 region offline for over 24 hours. The strikes caused disruptions to banking services, ride-hailing apps, and payment processors throughout the Gulf, prompting AWS to waive usage fees for that region for all of March.

      Iran also claimed to have attacked an Oracle data center in Dubai on April 2, which Dubai’s media office denied on the same day, leaving the factual status of that facility disputed. The AWS strikes marked the first documented case of a state intentionally targeting commercial data centers as part of military operations. This precedent lends greater credibility to the current threat against Stargate compared to typical geopolitical posturing.

      The significance for global AI infrastructure

      The timing is particularly concerning for the industry. Analysts at TD Cowen predict that hyperscaler capital expenditure will surpass $600 billion in 2026, with around three-quarters of that related to AI infrastructure development. Until this year, the Gulf region was expected to be the quickest-growing data center market globally, with annual growth rates exceeding 60 percent, driven by large-scale campuses in the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

      That development pipeline is now at risk. Insurers and institutional lenders are re-evaluating risk models for Middle Eastern infrastructure right at the moment when companies like Meta are striking $27 billion infrastructure deals with Nebius, demonstrating the industry's aggressive pursuit of long-term capacity. A successful attack on Stargate, or an extended period of credible threats, would necessitate a comprehensive reassessment of where the next generation of AI computing should be established, with Northern Europe, India, and Southeast Asia likely reaping the benefits.