Iran threatens Open AI’s $30B Abu Dhabi data center

Iran has publicly threatened to destroy the Stargate AI data center being built in Abu Dhabi, a $30 billion facility backed by OpenAI, SoftBank, NVIDIA and Cisco, escalating geopolitical tensions around America’s most ambitious AI infrastructure project.

The threat came from an Iranian military-linked account and has been widely circulated on social media in early April 2026, with posts pointing directly at the Stargate data center under construction in the UAE as a legitimate military target, reports Starup Fortune.

The warning comes after US continues to deepen its AI infrastructure partnerships with Gulf states, a strategic realignment that Tehran views as a direct security threat on its doorstep.

The facility at the center of the threat is no ordinary server farm. The Abu Dhabi Stargate campus is one of the most significant pieces of AI infrastructure ever announced, forming a cornerstone of the broader Stargate initiative that OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle unveiled with considerable fanfare in January 2025.

The UAE site alone carries a projected investment of around $30 billion, with NVIDIA supplying the GPU clusters, Cisco providing networking infrastructure and SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son serving as one of the project’s most visible advocates. For OpenAI, it represents its most ambitious step toward building sovereign AI compute capacity outside the United States.

The UAE has spent years positioning itself as the Arab world’s AI capital. Abu Dhabi’s G42, the state-linked technology conglomerate, has been central to that ambition, and its partnership with American AI firms has accelerated sharply since 2024. The Stargate data center fits squarely into that strategy, giving OpenAI direct access to the Middle East market while giving the UAE a technological anchor that carries serious geopolitical weight.