Islamic Revolutionary in Iran The Guard Corps warned Tuesday that it plans to launch attacks on more than a dozen U.S. companies across the Middle East on Wednesday in retaliation for the killing of Iranian citizens in the ongoing war with the U.S. and Israel. The list of companies includes Apple, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Tesla and Boeing, which the IRGC accuses of enabling US military targeting. The IRGC urged employees of American companies to evacuate and civilians in the region to stay away.
Tuesday’s warning, posted on the IRGC’s Telegram channel, extends Iran’s campaign of threats against U.S. commercial infrastructure since the United States and Israel launched their first attack on Tehran on February 28. Iranian drones struck two Amazon Web Services data centers and damaged others in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain on March 1, marking the first publicly confirmed attack on U.S. hyperscale cloud infrastructure. Banking, payment processor and consumer services sites across the region crashed as layoffs to prevent downtime were taken offline.
Earlier this month, IRGC-affiliated news agency Tasnim published a list of 29 regional offices and data centers operated by major companies such as Amazon, Google, IBM, Nvidia and Palantir, accusing the companies of supporting US military and intelligence activities.
In its post to Telegram, the IRGC said targeted companies “should expect” the attacks to begin after 8 p.m. on April 1 in Tehran.
Most of the companies mentioned by IRGC 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 Persian Gulf, where US tech giants are making large bets to make the region the next hub for artificial intelligence development.
The IRGC designates these civilian hardware and software suppliers as “legitimate targets” responsible for providing the technology that enabled the joint U.S.-Israeli attacks that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei early in the war. The threats underscore the U.S. Department of Defense’s dependence on commercial suppliers operating in the region. For example, Palantir is building the data architecture for Project Maven, the Pentagon’s artificial intelligence program that processes imagery from drones and satellites to identify airstrike targets. The defense contractor also has an office in Abu Dhabi.
The U.S. military responded throughout March by bombing IRGC drone networks needed to carry out the attacks, and U.S. Central Command recently released footage of airstrikes destroying mobile launchers. However, the air campaign has slowed in recent days as it has been in the US temporarily strikes suspended on Iran’s energy infrastructure to explore potential peace talks with Tehran. Amid a changing operational pace, the Pentagon is apparently considering whether to deploy up to 10,000 additional troops in the Middle East to expand its capabilities ahead of a possible land invasion.
In the month since Khamenei’s assassination, approximately 2,000 Iranians and at least 13 American soldiers have been killed. The conflict has spread across the region, with Iranian retaliatory attacks hitting targets in Israel, the Persian Gulf states and Iraq. The Strait of Hormuz, a key shipping lane between Iran and the United Arab Emirates and Oman, has been effectively closed for weeks due to threats from Iran, disrupting global supplies of oil and other goods.
Additional reporting by Dana Alomar and Carla Sertin.