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

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) just released a video that puts OpenAI’s half-billion-dollar Stargate data center in Abu Dhabi squarely in the crosshairs. The threat, published on an Iranian state-backed news outlet’s X account on April 3rd, explicitly warns of the “complete and utter annihilation” of US-linked energy and tech companies in the region if the US attacks Iran’s power plants.

And they didn’t just talk in generalities. The video shows satellite imagery of OpenAI’s $30 billion Stargate facility under construction in the UAE—likely pulled from Google Maps—alongside photos of the executives behind the project. They even managed to misidentify Cisco’s chief product officer, Jeetu Patel, as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Slip-ups aside, the message is clear: this is a direct threat to one of the most ambitious AI infrastructure projects on the planet.

OpenAI’s Stargate project is a $500 billion beast (across the whole program) with backing from Oracle, Nvidia, Cisco, and SoftBank. The Abu Dhabi facility alone is supposed to eventually house 16 gigawatts of compute power. As of an October 2025 update, construction was “well underway,” with a target of deploying 200 megawatts this year. How much of it is actually finished? Nobody outside OpenAI knows for sure, and they didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The timing is no coincidence. 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 followed up by telling ABC News the US plans on “blowing up the entire country” if no deal is reached. Iran’s Foreign Ministry responded Monday with the expected defiance: “determined to defend our national security and sovereignty with all might.”

So here we are. A massive AI data center—one that’s supposed to power the next generation of models—is now a geopolitical bargaining chip. It’s a reminder that infrastructure like this doesn’t exist in a vacuum. When you build a $30 billion facility in the Middle East, you’re not just betting on compute; you’re betting on regional stability. And right now, that bet looks shaky.

I’m not sure what OpenAI can do about this in the short term. You can’t exactly move a data center that size overnight. But if tensions escalate further, we might see a very expensive construction site sitting idle—or worse.