Iran’s Security Chief Names Data Centers and AI Facilities as Targets in Any Renewed War

Iran’s Supreme National Security Council secretary has told the region that the next war will not stop at missile fields and naval bases. Mohsen Rezaei, a former Revolutionary Guard commander who took the council’s top post in August, said that if fighting resumes, Iran will act on a broader scale and strike communications networks, data centers, artificial intelligence facilities and other critical infrastructure across the Middle East. According to one report, which cited Rezaei, the technological and communications assets in the region are worth more than $2 trillion. That figure appears in a single Hebrew-language real-time news report and has not been independently confirmed ^[1].

The threat is not a one-off. In late March, the Revolutionary Guard reportedly named major American technology companies, including Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Nvidia, as potential targets if the United States continued its military pressure on Iran ^[2][3]. Rezaei’s statement moves that rhetoric from American corporations to the physical plant that Gulf states are building their economic futures on. Several Arabic-language and Israeli channels circulated the warning with the same emphasis on cables and data centers, and one analyst account paraphrased Rezaei as saying that cables, data centres and AI facilities across the region would be destroyed in a new war ^[4][5].

What makes the message credible to Western planners is the way it matches Iran’s own choices. On the same day, reports said Iran’s Ministry of Communications had warned that the government might again cut domestic access to the internet if hostilities resume, without specifying whether the cut would be total ^[6]. A regime that is prepared to switch off its own population’s connectivity is signalling that it regards network infrastructure as a weapon it already knows how to use. Iran’s cyber capabilities have been tested against its own critics for years. The threat to Gulf and Western digital systems is the external version of the same logic.

The timing reflects strain inside the Islamic Republic. Rezaei himself has acknowledged economic crisis and a split between hardliners and reformists over how to survive the current pressure ^[7]. The Security Council has convened over fears of protest ^[8]. Diplomacy has also stalled. Tehran said in September that its conditions for re-engaging in talks and ending the war had been sent to Washington through Qatar ^[9], while Rezaei escalated the threat to close the Strait of Hormuz as nuclear negotiations stalled ^[10]. Read alongside the internal pressures, the threat against digital infrastructure looks less like a considered doctrine and more like an attempt to raise the cost of any renewed campaign for the states that would have to absorb it.

For the Gulf states, the implications are direct. Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar have spent heavily on data centers, cloud partnerships and AI campuses, and they have marketed the region as a neutral digital hub. An Iranian threat to those assets undercuts that pitch and forces a choice between deeper Western security guarantees and hedging toward Tehran. Rezaei’s statement is aimed at Washington, but its more immediate audience is Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and Doha, which have been trying to keep channels open to Iran while depending on American protection. The question for Western governments is whether they will treat the protection of undersea cables and data centers as a military priority before a crisis, rather than after one.

What happens next depends on whether the threat is a signal or a plan. Iran’s capacity to hit fixed digital infrastructure at scale is unproven, and the claims made so far rest largely on statements and channel commentary. But the pattern is consistent: Tehran is widening the set of targets it says it can reach, and it is doing so at the moment its own economy and political system are under the most strain since the JCPOA collapsed.