By Ivan Kesic

On October 10, 2026, Major General Mohsen Rezaei, Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, issued a clear and categorical warning that could reshape strategic calculations across the West Asia region.

In an exclusive interview with Press TV, Rezaei stated that if Washington launched another act of aggression against Iran, US assets across the region – including data centers, artificial intelligence facilities, and undersea cables – could become potential targets.

He described these assets as the pulse of the American economy in the region where it maintains abnormally heavy military presence, putting their value at more than $2 trillion.

The remarks, which came amid continued US warmongering, mark a significant expansion of Iran’s deterrence posture, extending its reach beyond conventional military targets to encompass the digital infrastructure underpinning the Persian Gulf’s economic transformation.

Understanding the stakes requires examining the critical infrastructure potentially at risk, the American companies deeply involved in building and operating it, the enormous American investments flowing into the region, and the far-reaching economic consequences that any disruption to these interconnected systems could trigger.

From military deterrence to digital targeting

The top Iranian security official’s remarks, delivered during an exclusive interview broadcast on Press TV, signaled a carefully calculated escalation in Iran’s strategic messaging.

General Rezaei stated that the United States maintains highly valuable assets in the UAE and around the Strait of Hormuz, adding that Iran had not yet designated these assets as targets.

However, he warned that if the US attacks Iran again, many of these undersea cables, data centers, artificial intelligence facilities, and numerous other sites would be destroyed.

The assessment that this infrastructure is worth more than $2 trillion underscores its central role in the United States’ military and economic presence across West Asia.

General Rezaei also emphasized that Iran had deliberately withheld some of its military capabilities during the 12-day war in June last year, while deploying more extensive capabilities during the subsequent forty-day aggression. He warned that if another attack occurred, Iran would respond with a significantly larger and more comprehensive plan.

His remarks were followed by statements from other Iranian security officials. One official asserted that every miscalculation against Iran had resulted in a heavy defeat for its adversary, warning that any further mistake would open new fronts and bring even greater surprises.

Geography of vulnerability: Where the infrastructure lies

The digital infrastructure that General Rezaei identified is concentrated in a handful of countries whose proximity to Iranian territory defines both their commercial value and their strategic vulnerability.

The United Arab Emirates hosts the region's most mature data center ecosystem, with major facilities in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, including hyperscale cloud regions operated by American companies such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle.

Saudi Arabia, the largest emerging market for hyperscale infrastructure, has clusters in Riyadh, Jeddah, and Dammam, with Google Cloud operating a region in Dammam and Oracle maintaining two regions in Jeddah and Riyadh.

Qatar has developed substantial domestic capacity in Doha, including Microsoft Azure's Qatar Central region and Google Cloud's Doha region, alongside locally operated facilities such as MEEZA's M-Vault campuses and Ooredoo's Syntys platform.

Bahrain, one of the first Persian Gulf states to attract a major American hyperscaler, hosts an AWS region launched in 2019, while Kuwait is pursuing a Google Cloud buildout with three identified construction sites south of Al-Mutlaa, in Jaber Al-Ahmad, and in the Al-Sulaibiya agricultural area.

Oman, positioning itself as an international connectivity gateway, has data centers at Watayah in Muscat, Knowledge Oasis Muscat, Duqm, and Salalah, the latter combined with a submarine cable landing station.

Jordan, though outside the Persian Gulf Cooperation Council, has invested in domestic hosting infrastructure in Amman through operators such as Umniah and DAMAMAX, serving as a connection point between the Levant and the Persian Gulf.

Each of these facilities lies within range of Iranian military capabilities, and their concentration in a relatively small geographic area amplifies the potential impact of any disruption.

American technology companies: Deeply embedded stakeholders

American technology companies are not peripheral participants in the US military infrastructure in the region, but they are its architects and principal beneficiaries.

Amazon Web Services operates cloud regions in Bahrain and the UAE, with the UAE region designated me-central-1 and launched in 2022.

Microsoft Azure maintains two UAE regions—UAE North in Dubai and UAE Central in Abu Dhabi—alongside the Qatar Central region in Doha and a Saudi Arabia region complementing its established facilities.

Google Cloud operates regions in Dammam, Saudi Arabia, and Doha, Qatar, with its Kuwait project advancing through identified construction sites.

Oracle has established cloud regions in Jeddah and Riyadh, plus an Abu Dhabi region, and has partnered with Ooredoo to deliver sovereign cloud services in Qatar through the Oracle Alloy platform.

Beyond the hyperscalers, Equinix provides carrier-neutral colocation and interconnection services in the UAE and Oman, IBM and Huawei participate in the wider infrastructure market, and G42, the Abu Dhabi-based AI and cloud group, has received a $1.5 billion investment from Microsoft for a minority stake.

The commercial relationships between American cloud providers and regional operators are increasingly collaborative: local companies supply land, power, regulatory relationships, and operational services, while American firms provide cloud platforms, software, and computing systems.

This interdependence means that any disruption to the physical infrastructure would reverberate through corporate balance sheets on both sides of the Atlantic.

Scale of investment: Billions committed, billions at risk

The financial commitments made by American technology companies and Persian Gulf governments to this digital infrastructure are staggering in their magnitude.

Microsoft has committed $15.2 billion in the UAE over the period from 2023 to 2029, encompassing cloud and AI infrastructure expansion in partnership with G42 and Khazna Data Centers, including the deployment of more than eighty thousand GPUs.

Google Cloud and Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund announced a joint ten-billion-dollar initiative to build and operate a global AI hub in Saudi Arabia through the local technology company Humain.

Amazon Web Services has announced a Saudi Arabian cloud region backed by a planned investment of approximately $5.3 billion, alongside its broader Middle East commitments totaling $5.47 billion.

Oracle plans to invest $1.5 billion to expand its cloud infrastructure in Saudi Arabia, complementing its existing Jeddah and Riyadh regions.

In the AI computing sector, G42's Stargate UAE campus, developed with OpenAI, Oracle, NVIDIA, Cisco, and SoftBank, is designed for a capacity of five thousand megawatts, with the first two-hundred-megawatt cluster expected by 2026.

Saudi Arabia's NEOM project includes a fifteen-hundred-megawatt AI factory campus developed by DataVolt, and Humain's AI data centers in partnership with AWS and AMD are under construction with two hundred megawatts of capacity.

The broader regional pipeline includes 2.6 gigawatts of data center capacity under active development and 13.8 gigawatts in planning, set to quadruple the region's installed base by 2030.

These figures represent not merely corporate investments but the physical embodiment of a strategic bet that the Persian Gulf can become a global hub for artificial intelligence and cloud computing.

Consequences of disruption: Cascading economic damage

Should Iran follow up on its warning to target this critical American tech infrastructure, the economic consequences would extend far beyond the immediate destruction of physical assets.

The Persian Gulf's digital economy relies on uninterrupted connectivity, and the region's data centers serve as nodes in a global network that carries an estimated $10 trillion in daily financial transactions through submarine cables alone.

Any disruption to even a portion of this infrastructure would immediately affect cloud services governments, financial institutions, and enterprises across the region rely on.

The experience of the earlier wars of aggression offers a preview: when AWS facilities in the UAE and Bahrain were struck, the company reported structural damage, power supply interruptions, and water damage from fire suppression systems, with core cloud services disrupted and one availability zone remaining unable to restore access to hosted resources months later.

The attack on AWS infrastructure was described as the first known instance of an American data center disrupted by military action, a precedent with profound implications for corporate risk assessment.

Beyond the direct damage, the wars have already demonstrated secondary effects: Qatar, which produces approximately thirty percent of the world's helium supply, halted production during the war on Iran, disrupting a critical input for semiconductor manufacturing and doubling spot prices.

Insurance markets have responded with alarm, with standard commercial policies typically excluding war risks, leaving companies and their Persian Gulf partners to absorb losses that could reach into the tens of billions.

For the Persian Gulf states themselves, whose economic diversification strategies depend on attracting and retaining technology investment, any sustained disruption would undermine the confidence upon which those strategies rest.

Strait of Hormuz: Undersea dimension

The digital infrastructure at risk extends beneath the waters of the Strait of Hormuz, where at least five major submarine fiber-optic cable systems carry the overwhelming majority of intercontinental internet traffic between Asia, the Persian Gulf, and Europe.

These cables—including the FALCON system, the Persian Gulf Bridge International network, and the TGN-Gulf system—form the backbone of the region's connectivity to global networks.

The legal status of these cables is unambiguous: the Strait of Hormuz at its narrowest point measures approximately twenty-one nautical miles in width, and the combined territorial seas of Iran and Oman, each extending twelve nautical miles, overlap completely, leaving no high seas whatsoever.

Under international maritime law, sovereignty over the seabed and subsoil within these territorial waters belongs exclusively to the coastal states, and the right of passage for vessels does not extend to the laying of fixed infrastructure such as internet cables.

Iran's earlier assertion of sovereign rights over this infrastructure, including permit requirements, transit fees, and exclusive control over cable maintenance and repair, represents a legal position grounded in the undisputed geometry of the strait.

The practical implication is that the companies whose cables transit Iranian territorial waters must operate within the framework established by the Islamic Republic, a reality that Western analysts have increasingly acknowledged.

Iran's control over this undersea infrastructure constitutes a form of leverage that operates independently of military capabilities, a fact that amplifies the significance of Rezaei's warning.