Iran Threatens To Strike Us-owned Infrastructure In The Middle East

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps threatened Tuesday to target American tech and defense companies operating in the Middle East if the U.S. and Israel continue to target Iranian leadership.

In a statement released by the government-backed Tasnim News Agency, the IRGC said retaliatory attacks could begin as early as Wednesday evening and advised employees and residents living within a 1 kilometer radius of the U.S.-owned facilities to evacuate the area.

The IRGC listed 18 companies it threatened to target for actively participating in terrorist plots, according to a translation of the statement. The companies include Cisco, HP, Intel, Oracle, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, IBM, Dell, Palantir, Nvidia, Tesla and Boeing, among others.

A spokesperson for Microsoft declined to comment. Spokespeople for the other companies listed and the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The IRGC similarly threatened a handful of companies with infrastructure in Israel and the Gulf earlier this month, all of which are named in Tuesday’s statement. Those companies, including Google, Microsoft, Palantir, IBM, Nvidia and Oracle, were listed as new targets given their technology has been used for military applications.

Fighting in the Middle East has highlighted the risks of President Donald Trump’s push to expand American tech infrastructure in the region. Iranian drone strikes knocked out power to Amazon Web Services cloud computing facilities based in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain on March 3. And experts warned it wouldn’t be an isolated attack.

“I think it's highly unlikely that it will be the last time, as data centers become more and more important for a broad range of critical infrastructure,” Sam Winter-Levy, a fellow in the Technology and International Affairs Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told POLITICO earlier this month in response to the AWS incident.

The continued warnings from Iran pose a significant threat to U.S. tech companies and raise questions about how the facilities will be protected in the event of an attack.

“We can't think about this AI infrastructure as purely a commercial asset anymore, and to some extent, it’s national security infrastructure,” Hamza Chaudhry, lead of AI and national security at the Future of Life Institute, told POLITICO earlier this month.