Iran threatened U.S.-linked data centers across the Middle East as the war with the United States escalated. Military spokesperson Ebrahim Zolfaghari warned that strikes on Iranian civilian infrastructure would bring retaliation against American energy and technology facilities. A video singled out the Stargate site in the United Arab Emirates, part of the $500 billion venture announced by OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle. Missiles had already hit AWS facilities in Bahrain and an Oracle data center in Dubai.

The threat gives physical coordinates to computing sold through the language of remote access. Stargate depends on buildings, power systems, cooling machinery, cables, workers, and host governments. Each site concentrates enormous investment in a structure visible to satellites and vulnerable to the politics of its location. The cloud metaphor encouraged customers to imagine processing without territory, yet military planners encounter a fixed facility that supports commercial services and national ambitions. AI capacity now enters calculations once reserved for ports, refineries, and power plants. This changes the price of expansion in regions chosen for capital, energy, or political alliances. Redundancy can move workloads when a building fails, but it cannot erase damaged equipment or danger to staff and nearby residents. Every new campus requires security plans that account for the state relationships surrounding its walls, along with the missiles capable of reaching them.