On April 3, an Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps account posted a video to social media. It opened with what appeared to be a blurred area on Google Maps, a patch of desert southeast of Abu Dhabi's coast that nobody outside a narrow circle of engineers and executives would recognize. Then the footage shifted to night-vision, and the blur resolved into something unmistakable: rows of data center buildings, cooling towers, the unmistakable geometry of a compute cluster. Overlaid text read: "Nothing stays hidden to our sight though hidden by Google." The video also showed a still image of the executives behind Stargate UAE — correctly identifying OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, correctly naming Apollo CEO Marc Rowan, but misidentifying Cisco chief product officer Jeetu Patel as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. The target, named explicitly in the video and in a statement from IRGC Brigadier General Ebrahim Zolfaghari, was Stargate UAE — the 1-gigawatt artificial intelligence campus that OpenAI, Oracle, and the Emirati holding company G42 are building together, valued at roughly $30 billion.
The threat was conditional. Zolfaghari said the facility would face "complete annihilation" if the United States followed through on President Donald Trump's warning to bomb Iranian power plants — Trump had written on Truth Social that "Tuesday will be Power Plant Day and Bridge Day" if Iran did not open the Strait of Hormuz. But the surveillance method was new. This was not a general warning about Gulf infrastructure. This was a named facility, specific imagery, a technical capability to see through countermeasures — and a 19-day-old precedent proving the threat was not theoretical.
On March 1, before dawn Gulf time, Iranian Shahed drones struck two Amazon Web Services data centers in the United Arab Emirates and damaged a third in Bahrain. Two of the three availability zones in AWS's ME-CENTRAL-1 region went offline for more than 24 hours. The attack was described by analysts as the first time data centers had been deliberately targeted for air strikes in a conflict. The U.S. military uses AWS for some of its workloads, including — as Iran itself noted in justifying the Bahrain strike — running Anthropic's Claude AI model for intelligence functions. The proximity was not incidental. Each availability zone in ME-CENTRAL-1 sits within 100 kilometers of the others, connected by ultra-low-latency fiber networks — the same architecture pattern, scaled up, that defines Stargate UAE.
The campus broke ground on March 20, 2026, 19 days after the AWS strikes. The timing was not lost on regional analysts. The full UAE-U.S. AI infrastructure partnership — organized around G42, the Abu Dhabi tech holding whose chairman is a national security adviser to the Emirati crown prince — spans 10 square miles with a planned capacity of 5 gigawatts, making it the largest such deployment outside the United States. Stargate UAE itself is a 1-gigawatt cluster using NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GB300 systems, with the first 200 megawatts expected to come online in 2026. The rest of the campus — the other four gigawatts — is planned infrastructure that does not yet exist. Whether it gets built, and on what timeline, may now depend on factors that have nothing to do with power procurement or GPU deliveries.
The question for OpenAI and its partners is not primarily about insurance premiums or physical hardening, though both will receive scrutiny. It is about what it means to co-locate military AI workloads — intelligence analysis, targeting, signals processing — inside a commercial compute cluster in a geopolitically contested region, and then announce it publicly. The March strikes demonstrated that data centers in the Gulf are within range of drones that are not shot down. The April threat demonstrated that specific facilities can be identified, surveilled past commercial obfuscation, and designated for destruction. The gap between those two demonstrations is the distance between risk as abstraction and risk as targeting packet.
Stargate UAE's first 200 megawatts may still come online on schedule. The political calculation that produced the threat could collapse under its own contradictions, as so many escalations do. But the IRGC video is now on a server somewhere, and the facility coordinates are confirmed. The question of what gets built next — and whether it gets built at all — is a question for investors, Emirati authorities, and the architects of the OpenAI-Oracle-G42 partnership, not for the engineers laying fiber in the desert.
Correction appended April 7, 2026: An earlier version of this article did not note that the IRGC video misidentified Cisco chief product officer Jeetu Patel as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Apollo CEO Marc Rowan was correctly identified in the video. The error is corrected above.
