A news agency affiliated with the Iranian regime released a list of American tech companies with links to American and Israeli military operations as new targets for Iran on Wednesday.
According to Al Jazeera, the Tasnim News Agency’s report lists Microsoft, Google, Palantir, IBM, Nvidia, and Oracle’s offices and cloud infrastructure in Israel and some Gulf countries as the new targets.
On top of targeting the tech giants, a spokesperson for a group owned by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps told Al Jazeera that American and Israeli economic centers and banks in the region are also legitimate targets now, and warned people to “not be within a one-kilometre radius of banks.”
The list comes on the heels of an Israeli attack on a bank in Iran’s capital city of Tehran, according to Tasnim News Agency, which expanded “the scope of the regional war” to an “infrastructure war.”
The United States and Israel began their military campaign against Iran at the end of last month, with Iran responding with retaliatory strikes on Israeli soil and on American military bases in the region from Cyprus and Turkey to the Gulf countries.
As the war entered its 12th day, more than 1,300 civilians in Iran have been killed, including 175 people (most of them children) at an elementary school in southern Iran, reportedly struck by American missiles.
All six of the tech giants named by Iranian media have lucrative partnerships with the Pentagon and/or Israel. Nvidia is building data centers and a research and development campus in Israel, a country that CEO Jensen Huang has recently called “Nvidia’s second home.” Microsoft, Google, Palantir, IBM, and Oracle all have a close history with the Israeli government and military, with some reports claiming that the AI technology provided by these American tech giants is aiding the army in the mass surveillance of Palestinians. Meanwhile, Google, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and Palantir also have military AI agreements with the Pentagon.
Though not named by Tasnim, another American tech giant with ties to both American and Israeli military operations is Amazon. One of the company’s operating facilities in Bahrain and two of its data centers in the United Arab Emirates were heavily damaged earlier this month following Iranian drone strikes. The strikes, which Iranian state media later described as targeted, led to power disruptions and degraded AWS applications in the region.
So far, Iran’s military actions have been limited to the region. That could change, according to an ABC News report also from Wednesday, as the FBI has claimed Iran could launch drone strikes on the West Coast of the United States, where the headquarters of tech giants like Google, Nvidia, and Microsoft are located. But the chances of that happening are very slim, as even President Trump himself has said he is not worried, and the Iranian report explicitly threatens damage to the offices and infrastructure that these tech companies have in the Middle East.
