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OpenAI’s $30 billion Stargate AI data center under construction in Abu Dhabi has become the subject of a direct military threat from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
In a video released on April 4, IRGC spokesperson Brigadier General Ebrahim Zolfaghari warned of retaliation against U.S.-linked facilities in the region, singling out the Stargate project by name. The video included satellite imagery showing the facility’s desert location.
The Stargate data center is a joint venture between OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, Cisco, NVIDIA and UAE-based G42. It is designed to scale from an initial 200-megawatt phase in 2026 to a full 1-gigawatt capacity across a campus spanning approximately 19.2 square kilometers with up to 5 gigawatts of total planned capacity. When fully operational, it will be the largest data center deployment outside the United States.
NVIDIA is supplying Grace Blackwell GB300 systems for the facility’s GPU clusters. Cisco is handling networking and security infrastructure. Oracle will operate the site alongside OpenAI. SoftBank has committed $100 billion to the broader Stargate initiative, which includes a campus in Abilene, Texas, along with the Abu Dhabi expansion. The Abu Dhabi site was designed to show that frontier AI compute infrastructure is deployable at scale in partner nations outside the U.S.
The facility represents the physical compute layer underneath OpenAI’s API, supporting training and inference workloads for GPT-based models and autonomous agent services. Any sustained disruption would affect every product and workflow dependent on OpenAI’s infrastructure, from enterprise API customers to consumer-facing ChatGPT services.
The threat has drawn attention to physical infrastructure risk across the AI industry. Data centers of this scale take years to plan, require specialized construction and depend on supply chains already stretched by global semiconductor demand. They are not replaceable in the short term. In March 2026, regional disruptions affected Amazon AWS data centers in the UAE and Bahrain, causing service outages across multiple sectors.
The global AI infrastructure market is projected to exceed $400 billion by 2029. The Stargate threat highlights the trade-off between building near energy-rich regions with favorable costs and the risks that come with those locations. UAE authorities have not publicly responded. The facility is not yet operating at full capacity.
