Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has released a video threatening the " total and utter destruction " of OpenAI 's $30 billion Stargate AI campus in Abu Dhabi. The warning comes in response to US threats to attack Iranian political infrastructure.
A senior Guards officer, Brigadier General Ebrahim Zolfaghari, released the video on April 3, 2026. The video includes a blurry satellite image of the deserted location and then transitions to a nighttime shot of the Stargate campus, with the message: “Nothing is hidden from our sight, even if hidden from Google.” This video marks a significant escalation in Iran’s stance, as just days before, the Guards had identified 18 American technology companies as legitimate military targets, including Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla (without naming specific facilities).
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Zolfaghari said the attack would take place if the United States carries out President Donald Trump's threat to bomb Iranian power plants and desalination facilities.
Stargate: A project by OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle and MGX
Stargate UAE is the global project of the $500 billion Stargate consortium, which includes OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle and Abu Dhabi-based MGX . The campus, being built by UAE-based artificial intelligence company G42 , spans approximately 19 square kilometers south of Abu Dhabi and will be jointly operated by OpenAI and Oracle. SoftBank’s participation was partially covered by the $40 billion bridge loan to finance its commitment to OpenAI.
The first phase of the facility, a 200-megawatt compute cluster powered by Nvidia Grace Blackwell GB300, is expected to be operational by the end of 2026. When fully completed, the campus is expected to reach a total capacity of 1 gigawatt, with a projected construction cost exceeding $30 billion. The facility is said to house up to 500,000 Nvidia GPUs, although this number has not been independently verified.
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If completed as planned, Stargate UAE will represent the largest concentration of AI compute capacity outside the United States.
Cisco provides zero-trust networking and connectivity infrastructure, while Oracle manages cloud operations and Nvidia supplies the main chips. The UAE government, through G42, holds manufacturing and land interests, with OpenAI overseeing model training and inference workloads.
Threats from Iran
The threat to Stargate from Iran is becoming increasingly tangible. On March 1, 2026, Iranian Shahed drones attacked two Amazon Web Services data centers in the UAE and damaged a third in Bahrain, causing significant disruptions to banking services, ride-hailing platforms, and payment processors across the Gulf.
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Iran also claimed to have struck an data center Oracle in Dubai on April 2. The Dubai press office denied the claim the same day. The actual status of this facility remains in question.
The AWS attacks were the first time in history that a state has deliberately targeted commercial data centers as part of an active military campaign. This precedent makes the current threat to Stargate much more credible than a typical geopolitical standoff.
