Iran Just Put a $30 Billion Bullseye on OpenAI’s Desert Data Center

Well, this escalated quickly.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) just published a video that directly threatens OpenAI’s massive, partially-built Stargate data center in Abu Dhabi. The context: the US has been threatening to attack Iranian power plants, and the IRGC is making it clear they’ll retaliate against American-linked infrastructure in the region.

The video, posted to an Iranian state-backed news outlet’s X account on April 3rd, promises “complete and utter annihilation” of US-linked energy and tech companies. Then it zooms in on satellite imagery of OpenAI’s $30 billion Stargate facility under construction in the UAE. They also showed photos of the project’s backers—though they hilariously misidentified Cisco’s chief product officer Jeetu Patel as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Not exactly precision intelligence work, but the threat itself is unambiguous.

Let’s talk about what’s at stake. OpenAI’s Stargate project is a $500 billion beast involving Oracle, Nvidia, Cisco, and SoftBank. The Abu Dhabi facility alone is supposed to house 16 gigawatts of compute power. A construction update from October 2025 said they were “well underway” and aiming to deploy 200 megawatts this year. That’s a lot of GPUs sitting in a desert that’s now a potential target.

This didn’t come out of nowhere. Over the weekend, Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that Tuesday would be “Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day” if Iran doesn’t open the Strait of Hormuz. He followed up by telling ABC News the US plans on “blowing up the entire country” if no deal is reached. Iran’s Foreign Ministry responded Monday that they’re “determined to defend our national security and sovereignty with all might.”

OpenAI hasn’t commented yet. I’m not surprised—what do you even say? “Our cloud infrastructure is caught in a geopolitical crossfire, please hold”?

The irony here is thick. These hyperscale data centers are supposed to be the backbone of the next industrial revolution, parked in politically stable locations with cheap energy and friendly governments. The UAE was supposed to be safe. But safe is relative when your adversary has ballistic missiles and a grievance list.

I’ve been watching the Stargate project closely since it was announced, and this is the kind of risk nobody in the AI industry wants to talk about publicly. Hardware supply chains are fragile enough without adding military targeting to the mix. If this escalates, we’re not just talking about delayed model training runs—we’re talking about billions in physical assets going up in smoke.

For now, it’s a threat. But threats in this part of the world have a way of becoming Tuesday.