The $500 billion Stargate AI infrastructure project - a joint venture between OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle launched in January 2025 - has become a stated military target. Iran has threatened to strike U.S.-linked data centers including those tied to Stargate, as conflict between the U.S. and Iran escalates.
Stargate is built around massive data center campuses housing GPU clusters (specialized chips for training and running large AI models), power substations, and fiber networks that frontier AI development requires. Texas is the primary build site, with additional locations planned across the U.S. At this scale, Stargate isn't just OpenAI's infrastructure - it's expected to host compute for many companies building on top of OpenAI's systems.
Physical Infrastructure Wasn't in the Risk Model
AI companies have extensive redundancy plans for natural disasters and localized outages. The standard approach is geographic distribution across multiple regions so no single failure brings down the whole system. That model assumes the failure is accidental.
Deliberate missile strikes from a state adversary are a different problem. Spreading data centers across U.S. states doesn't reduce exposure to external threats. And Stargate's campuses - requiring hundreds of acres and multiple gigawatts of power - are not discreet facilities. They're large, visible infrastructure that can be identified and targeted.
The immediate operational risk to current AI services is low. Iran's statement is a threat within a broader conflict escalation, not a scheduled attack. OpenAI and its partners haven't announced changes to construction or operations. But for the multi-year, multi-billion-dollar infrastructure decisions being made right now, the possibility of physical targeting adds a planning variable that wasn't in anyone's model 18 months ago.
Separately, several AI companies have been signing sovereign AI deals in the Middle East - arrangements where governments fund local AI data centers to keep capacity within their borders. Those deals now sit adjacent to a conflict zone, adding complications that weren't part of those negotiations.