Summary

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps warned Tuesday that it plans to begin attacking more than a dozen American companies across the Middle East on Wednesday in retaliation for the killing of Iranian citizens in the ongoing war with the US and Israel. The list of companies includes Apple, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Tesla, and Boeing, which the IRGC accused of enabling United States military targeting operations. The IRGC urged employees of the US firms to evacuate and civilians in the region to stay away. Tuesday's warning, posted to the IRGC's Telegram channel, extends a campaign of threats by Iran against American commercial infrastructure since the US and Israel launched their first attack on Tehran on February 28. Iranian drones struck two Amazon Web Services data centers and damaged another in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain on March 1, in the first publicly confirmed attack on American-owned hyperscale cloud infrastructure. Banking sites, payment processors, and consumer services across the region crashed as redundancies meant to prevent outages were taken offline. Earlier this month, the IRGC-affiliated Tasnim News Agency published a list of 29 regional offices and data centers operated by major firms such as Amazon, Google, IBM, Nvidia, and Palantir, accusing the firms of supporting US military and intelligence activities. The IRGC said in its post to Telegram that targeted companies “should expect” attacks to begin after 8 pm on April 1 in Tehran. Most of the companies the IRGC named in Tuesday’s Telegram post did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment. Google, Microsoft, and JP Morgan declined to comment. Billions of dollars in US technology and infrastructure are tied up in the Gulf, where American tech giants have bet big on the region becoming the next hub for AI development. The IRGC designates these civilian hardware and software providers as “legitimate targets” responsible for providing the technology that enabled the joint US-Israeli attacks that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei at the start of the war. The threats highlight the US Defense Department's reliance on commercial vendors with operations in the region. Palantir, for example, builds the data architecture for Project Maven, a Pentagon artificial intelligence program that processes drone and satellite imagery to identify air-strike targets. The defense contractor also maintains a corporate office in Abu Dhabi. The US military responded throughout March by bombing IRGC drone networks needed to carry out the attacks, and US Central Command recently released footage of air strikes destroying mobile launchers. The aerial campaign has slowed in recent days, however, as the US temporarily paused strikes on Iran’s energy infrastructure to explore potential peace talks with Tehran. Amid the shifting operational tempo, the Pentagon is reportedly considering whether to deploy up to 10,000 additional troops to the Middle East to expand its options ahead of a possible ground invasion. In the month since Khamenei’s assassination, approximately 2,000 Iranians have been killed, along with at least 13 US service members. The conflict has spread across the region, with Iranian retaliatory strikes hitting targets in Israel, Gulf states, and Iraq. The Strait of Hormuz, an essential shipping route that runs between Iran and the United Arab Emirates and Oman, has remained effectively closed for weeks due to threats from Iran, disrupting shipments of oil and other goods globally. Additional reporting by Dana Alomar and Carla Sertin.