Iran threatens to annihilate OpenAI's $30B Stargate datacenter in UAE

Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps released a threat video targeting OpenAI's $30B Stargate AI datacenter in Abu Dhabi — a 1GW facility backed by Nvidia, Cisco, SoftBank, and Microsoft. The video showed satellite imagery of the complex (hidden on Google Maps), overlaid with the message: "Nothing stays hidden to our sight, though hidden by Google."

The threat comes after reported drone and missile strikes on commercial data centers in Bahrain and the UAE over the previous 48 hours. Iran warned of "complete and utter annihilation" of the facility — the centerpiece of the US-Gulf AI infrastructure push.

Stargate's first phase was expected to go live in 2026, with the full 1GW buildout representing one of the most concentrated AI compute clusters on the planet.

Why it matters: Geopolitical risk just became the biggest threat to US AI infrastructure expansion in the Middle East — putting billions in GPU capacity squarely in a conflict zone.