Iran just put OpenAI’s $30B data center in its crosshairs

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps just made it personal for OpenAI. A video published to an Iranian state-backed news outlet’s X account on April 3rd explicitly threatens the company’s $30 billion data center in Abu Dhabi — the Stargate facility — if the US follows through on threats to attack Iranian power plants.

The video doesn’t mince words. It promises the “complete and utter annihilation” of US-linked energy and technology companies in the region, then cuts to satellite imagery of OpenAI’s in-progress Stargate facility in the UAE. It also shows a photo of the project’s backers, though they hilariously misidentify Cisco’s chief product officer Jeetu Patel as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Someone in Iran’s propaganda unit needs a better briefing deck.

This is the same Stargate project that OpenAI announced with much fanfare — a $500 billion umbrella initiative involving Oracle, Nvidia, Cisco, and SoftBank. The Abu Dhabi piece alone is $30 billion and supposed to deliver 16 gigawatts of compute power. An October 2025 update said construction was “well underway” and targeting 200 megawatts operational in 2026. How much is actually built right now? OpenAI isn’t saying.

The timing isn’t coincidental. Over the weekend, President Trump went on Truth Social and declared Tuesday would be “Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day” if Iran doesn’t open the Strait of Hormuz. He told ABC News the US plans on “blowing up the entire country” if there’s no deal. Iran’s Foreign Ministry responded Monday by saying it’s “determined to defend our national security and sovereignty with all might.”

So here we are. A multi-billion dollar AI infrastructure project — the kind of thing that’s supposed to define the next decade of computing — is now a potential military target in a geopolitical escalation. That’s a wild sentence to write, but it’s where we’re at.

The IRGC video is clearly propaganda, and the misidentification suggests they’re not exactly running a precision intelligence operation. But the threat is real enough that anyone with a stake in Stargate — and that’s a lot of big names — should be paying very close attention. Data centers are soft targets. They’re massive, they’re visible, and they’re connected to the grid in ways that make them hard to protect from a determined adversary.

OpenAI hasn’t commented. I’m not sure what they’d say. “Our lawyers are reviewing” doesn’t quite cover it when someone’s threatening to blow up your servers.

What strikes me is how quickly AI infrastructure has become a geopolitical bargaining chip. These facilities aren’t just buildings full of GPUs anymore. They’re national assets, symbols of technological dominance, and now, apparently, targets in a propaganda war. The Stargate project was supposed to be about compute power and AGI timelines. Now it’s about whether a cruise missile can find it on Google Maps.

I don’t have a tidy take on this. It’s messy, it’s escalating, and it’s happening way faster than anyone in the AI industry probably expected. But if you’re building a massive data center in the Middle East in 2026, you should probably have a contingency plan that goes beyond “we’ll call the insurance company.”