Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has threatened attacks on a swath of U.S. tech companies with operations in the Middle East, including Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft and Google.
The IRGC warned on Tuesday that 18 tech companies would be considered as “legitimate targets” in retaliation for U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran.
Attacks on those companies would begin from 8 p.m. on Wednesday, April 1, Tehran time (10:30 am ET), the IRGC said in a post on Telegram translated by Google, warning employees at those companies to leave workplaces immediately to protect their lives.
“From now on, for every assassination, an American company will be destroyed,” they said in an IRGC-affiliated Telegram channel.
The list of companies also featured Cisco, HP, Intel, Oracle, IBM, Dell, Palantir, JP Morgan, Tesla, GE, Spire Solutions, Boeing and UAE-based AI company G42.
It follows Iranian strikes on AWS data centers in the Middle East earlier this month, which caused outages in a number of apps and digital services in the United Arab Emirates.
U.S. tech firms have been funnelling resources into the Middle East in recent years, specifically around the AI infrastructure buildout, with the region offering cheap energy and access to land.
“The safety and wellbeing of our team is our number one priority,” an Intel spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC. “We are taking steps to safeguard and support our workers and facilities in the Middle East and are actively monitoring the situation.”
All the companies listed in the Telegram post have been approached for comment. Google and JP Morgan declined to comment.
— CNBC’s Holly Ellyatt and Emma Graham contributed to this report.
