Iran warns of the potential destruction of OpenAI's Stargate data center located in Abu Dhabi | TNW

      In summary: The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran has published a video threatening the “complete and utter annihilation” of OpenAI’s $30 billion Stargate AI campus in Abu Dhabi, marking the first time the facility has been explicitly mentioned and warning it will be targeted if the US carries out its threatened assaults on Iranian civilian infrastructure.

      A senior member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has warned of plans to obliterate OpenAI’s primary AI data center in Abu Dhabi, accompanied by a video that begins with a blurred satellite image of the desert location and transitions to clear night-vision footage of the expansive Stargate campus. The text displayed states: “Nothing remains concealed from our view, even if hidden by Google.”

      The video was released on April 3, 2026, by Brigadier General Ebrahim Zolfaghari of the IRGC, indicating a notable shift in Iran’s stance. Just days prior, the Guard had identified 18 US tech companies as legitimate military targets, including Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla, but had not specified any particular site. This Stargate video is the first instance of the IRGC explicitly naming an installation for threatened destruction.

      Zolfaghari indicated that the attack would occur if the United States acts on President Donald Trump’s threat to bomb Iranian power plants and desalination facilities. The threat is conditional rather than immediate, but follows a month of escalating conflicts: the US-Israel joint campaign that began on February 28, 2026, has already led to Iranian retaliation against Gulf energy infrastructure, military sites, and notably, commercial data centers.

      What is Stargate UAE?

      The heart of EU tech. Insights from the latest developments in the EU tech landscape, a narrative from our founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, delivered weekly to your inbox. Sign up now! Stargate UAE is the international flagship of the $500 billion Stargate joint venture among OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and Abu Dhabi's sovereign investment entity MGX. The campus is being constructed and financed by the UAE AI firm G42 over approximately 19 square kilometers of desert south of Abu Dhabi and will be jointly operated by OpenAI and Oracle. SoftBank's participation in the project was partly funded by a $40 billion bridge loan to support OpenAI, arranged with JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and three Japanese lenders in late 2025.

      The facility's first phase, a 200-megawatt compute cluster powered by Nvidia Grace Blackwell GB300 systems, is expected to go live by the end of 2026. Upon full completion, the campus is intended to reach a total capacity of 1 gigawatt, according to the UAE’s AI minister, who estimated the total construction cost at over $30 billion in January 2026. The facility reportedly contains up to 500,000 Nvidia GPUs, although this number has not been independently verified. If built as planned, Stargate UAE would represent the largest concentration of AI compute capacity outside the US.

      Cisco is providing zero-trust networking and connectivity options, Oracle will handle cloud operations, and Nvidia is the main chip supplier. The UAE government, via G42, owns the construction and land interests, while OpenAI is responsible for model training and inference operations.

      A conflict that has already affected the server room

      The threat to Stargate is no longer merely theoretical as it may have been six months ago. Before dawn on March 1, 2026, Iranian Shahed drones attacked two Amazon Web Services data centers in the UAE and damaged a third in Bahrain, causing two of the three availability zones in AWS’s ME-CENTRAL-1 region to be offline for over 24 hours. These strikes disrupted banking services, ride-hailing platforms, and payment processors throughout the Gulf, prompting AWS to waive usage fees for the region for all of March.

      Iran claimed to have also attacked an Oracle data center in Dubai on April 2. Dubai's media office refuted the claim on the same day; the actual status of that facility is still disputed.

      The AWS attacks mark the first recorded instance of a nation intentionally targeting commercial data centers as part of an active military engagement. This precedent lends significant credibility to the current threat against Stargate, surpassing mere geopolitical posturing.

      The implications for global AI infrastructure

      The timing is particularly troubling for the industry. Analysts at TD Cowen predict that hyperscaler capital expenditures will exceed $600 billion in 2026, with approximately three-quarters of that related to AI infrastructure development. The Gulf was projected to be the fastest-growing data center market globally until this year, with annual growth rates over 60 percent, driven by large-scale campuses in the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

      This pipeline is now at risk. Insurers and institutional lenders are reassessing risk models for Middle Eastern infrastructure at precisely the time when companies like Meta have been aggressively securing long-term capacity, as evidenced by its $27 billion agreement with Neb