Analysis
Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council and a former Revolutionary Guard commander, said Tehran could target "cables, data centers, AI facilities and other sites in the region" if intense fighting with the US and Israel breaks out again. His comments, carried by state-run IRNA and reported by Fortune on October 11, came as Iran called the latest US response to its ceasefire proposal "insufficient" and said it is no longer routing messages through Washington.
A Threat With Precedent
The warning isn't abstract. Iranian drones already struck two AWS data centers in the UAE and one in Bahrain on March 1, 2026, in attacks that framed the facilities as extensions of US military operations in the region, according to cryptobriefing.com. That strike came and went without derailing the Gulf's AI buildout -- a pattern that matters more than the rhetoric itself for anyone pricing risk into data-center deals in the region.
“## The Money Keeps Flowing The exposure is real money: - Stargate UAE (Abu Dhabi) -- a 5 gigawatt planned campus, with an initial 1 GW cluster under construction.”
Rezaei's comments follow the collapse of a June memorandum meant to end the US-Iran war and a rejected Iranian proposal for a faster settlement. Iran's Revolutionary Guard navy separately warned that ships turning off identification systems in the Strait of Hormuz -- the chokepoint for a large share of global oil flows and a growing share of the subsea cable traffic feeding Gulf data centers -- would be treated as hostile.
The Money Keeps Flowing
The exposure is real money:
- Stargate UAE (Abu Dhabi) -- a 5 gigawatt planned campus, with an initial 1 GW cluster under construction.
- HUMAIN (Saudi Arabia) -- targets 1.9 GW of AI compute by 2030 and 6.9 GW by 2034.
- Microsoft -- pledged $15.2 billion for Saudi projects and more than $10 billion across the Gulf through 2030.
- Amazon -- committed $5.3 billion to Saudi digital infrastructure.
- Mubadala -- Abu Dhabi's sovereign investor, put roughly $12.9 billion into AI and digital infrastructure in 2025.
Analysts expect the region's combined AI capacity to reach 8 to 10 gigawatts this decade. None of that capital paused after the March strikes, and it's unlikely to pause for a threat alone. Gulf sovereign funds have so far treated physical risk as a cost of doing business rather than a reason to redirect capacity to the US or Europe, where power and permitting delays are the bigger constraint on buildout speed. But the calculus isn't static: every escalation raises the price of war-risk insurance and the odds an operator eats an uninsured loss, and no hyperscaler has disclosed how much of its Gulf capex is actually covered against this specific threat.
Gulf governments have invested in layered air defense around critical infrastructure since the 2026 strikes, and hyperscalers have reportedly begun spreading capacity across Saudi, UAE and Qatari sites rather than concentrating load in one campus -- a hedge that raises build costs but cuts single-point-failure risk. No major cloud provider has quantified how much extra capex that redundancy adds, which makes it hard for outside investors to compare the true cost of a Gulf AI bet against a US or European one on an apples-to-apples basis.
The timing lands awkwardly next to Amazon's own fight over a Pennsylvania data center, where local opposition -- not foreign militaries -- is what's actually slowing US buildout right now. Investors underwriting AI infrastructure are learning to price two very different risk profiles at once: political backlash at home, and geopolitical risk abroad, both attached to the same capital-intensive bet on compute.
What remains to be seen is whether this is posturing tied to stalled ceasefire talks or a genuine shift in Iranian targeting doctrine. Mediation between Washington and Tehran continues even as both sides trade threats, and no Gulf data-center operator has publicly changed its buildout plans since Rezaei's remarks.
