AI NewsIran threatens ‘Stargate’ AI data centers

Iran threatens ‘Stargate’ AI data centers

1:42 AM IST · April 7, 2026

Iran has warned of further attacks on data centers across the Middle East in response to ongoing threats and air strikes from the United States. Iran’s military said that if the U.S. went ahead with its threats to hit its civilian infrastructure, the country would retaliate with its own strikes against U.S.’ energy and tech infrastructure in the region, according to avideo released late last weekandshared widely on Sundayof Iranian military spokesperson Ebrahim Zolfaghari. The video released by Iran shows an image of a globe, then zooming in on the Stargate data center in the United Arab Emirates with the message of “nothing stays hidden to our sight, though hidden by Google.” Stargate is a$500 billion joint venturebetween OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle to build AI data centers, announced in January 2025. The initiative originally struggled to get off the ground due to allegedfunding troublesandcosts associated with tariffs, andsought to expandwith new data centers internationally. The latest threat comes afterU.S. President Trumpthreatened to strike Iran’s civilian infrastructure, like power plants and water desalination plants, by the end of Tuesday if Iran doesn’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a critical global shipping channel that has choked global supply chain traffic since the start of the war in February. Several data centers in the region have already been hit by missiles as a result of the war. Iranian missilesstruck Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centersin Bahrain andan Oracle data center in Dubai. Iran alsothreatened tech companiesincluding Nvidia and Apple by name last week.