On 1 March 2026, Iranian forces launched drone strikes against Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centres in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, coinciding with the first day of intensified regional hostilities following US and Zionist strikes that eliminated Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
These operations damaged three facilities: two in the UAE suffered direct hits, igniting fires and forcing power shutdowns, while a Bahrain site sustained structural impact from a nearby drone explosion. AWS confirmed the incidents, noting structural damage, disrupted power delivery, and water-related issues from fire suppression activities, leading to prolonged recovery for affected services.
The strikes triggered widespread outages across banking, payment systems, delivery platforms, and enterprise software throughout the region. Specific impacts included downtime for apps like Uber, Careem, and local banking platforms such as those from Emirates NBD and Bahrain Islamic Bank, with core AWS services like EC2, S3, DynamoDB, Lambda, and RDS experiencing degraded performance or temporary halts, as Fortune details. AWS advised clients to migrate workloads away from the impacted zones (ME-CENTRAL-1 and ME-SOUTH-1 regions), highlighting the cascading effects on Gulf economies heavily reliant on cloud computing.
Analysts view this as a watershed in modern conflict, where commercial data centres transition from civilian assets to strategic military targets due to their role in hosting dual-use AI and intelligence workloads, as Fortune reports. The US military utilises AWS for certain operations, including running Anthropic’s Claude model for intelligence tasks, raising questions about the facilities’ dual civilian-military nature. AWS stated in its status update, as Reuters reports: “In the UAE, two of our facilities were directly struck, while in Bahrain, a drone strike in close proximity to one of our facilities caused physical impact to our infrastructure”.
No fatalities occurred, as multiple reports confirm, but the psychological and economic ripple effects proved significant, exposing vulnerabilities in air defence coverage for critical infrastructure.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) claimed responsibility through state-affiliated channels, framing the strikes as measured responses to perceived threats. Fars News Agency reported via Telegram that the Bahrain facility was specifically chosen “to identify the role of these centers in supporting the enemy’s military and intelligence activities”.
The Tasnim Target List: Expanding the Battlefield to Tech Giants
Ten days later, on 11 March 2026, Tasnim News Agency — claimed to be affiliated with the IRGC — published a list designating six US tech companies as “Iran’s new targets”. The firms named were Google (Alphabet), Oracle, Palantir, Nvidia, IBM, and Microsoft, with specific offices, data centres, and infrastructure highlighted in the Zionist entity, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and other Gulf locations.
Tasnim explicitly linked this escalation to the broadening conflict: “As the scope of the regional war expands to infrastructure war, the scope of Iran’s legitimate targets expands”. The list detailed facilities, asserting these assets support military applications tied to the US and the Zionist regime.
The list, disseminated via Tasnim’s Telegram channel and titled ‘Iran’s New Targets’, identified approximately 29 locations across Bahrain, the Zionist entity (primarily Tel Aviv, Haifa, Jerusalem, and Be’er Sheva), Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (mainly Dubai and Abu Dhabi). These encompassed a mix of offices, cloud infrastructure, research and development (R&D) centres, and data facilities, which Tasnim described as “enemy technology infrastructure” allegedly used for adversarial military and intelligence purposes.
Breakdown by company (as detailed in reports citing the Tasnim post):
- Amazon: Five facilities, including additional AWS data centres beyond those already struck on 1 March, plus offices in Tel Aviv and Haifa.
- Microsoft: Five facilities, including regional offices and cloud-related sites in Tel Aviv and other locations.
- IBM: Six facilities, notably its AI research and threat response centre in Be’er Sheva.
- Google (Alphabet): Four facilities, including the regional Dubai office (handling advertising and search operations) and its Qatar office for cloud support services.
- NVIDIA: Three facilities, prominently featuring its “main and largest R&D centre” in Haifa.
- Oracle: Three facilities, including its regional cloud service office in Jerusalem and main office in Abu Dhabi.
- Palantir: Three facilities, such as its strategic collaboration centre in Abu Dhabi and regional office in Tel Aviv.
Tasnim suggested that these sites were selected due to their role in providing cloud services, AI systems, and digital tools that bolster US and Zionist military/intelligence operations—extending the rationale from the earlier AWS strikes. The announcement positioned the list as part of a deliberate shift to “infrastructure warfare”, warning that economic and technological assets linked to adversaries were now fair game.
A spokesperson for the Iranian combined military command, Khatam al-Anbiya Headquarters, reinforced the message: “The enemy left our hands open to targeting economic centres and banks belonging to the United States and the Zionist regime in the region”. No strikes materialised immediately, so far as is known, but the declaration prompted heightened security measures among the named companies and intensified scrutiny of their regional operations.
This level of specificity — naming exact buildings, cities, and functions — marks a significant escalation in rhetoric, blending propaganda with apparent reconnaissance signalling. It raises practical concerns for the companies involved: physical site hardening, employee evacuations or remote-work shifts, supply-chain disruptions for regional clients, and diplomatic lobbying with host governments (UAE, Qatar, and Bahrain) to bolster protections. It’s notable that the Qatari office appears not to be a data centre and, arguably, should not be targeted, given Qatar’s status as a ‘brotherly’ country.
Here is a review of the involvement of the six firms in genocide and in the attacks on Iran.
Google: Enabling Surveillance and AI Targeting
Google’s deep involvement stems from Project Nimbus, the 2021 $1.2 billion cloud contract with Amazon to supply the Zionist government and military with advanced computing and AI services. Leaked documents reveal Google agreed to a “winking mechanism” — a secret alert system notifying the Zionist entity of foreign data access requests, bypassing standard legal processes, as exposed in a joint investigation by The Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Local Call.
As The Intercept reports, Nimbus provides access to AI capabilities including face detection, object tracking, sentiment analysis, and other complex tasks that have been integrated into Israeli military systems for mass surveillance and automated targeting in Gaza and the West Bank, contributing directly to the genocide.
Google’s Israeli R&D centres employ former Unit 8200 personnel, fostering seamless tech-intel transfers. Notable examples include:
- Gavriel Goidel, who served in Unit 8200 from 2010 to 2016 as Head of Learning (leading teams to analyse patterns of “hostile activists”) and now holds the position of Head of Strategy and Operations at Google.
- Jonathan Cohen, a former Unit 8200 team leader (2000–2003), who has spent over 13 years in senior Google roles, and is currently Head of Insights, Data and Measurement.
These hires exemplify the pipeline from Zionist intelligence to Silicon Valley leadership, where ex-Unit 8200 operatives bring expertise in signals intelligence, data analysis, and cyber operations directly into corporate AI and cloud development.
In US-Zionist operations against Iran, Google’s AI models support drone surveillance and predictive analytics, aiding identification of nuclear and military sites. While direct attribution remains classified, broader US military adoption of frontier AI (including large language models for intelligence summarisation and target prioritisation) intersects with Google’s capabilities.
Oracle: Ellison’s Zionist Funding and Military Contracts
Oracle founder Larry Ellison has donated over $26 million to the Friends of the IDF, including a record $16.6 million in 2017 for an IDF training facility. He publicly affirmed: “We love the country of Israel and will do everything we can to support it”.
Beyond direct financial support to the IDF, Ellison maintains several high-level Zionist connections at the top of the firm, including ties to Israeli intelligence networks and leadership. Safra Catz, Oracle’s long-time CEO (until 2024) and current Executive Vice Chair, has deep personal and professional links to Zionist leadership: she has been a vocal advocate for the Zionist entity in Washington policy circles, meeting frequently with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (including discussions on AI, cloud computing, and security assistance during wartime visits), and has publicly stated that Oracle’s “commitment to Israel is second to none”, even suggesting employees who disagree with the company’s pro-Israel mission “maybe aren’t the right company for them”. Catz has also been described in Israeli media as part of Oracle’s “unequivocal” support for Israel, including doubling salaries for Israeli staff during conflicts and leading visits to affected communities like Kfar Aza.
Additionally, Oracle has historically employed former senior officers from Unit 8200 in key technical roles. One prominent example is Avi Assaraf, who served as Oracle’s Chief Corporate Architect (in senior database and cloud roles until around 2020); Assaraf is a former senior officer in Unit 8200, bringing direct signals-intelligence and cyber expertise into Oracle’s core architecture and security teams during his tenure. This reflects a broader pattern where ex-Unit 8200 personnel integrate military-grade intelligence skills into commercial tech development at Oracle, with hundreds of alumni from the elite signals-intelligence unit populating senior engineering, security, and AI roles across Big Tech — including Oracle — facilitating the transfer of cyberwarfare and surveillance know-how into corporate products.
Oracle provides cloud services to the Zionist Ministry of Defense and manages biometric databases enforcing segregation in occupied Palestine. Its systems underpin the Population and Immigration Authority’s biometric registry, which stores fingerprints, facial data, and other identifiers used to control movement, issue discriminatory permits, and enforce apartheid policies in the West Bank and Gaza. Oracle’s Israeli subsidiary has long collaborated with security agencies on population monitoring across the Levant, including data analytics contracts with the Shin Bet and IDF logistics units that facilitate settler expansion and occupation enforcement in occupied Syrian Golan and southern Lebanon.
For operations targeting Iran, Oracle’s databases underpin cyber tools and enable predictive targeting for sanctions enforcement and strike planning, extending US-Zionist reach. Oracle Database and Autonomous Database platforms are widely used within US Cyber Command, NSA, and intelligence community environments for secure data warehousing, real-time analytics, and modelling of adversarial networks — including Iranian nuclear programme infrastructure, financial flows under sanctions, and command-and-control structures. These capabilities enable predictive targeting (e.g., identifying high-value individuals or facilities for cyber intrusions or kinetic strikes) and support joint US-Zionist operations such as those historically linked to Stuxnet-era sabotage (where similar database and control-system expertise underpinned the worm that damaged Iranian centrifuges at Natanz) and current shadow-war activities against Iranian nuclear and missile sites.
Palantir: AI Platforms for Precision Targeting
Palantir signed a strategic partnership with the Zionist Ministry of Defense in January 2024, supplying AI for “war-related missions”. The agreement, announced after a meeting in Tel Aviv between Israeli defence officials and Palantir co-founders Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, commits the company to providing advanced data analytics and AI tools explicitly to support the Zionist entity’s military efforts.
Tools like Gotham and Foundry integrate vast datasets from multiple sources to automate targeting, implicated in Gaza operations generating plausibly deliberate disproportionate civilian harm. While Palantir has not been directly named in public disclosures of specific systems like Lavender (the AI that generated thousands of assassination targets with minimal human oversight), its Gotham platform — designed for military and intelligence fusion of disparate data — aligns closely with the capabilities described in investigations of automated kill chains in Gaza.
Founder Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, and other executives maintain strong Zionist affiliations, with ex-Unit 8200 hires in Israeli offices. Palantir has actively recruited from the elite signals-intelligence unit, with alumni bringing cyberwarfare and surveillance expertise into its Tel Aviv operations and the company offering services directly to the Zionist intel agency. This pipeline mirrors broader Big Tech trends but is particularly pronounced at Palantir due to its defence-heavy focus.
Palantir doubled its Tel Aviv presence post-partnership, expanding staff and facilities to meet surging demand from Israeli military and intelligence clients amid the Gaza conflict.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp has openly embraced the lethal applications of the company’s technology, stating in various public forums that Palantir’s tools are used “on occasion to kill people” and defending their deployment against critics. In a widely circulated 2020 interview with Axios on HBO, Karp explicitly said: “Our product is used, on occasion, to kill people,” referring to Palantir’s work with government and defence agencies in targeting operations. He has also described Palantir’s mission as helping the West “scare enemies” and, “on occasion, kill them,” positioning the firm as unapologetically pro-Western military intervention.
In one high-profile confrontation at the Hill & Valley Forum in May 2025, when a pro-Palestine protester (Sumer Mobarak) accused Palantir of enabling the killing of Palestinians in Gaza with its AI technology, Karp responded: “Mostly terrorists, that’s true”, framing the technology’s use as targeted and justified while dismissing opponents as “useful idiots for Hamas”. He further described the protester as “an unwitting product of an evil force, Hamas”, and suggested she was part of their strategy to spread ideology in the West. The exchange drew applause from the audience but sparked widespread criticism online and in media for its callous dismissal of civilian casualties and dehumanisation of Palestinians.
Against Iran, Palantir supports US Cyber Command modelling for regime networks, ransomware, and hybrid threats. Its platforms enable predictive analytics on adversarial command structures, financial flows, and infrastructure vulnerabilities — capabilities that feed into US intelligence efforts to monitor and disrupt Iranian nuclear, missile, and proxy networks. While direct contracts remain classified, Palantir’s long-standing work with US Cyber Command and intelligence agencies positions it as a key enabler of hybrid warfare tools, including scenario modelling for sanctions evasion detection and preemptive cyber/kinetic responses.
NVIDIA: Powering AI Supercomputers for Occupation
NVIDIA is not an Israeli company, but a US-based multinational corporation (headquartered in Santa Clara, California) with one of its largest and most strategically important global development hubs in Israel — often described by CEO Jensen Huang as the company’s ‘second home’ outside the United States. Israel hosts NVIDIA’s second-largest R&D operation worldwide (after the US), employing over 5,000 workers across seven R&D centres (including Yokne’am — headquarters after the 2020 $7 billion acquisition of Mellanox — Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Ra’anana, Be’er Sheva, and planned expansions in Kiryat Tivon). This massive footprint, with ongoing multibillion-shekel investments (including a planned 160,000m2 ‘spaceship-style’ campus in Kiryat Tivon expected to create up to 10,000 jobs), embeds NVIDIA deeply in the Zionist tech ecosystem and raises questions about the dual-use nature of its hardware and AI advances.
NVIDIA supplies GPUs for the Zionist entity’s Israel-1 supercomputer (also referred to as the national AI supercomputer under the Telem Program), which ranks among the world’s most powerful AI systems and is used for military simulations, advanced modelling, and targeting applications. Built with thousands of NVIDIA accelerators (including recent phases deploying B200 GPUs), Israel-1 serves as a national resource for both civilian research and defence-related AI workloads, including training models for intelligence analysis, autonomous systems, and predictive targeting.
NVIDIA’s investments in Haifa-area R&D exceed $500 million (with specific projects like the Mevo Carmel AI research and engineering data centre lab valued at over $500 million, plus broader expansions pushing total commitments higher), embedding the firm in occupation tech. These facilities develop critical interconnects, networking chips (e.g., ConnectX, BlueField DPUs, Spectrum Ethernet switches), and AI acceleration hardware that power high-performance computing for military and intelligence purposes.
Its hardware enables real-time drone processing and ethnic profiling in the West Bank. NVIDIA GPUs and AI accelerators underpin drone surveillance systems, real-time video analytics, and facial recognition/identity verification tools deployed at checkpoints and in occupied territories — capabilities that facilitate automated monitoring, movement control, and demographic profiling of Palestinians, core to apartheid enforcement mechanisms.
Corporate grants and employee-matched donations fund Zionist initiatives. In late 2023, NVIDIA and its employees raised $15 million (the company’s largest single humanitarian fundraiser) for nonprofits supporting civilians affected by the conflict, including groups like Friends of United Hatzalah, Jewish Agency for Israel, American Friends of Magen David Adom, and Zaka — organisations tied to Israeli emergency services, settlement support, and pro-genocide propaganda.
In Iran-focused operations, NVIDIA powers US-Zionist simulations of nuclear and cyber strikes. Its GPUs and AI platforms are integral to high-fidelity modelling of nuclear scenarios, cyber intrusion simulations, and predictive analytics within US Cyber Command, NSA, and joint intelligence environments — tools used to map Iranian nuclear facilities (e.g., Natanz and Fordow), missile trajectories, and command networks. While direct contracts remain classified, NVIDIA’s dominance in AI training hardware and its deep integration with US defence ecosystems (including partnerships for autonomous systems and intelligence processing) position it as a key enabler of hybrid warfare planning against Iran.
IBM: Biometric Control and Population Registries
IBM operates the Eitan database, which stores Palestinian biometrics for discriminatory permit systems, a cornerstone of apartheid enforcement since the 1970s, as Who Profits documents. The system, managed through IBM’s long-standing contracts with the Zionist Population and Immigration Authority (PIBA), centralises fingerprints, facial recognition data, iris scans, and other identifiers for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. This biometric registry directly enables movement restrictions, permit denials, family separation, and targeted enforcement — mechanisms that human rights organisations describe as integral to maintaining apartheid policies.
IBM trains Unit 8200 personnel. Through partnerships with Israeli universities and military programs (including joint research initiatives and talent pipelines), IBM provides technical training, workshops, and access to its AI and analytics platforms for Unit 8200 officers and reservists. These collaborations feed into systems that classify populations, prioritise targets, and automate intelligence processing across the occupied territories and neighbouring countries (Lebanon and Syria), enabling predictive policing, demographic mapping, and strike coordination.
IBM has long-standing ties to the Israeli military industrial complex, including involvement in programs that facilitate the employment of former Unit 8200 intelligence combatants into the high-tech sector. IBM operates in joint ventures with the Israeli Ministry of Defense and National Cyber Directorate.
For Iran, IBM analytics track sanctions and model economic vulnerabilities. IBM’s Maximo, Watson, and Cloud Pak for Data platforms are widely deployed in US Treasury, OFAC, and intelligence community environments to monitor compliance, detect evasion networks, and simulate the impact of sanctions on Iranian financial institutions, oil exports, and procurement chains. These tools enable predictive economic modelling — forecasting regime stability, proxy funding flows, and choke-point vulnerabilities — feeding into broader US-Zionist efforts to contain Iran’s nuclear and missile programmes through financial warfare and targeted disruptions.
Microsoft: Cloud Services for Military Operations
Microsoft’s Azure hosts Zionist military data under Project Nimbus, the 2021 $1.2 billion cloud contract (shared with Google) signed in 2021 to provide the Zionist government and military with advanced computing, storage, and AI services. Azure powers a wide range of military workloads, including AI-driven targeting in Palestine, despite occasional internal restrictions placed on direct access by Unit 8200 personnel (such as limits on certain surveillance features after employee backlash in 2024–2025), as The Guardian reports.
Tools facilitated intercept storage in Gaza operations. Microsoft Azure has been used to store and process vast quantities of intercepted communications data — phone calls, SMS, WhatsApp metadata, social media interactions, and location pings —collected from Gaza’s Palestinian population during the conflict. These intercepts feed into real-time intelligence dashboards and AI models that generate target lists, track movements, and support ‘kill chain’ decisions. While Microsoft has publicly stated it does not provide ‘offensive’ tools, leaked documents, and investigative reporting show Azure infrastructure hosting classified military databases that retain and analyse intercepted material, enabling prolonged storage (often years) for pattern-of-life analysis and retrospective targeting. This capability has been directly implicated in operations that cause disproportionate civilian harm and indiscriminate strikes.
Microsoft Israel is one of the most prominent employers of Unit 8200 alumni, employing roughly 250 veterans of the unit.
Microsoft Israel participates in corporate matching programs and community initiatives that channel donations to settler organisations. Employee donation-matching campaigns have amplified contributions to these entities, while Microsoft Israel sponsors events and hackathons co-organised with settler-linked tech accelerators in occupied East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, indirectly bolstering economic normalisation of settlements.
Against Iran, Microsoft integrates with partners for drone and cyber targeting. Azure cloud platforms are deeply embedded in US military and intelligence workflows, including integrations with Palantir (via Azure-hosted Foundry/Gotham deployments), Anduril (Lattice AI for drone swarms), and Shield AI (autonomous systems). These partnerships enable:
- Real-time fusion of drone sensor data (video, SIGINT, geolocation) into Azure for AI-enhanced targeting
- Cyber tools for offensive operations, including modelling of Iranian C2 networks and infrastructure
- Predictive analytics that feed into joint US-Zionist drone campaigns (e.g., MQ-9 Reaper or Heron TP flights over Iranian assets)
Microsoft’s role provides scalable storage, compute, and AI inference for these hybrid threats, allowing rapid iteration on targeting algorithms and mission planning. While Microsoft maintains it does not support ‘offensive cyber’, Azure’s classification as FedRAMP High and DoD Impact Level 5 enables classified workloads that support preemptive and retaliatory operations against Iranian nuclear sites, proxy forces, and command structures.
These urban-proximate sites remain exposed to kinetic and cyber risks, as demonstrated.
These developments demand scrutiny and divestment — targeting the tech enablers of oppression weakens the entire apparatus.
“Come friendly bombs”, as the British Poet Laureate, Sir John Betjeman, once wrote.