Iran’s state TV just announced that its military will start targeting “economic centers and banks tied to the US and Israel” after an Israeli strike allegedly hit a bank inside the capital of Tehran. According to Al Jazeera, the nation’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC) released the threat of attacking these economic targets on the 12th day of the conflict. Furthermore, an IRGC-affiliated news agency released a list of offices and infrastructure owned by U.S. companies that developed military tech, including prominent companies such as Nvidia, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, and Palantir, as well as cloud services providers, located in Israel and throughout the Middle East.
According to the report, the broadcaster claimed Israel had struck a bank branch in Tehran overnight, killing several employees, a move it described as an "illegitimate and unusual act in war," opening up economic centres and banks as targets.
“As the scope of the regional war expands to infrastructure war, the scope of Iran’s legitimate targets expands,” the Tasnim news agency said. It also described the listed companies and offices as “Iran’s new targets.” Iran’s joint military command, the Khatam al-Anbiya Headquarters, said that “the enemy left our hands open to targeting economic centers and banks belonging to the United States and the Zionist regime in the region,” and it warned that “people of the region should not be within a one-kilometer radius of banks.”
Many of the aforementioned tech companies have substantial Middle Eastern presences. 13% of its global workforce is said to reside in Israel, working at its second-largest research and development center outside the U.S. Notably, Intel doesn't seem to be named among the tech companies, despite having 9,335 employees in Israel, according to its website. The company has locations in Haifa and Jerusalem, and is described as " one of Intel’s key global manufacturing and R&D sites."
It’s unclear if the Iranian military’s one-kilometer radius warning includes tech offices and infrastructure, but data centers have already been hit before since the conflict began last February 28. Several Amazon Web Services regional data centers in the Middle East have gone offline due to drone attacks, with Iran claiming that it deliberately targeted these sites in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain because they host U.S. military workloads. But with this new threat, it seems that Iran is looking to step up its targeting of tech companies, especially those that the Iranian regime perceives as service providers to the U.S. military.
This will be a major cause of concern for tech companies in the Middle East, especially as data centers are expensive to build, and any damage to them could mean millions of dollars in repair costs. More importantly, standard insurance policies often do not cover damage or losses incurred through war, invasion, or military action, meaning these losses will likely solely be borne by the companies that own them.
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