Iran's Revolutionary Guard released a video this week showing the Stargate data centre complex in the United Arab Emirates with the caption: "nothing stays hidden to our sight, though hidden by Google." The facility is the centrepiece of a joint venture between OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle to build AI infrastructure across the Middle East, announced in January 2025 with a projected cost of $500 billion over several years. It is now, explicitly, a designated military target.
This is not the first time AI infrastructure in the region has been struck. In March, Iranian drone strikes hit Amazon Web Services data centres in Bahrain, causing outages across banking, payments, and consumer services before operators restored access by migrating workloads. An Oracle building in Dubai was struck by debris from interception fire in early April. The attacks follow a pattern: Iran has circulated a list of 18 technology companies it considers legitimate targets in retaliation for US and Israeli military operations, including Nvidia, Apple, Cisco, Oracle, Palantir, and others with a presence in the region.
The Middle East AI buildout was, until recently, one of the most aggressive infrastructure bets in the industry. The Gulf states, sitting on sovereign wealth and wanting to diversify beyond hydrocarbons, have been pouring money into data centre clusters and AI campuses. Microsoft, Google, and AWS all have significant regional commitments. The Stargate UAE facility was designed to become a hub for AI services across the broader region. That calculation has changed in a few months of sustained conflict.
The technical exposure is significant. Data centres require uninterrupted power, stable connectivity, and physical security. They are large, fixed, and expensive to relocate. The hyperscalers have invested heavily in redundancy and failover, and the Bahrain attacks demonstrated that workloads can be migrated when facilities go offline. But mitigation is not the same as immunity, and the sustained threat changes the calculus for new investment. Insurance costs for regional facilities are rising. Engineering teams have to factor in blast radius. The ambition to build $500 billion worth of AI infrastructure in a region now under active missile threat is a different proposition than it was at announcement.
There is a broader irony worth noting. The AI investment boom in the Gulf was partly driven by the same geopolitical logic that produced the current conflict: the US and its technology companies sought to extend influence through infrastructure partnerships, positioning AI as a tool of soft power and economic alignment. The same facilities now targeted by Iran were funded and built as instruments of that strategy. The war has not separated the military and commercial dimensions of AI infrastructure; it has collapsed them into the same target set.
CNBC reported earlier this year that hyperscalers were beginning to reassess their Middle East plans in light of the conflict. The Stargate threat video crystallises what had been an emerging calculation into an explicit one. The $500 billion bet was made on an assumption of regional stability that no longer holds. The companies involved have not publicly revised their commitments, but the targeting of their facilities by a state military is a material development that goes beyond the ordinary risks of doing business in an unstable region.