By Jack Phillips
Contributing Writer
Iran’s military said that it will start attacking some U.S. businesses in the Middle East amid the month-long conflict with the United States and Israel.
In a March 31 statement published on state-run media websites and accounts in Farsi, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) threatened 18 companies that it alleged have taken part in providing services for the U.S. military operation. They include Meta, Google, Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Dell, Palantir, Nvidia, Tesla, Boeing, Cisco, Oracle, and Intel, among others, according to a translation.
The IRGC said the attacks would start from April 1 and urged employees at the companies to leave their workplaces immediately.
After the U.S.–Israeli operation started on Feb. 28, Iran responded by firing missiles and drones at nearby countries that host U.S. bases, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. Tehran has also moved to block the crucial Strait of Hormuz, which connects the oil-rich nations of the Persian Gulf with the wider ocean, sending oil and gas prices surging.
Amazon confirmed in early March that some of its data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain were damaged by drone strikes in the Middle East conflict, disrupting cloud services.
In a March 24 statement, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) spokesperson said the company was working with authorities and prioritizing staff safety while assisting clients affected by the outage in Bahrain.
“We continue to support affected customers, helping them to migrate to alternate AWS Regions, with a large number already successfully operating their applications from other parts of the world,” the AWS spokesperson said.
U.S. tech companies have been positioning the UAE as a regional hub for artificial intelligence computing needed to power services such as ChatGPT. Microsoft said in November 2025 that it planned to raise its total investment in the country to $15 billion by the end of 2029 and would use Nvidia chips in its data centers there.
Washington-based think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies said earlier this year that “regional adversaries such as Iran and its proxies targeted pipelines, refineries, and oil fields in Gulf partner states” in previous conflicts.
“In the compute era, these actors could also target data centers, energy infrastructure supporting compute, and fiber chokepoints,” the think tank said in a Feb. 27 statement.
U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday night provided an update on the war, saying it’s nearly over and that Tehran is “no longer a threat.” He also indicated that more military activity is needed over the coming two to three weeks.
“We are going to finish the job, and we’re going to finish it very fast,” he said, referring to the Iran campaign dubbed “Operation Epic Fury” by the Pentagon.
“We’re going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks,” he added. “We’re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.”
He has said he may end the war without a deal and told countries that rely on fuel shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, which has been all but closed by Iranian attacks, to “just grab it.”
Evgenia Filimianova and Reuters contributed to this report.
