Iran Threats to Destroy OpenAI's $30bn Stargate Data Centre in Abu Dhabi
April 6, 2026 - 9:24 pm
In short:
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has released a video threatening “complete and utter annihilation” of OpenAI’s $30bn Stargate AI campus in Abu Dhabi, singling out the facility by name for the first time.
A senior officer in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has threatened to destroy OpenAI’s flagship AI data centre in Abu Dhabi, releasing a video that opens on a blurred satellite view of the desert site before transitioning to night-vision footage of the sprawling Stargate campus. The message overlaid on screen reads: “Nothing stays hidden to our sight, though hidden by Google.”
The video was released on 3 April 2026 by Brigadier General Ebrahim Zolfaghari of the IRGC, marking a significant escalation in Iran’s position. Just days prior, the Guard had named 18 US technology companies as legitimate military targets, including Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla. However, this is the first time the IRGC has designated a specific installation for threatened destruction.
Zolfaghari stated the attack would occur if the United States follows through on President Donald Trump’s threat to bomb Iranian power plants and desalination facilities. While the threat is conditional rather than imminent, it comes after a month of escalating tensions: the US-Israel joint campaign initiated on February 28, 2026 has already prompted Iranian retaliatory strikes against Gulf energy infrastructure, military installations, and notably, commercial data centers.
What is Stargate UAE?
Stargate UAE represents a $500bn joint venture between OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and Abu Dhabi’s sovereign investment vehicle MGX. The campus, under construction across approximately 19 square kilometers of desert south of Abu Dhabi, will be operated jointly by OpenAI and Oracle.
The first phase, a 200-megawatt compute cluster powered by Nvidia Grace Blackwell GB300 systems, is scheduled to come online by the end of 2026. Upon full build-out, the campus aims for 1 gigawatt of total capacity. Housing up to 500,000 Nvidia GPUs (though this figure hasn't been independently verified), Stargate UAE would be the largest concentration of AI compute capacity outside the United States if completed as planned.
Cisco provides zero-trust networking and connectivity infrastructure for the project.