As fighting between Israel, the United States and Iran continues, the arena of confrontation is now expanding to cloud and technology infrastructure. The Iranian news agency Tasnim, affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, this week published a list of “legitimate targets” that includes the offices and infrastructure of American technology giants operating in the region.
Particularly notable is Palantir, which recently confirmed a strategic partnership with Israel to supply advanced technology for operational missions.
Iran not only declares, but it also acts
The Iranian threat has not remained at the level of statements. Last week, a historic precedent was recorded when Iranian drone strikes hit Amazon Web Services data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. The attack caused widespread disruptions to regional cloud services and underscored the physical vulnerability of infrastructure previously considered relatively resilient.
Iranian officials presented the move as a direct retaliation for an attack attributed to Israel on Bank Sepah in Tehran. A spokesman for the Revolutionary Guard said that “the enemy forced our hand to strike economic centers and banks associated with the United States and the Zionist regime.”
Iranian officials went further, warning civilians to remain at least one kilometer (about 0.6 miles) away from American and Israeli banking institutions in the region.
The companies singled out by Iran form the backbone of global computing, though each plays a different role in the conflict. Google and Microsoft provide the core cloud platforms that enable storage and analysis of massive volumes of data.
Palantir specializes in intelligence analysis and real-time data fusion, a critical tool on the modern battlefield, while Nvidia’s chips power artificial intelligence applications used for target identification and autonomous navigation. Oracle and IBM manage critical databases for government and defense bodies.
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From right: Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Nvidia President and CEO Jensen Huang
(Photo: Damian Lemanski/Bloomberg, Ezra Acayan/Getty Images)
A dangerous escalation
In the past, digital warfare largely consisted of cyberattacks and electronic warfare — such as the widespread GPS disruptions now felt across the Middle East. The shift to kinetic strikes against server farms represents a significant escalation.
In China, the state news agency Xinhua reported that Iran is determined to continue the attacks until what it calls the “surrender of the Zionist and American enemy,” while officials in Europe have expressed serious concern about the potential impact on the stability of the global internet.
The Revolutionary Guard’s announcement of a technology “target list” is not only a security development but also an economic shock that quickly reached financial markets. Over the past two days, the Nasdaq-100 index has shown unusual volatility as investors attempt to price in a new type of risk: physical damage to global digital infrastructure.
Nvidia’s stock has drawn particular attention. Iran’s focus on the company’s research and development center in Yokneam — and, in the coming years, the nearby site planned for Kiryat Tivon — the largest outside the United States, has raised concerns about the continuity of next-generation chip development. Despite strong quarterly earnings reported recently, the stock lost about 9% of its value in the two days before the list was published.
Amazon posted modest declines after confirming physical damage to three data centers in the United Arab Emirates. However, its global resilience allows it to redirect workloads to other regions around the world. Microsoft and Google are also under pressure, largely due to their involvement in Israel’s government cloud initiative, Project Nimbus, which Tehran has identified as a technological supply pipeline for the Israeli military.
The use of civilian infrastructure for military purposes is not new, but its scale has changed dramatically over the past decade. In the early 2000s, military computing infrastructure was physically separated from the public internet.
The shift began when the U.S. Department of Defense moved toward massive contracts with commercial companies — including the controversial JEDI cloud project — recognizing that technology firms develop algorithms faster and more efficiently than traditional military bureaucracies.
In Israel, Project Nimbus marked a turning point when the government moved most of its infrastructure to the cloud platforms of Google and Amazon. Now, as the cloud itself becomes a military target, companies are activating contingency plans: shifting workloads to more distant regions such as Europe or the United States and reducing the physical presence of employees in high-risk areas.