Iran Says U.S. Data Centers in Middle East Are Now Legitimate Targets

Tensions continue to escalate between Iran and the U.S.: On Tuesday, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) openly named major American tech companies, including Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and NVIDIA, as “legitimate targets.”

To be clear, the threat is focused on the physical infrastructure currently located in the Middle East, not on U.S. soil itself. The IRGC encouraged all employees and residents to evacuate if they’re within a 1 kilometer radius, according to TIME.

In a public statement, the IRGC argued that American ICT and AI companies play a main role in designing and tracking military targets:

“You ignored our repeated warnings about the need to stop terrorist operations, and today, a number of Iranian citizens were martyred in both your and your Israeli allies’ terrorist attacks. Since the main element in designing and tracking terror targets are American ICT and AI companies, in response to these terrorist operations, from now on, the main institutions effective in terrorist operations will be our legitimate targets. Companies that actively participate in terrorist plots will be targeted for retaliation against any terrorist attack.”

Obviously, this didn’t come out of nowhere — it’s following a long series of recent attacks that Iran attributes to the U.S. and Israel. It also doesn’t help that the companies IRGC named already have a sizable infrastructure footprint across the Middle East, with at least 10 public cloud regions operated by AWS, Microsoft, and Google alone.

Surveillance is, of course, not new. What is new is the use of AI. AI isn’t out there choosing targets on its own, but modern military operations rely on machine learning systems for surveillance, pattern recognition, and targeting assistance.

It scans satellite images and drone footage to spot things like vehicles, buildings, or movement; it compares those images over time to see what’s changed. It can also map patterns, like who’s going where and how often, and flag anything that breaks routine.

And those very systems are powered by GPUs (mostly from Nvidia) and trained and deployed on cloud infrastructure like Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud.

So, no, it’s not that surprising the IRGC is pointing at Big Tech. But we certainly shouldn’t believe this is the last of it.