Iran names Gulf data centres and subsea cables as wartime targets, and no Gulf government answers

Rezaei, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, gave a 30-minute interview to the Iranian state broadcaster Press TV published on Sunday 11 October, reported onward by Al Jazeera and then by Dawn, Breitbart and a string of aggregators. “The United States has extremely expensive assets in the UAE and around the Strait of Hormuz,” he said. “We have not yet included these assets among our targets. But if war breaks out, many of these cables, data centres, artificial intelligence facilities and numerous other sites will be destroyed.” He called the infrastructure the “pulse of the American economy in this region” and put its value above $2 trillion — his own figure, unsourced, and not broken down. He gave no locations and no capacity estimates beyond the categories. On the June war he said: “We did not act in a way that would reveal all our capabilities in the first week. Had we done so, we would have had little left to use afterwards.”

The target set is not new, which is the part worth holding onto. Al Jazeera’s 13 October explainer records that on 11 March the semi-official Tasnim agency said the IRGC had published a list of “Iran’s new targets” including Google, Microsoft and Oracle cloud infrastructure in Israel and some Gulf states; that same month the IRGC named 17 US firms in a Telegram post, among them Google, Meta and Apple, alongside the Emirati AI company G42. Data centres and US business interests were struck in Bahrain and the UAE during the US-Israel war on Iran, which Tehran framed as retaliation for US strikes on Iranian civilian installations. Active hostilities have largely ended since the June memorandum of understanding between Iran and the United States, though attacks on shipping through Hormuz have continued.

The exposure numbers cut against the rhetoric more than they support it. Steptoe’s Stepwise Risk Outlook puts the cables running through the Strait of Hormuz at roughly 1 percent of global internet traffic; the genuine chokepoint is Bab al-Mandeb, through which around 90 percent of Europe–Asia communications and 17 percent of global data traffic pass daily, and which is Houthi-adjacent rather than Iranian. Subsea cables carry an estimated 95 percent of all international data. The damage model is well established: three cables were cut in February 2024, most likely by the dragging anchor of the Rubymar after a Houthi missile disabled it, and repairs took months. A Pakistani aggregator, PhotoNews, reports that Tasnim and the Kayhan editor Hossein Shariatmadari endorsed Rezaei’s line; we could not verify that against either Persian-language outlet and do not treat it as established.

Assessment: Read this as doctrine disclosure, not warning. Rezaei is describing a target list that the IRGC published in March and partially executed in June; the interview’s function is to price the next round for Gulf capitals and the firms building in them, which is why the UAE was named and the dollar figure was round, large and unaudited. The thing to measure is the gap between declared targeting and observed operations — nothing in this window shows a new attributed Iranian cyber operation. Gulf silence is the second variable. If Abu Dhabi, Riyadh and the hyperscalers are still saying nothing by the weekend, that is a decision about not conferring weight, not an absence of one.