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.
“From now on, for every assassination, an American company will be destroyed,” they said in an IRGC-affiliated Telegram channel.
Attacks on those companies would begin from 8 p.m. on Wednesday, April 1, Tehran time (12:30 p.m. EDT), the IRGC said in a post on Telegram translated by Google, warning employees at those companies to leave workplaces immediately to protect their lives.
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. Microsoft, Google and JP Morgan declined to comment.
U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran on Feb. 28 prompted retaliatory attacks across the region from Iran.
More than 3,000 drones and missiles have been fired on the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Kuwait since the conflict began, according to data compiled by think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
On Tuesday President Donald Trump said he expected that U.S. military forces would leave Iran in “two or three weeks.” The White House announced Trump will address the nation on the Iran war on Wednesday night.
Over 3,400 Iranian civilians and military personnel have been killed during the conflict, according to the Human Rights Activist News Agency (HRANA). Thirteen U.S. service people have been killed, per U.S. Central Command.
— CNBC’s Holly Ellyatt and Emma Graham contributed to this report.
Correction: This story has been updated to correct the Eastern time zone conversion for when the IRGC said the attacks would begin on the U.S. companies.
