The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps threatened on Tuesday to target US technology and defense companies operating in the Middle East if the US and Israel continue to target Iran’s leadership.
In the statementreported by the state-backed Tasnim News Agency, the IRGC said retaliatory attacks could begin as early as Wednesday evening and advised workers and residents living within 1 kilometer of US-held bases to evacuate the area.
The IRGC listed 18 companies it threatened to target for active participation in terrorist plots, according to an interpretation of the statement. Those companies include Cisco, HP, Intel, Oracle, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, IBM, Dell, Palantir, Nvidia, Tesla and Boeing, among others.
A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment. Spokesmen for the other companies listed by the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Part of the IRGCas well as threatenedseveral companies with infrastructure in Israel and the Gulf earlier this month, all of which were named in Tuesday’s statement. The companies, including Google, Microsoft, Palantir, IBM, Nvidia and Oracle, were listed as new targets due to their technology being used for military applications.
Fighting in the Middle East has highlighted the dangers of President Donald Trump’s push to expand US technology infrastructure in the region.Iran’s drone strikesknocked out power to Amazon Web Services cloud computing services located in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain on March 3. And experts warned that it was not an isolated attack.
“I think it’s very likely that it will be the last time, as data centers become more and more important for a variety of critical infrastructures,” Sam Winter-Levy, a fellow in the Technology and Global Affairs Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told POLITICO earlier this month in response to the AWS event.
Continued warnings from Iran pose a serious threat to US technology companies and raise questions about how those facilities would be protected in the event of an attack.
“We can’t think about this AI infrastructure as a commercial asset anymore, and to some extent, it’s a national security infrastructure,” Hamza Chaudhry, AI and national security leader at the Future of Life Institute, told POLITICO earlier this month.
