Iran Just Put OpenAI’s $30 Billion Data Center in Its Crosshairs

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) 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 Stargate data center under construction in Abu Dhabi.

The video warns of “complete and utter annihilation” of US-linked energy and technology companies in the region if the US follows through on threats to attack Iran’s power plants. It then shows satellite imagery of OpenAI’s UAE facility — taken from Google Maps, apparently — alongside photos of the project’s backers.

There’s a pretty funny mistake in there too: the IRGC misidentifies Cisco’s chief product officer Jeetu Patel as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Not exactly a great look for an intelligence operation, but the underlying threat is dead serious.

The Stargate project is OpenAI’s massive $500 billion infrastructure bet, with Oracle, Nvidia, Cisco, and SoftBank all in on it. The Abu Dhabi portion alone is reportedly $30 billion and aims to deliver 200 megawatts of compute power this year. An October 2025 update showed construction was “well underway” with 16 gigawatts of compute planned total. That’s a lot of GPUs sitting in a very exposed location.

This doesn’t come out of nowhere. Over the weekend, President 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 also told ABC News the US plans on “blowing up the entire country” if no deal is reached. Iran’s Foreign Ministry responded by saying it’s “determined to defend our national security and sovereignty with all might.”

The timing is awful for OpenAI. They’re racing to get this facility operational while geopolitical tensions spike. Data centers are already prime targets in modern conflict — they’re high-value, hard to defend, and crippling one can set back an entire country’s AI ambitions by years.

I’ve been watching the Stargate project since it was announced, and honestly, the security implications always felt under-discussed. Building a concentrated cluster of world-class compute in a region that’s historically volatile is a risk that no amount of backup generators can mitigate. The IRGC just made that risk very, very real.

OpenAI hasn’t responded to requests for comment. I’m not sure what they’d say at this point. You can’t exactly negotiate with a video that promises annihilation.