Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said on Thursday that it had hit a data center linked to Oracle in Dubai as part of its war against the U.S. and U.S. technology companies in the region, reports The Times of India. The government of Dubai was quick to deny the report, according to Gulf News. An Amazon facility in Bahrain was also targeted, according to NDTV, which cites the Tasnim news agency.
Several days ago, the IRGC named Oracle among a group of American corporations it accuses of enabling U.S. and Israeli military activity, alongside Apple, Boeing, Cisco, Google, HP, IBM, Meta, and Microsoft. Oracle has cloud and artificial intelligence contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense, and its chairman, Larry Ellison, has longstanding ties with Israel, which were among the factors cited in the accusations. In addition, the IRGC targeted American aluminum and steel industries in Bahrain and the UAE, as well as Rafael arms factories in Israel.
While the officials in the United Arab Emirates have not confirmed any successful hit on infrastructure in Dubai. Bahrain's Ministry of Interior confirmed that an Iranian strike has set 'a facility of a company' on fire. That company is said to be Batelco, the country's largest telecommunications company that hosts infrastructure for Amazon Web Services.
While hitting traditional targets — such as arms factories, industrial plants, and military facilities — causes a lot of costly damage, hitting AI data centers equipped with hardware that is worth billions causes dramatically more financial damage. For example, an Nvidia NVL72 GB300 system can cost as much as $6 million, so a data center hosting 50,000 Blackwell processors houses hardware worth $4.16 billion. This estimate excludes networking, storage, racks, power delivery, cooling, building shell, and deployment, so even if supporting infrastructure adds 50% on top of that (which is a conservative estimate), we are talking about a data center that costs $6.24 billion. A hit on such an object causes more damage than a hit on a traditional target. Furthermore, it potentially causes severe damage to American companies.
Of course, for now, we do not know for sure whether any AI data centers belonging to AWS or Oracle were hit by Iran's IRGC, though the risks for American companies that have AI infrastructure in the Middle East are exceptionally high.
Although authorities in the Middle East claim successful interceptions of Iranian strikes, an investigation by Bellingcat published on Thursday suggests that not all attacks are intercepted, official damage reports may not fully reflect actual impacts, so some incidents are minimized, mischaracterized, or even not publicly acknowledged.
