G42 rethinks Stargate plans amid Iran fears

G42 is considering revising the long-range plan for its gargantuan, 5 GW Stargate AI campus amid concerns that Iran could ramp up attacks on tech facilities as part of its ongoing war with the US and Israel, Reuters reports.

Spreading out: G42 isn’t scaling back its plans, but it’s mulling spreading data centers in clusters across the small country rather than concentrating them into a single, 10 sq mi campus in Abu Dhabi, Reuters says, citing four unnamed sources. The wire service described the sources as including a US diplomat and industry executives briefed on the deliberations.

The plan is not expected to affect the first phase of Stargate, a USD 30 bn, 1 GW computer cluster that’s already under construction, per Reuters.

The move jibes with recommendations security experts have been making since the war began. Top-line recommendations include spreading infrastructure out so there’s no single, critical point for adversary drones to attack, moving the most important data underground or out of the country, and stocking spare components for quick recovery after a strike.

“I’d start with the principle that resilience matters more than trying to make any single facility invulnerable,” Joe Scheidler, a former White House and US State Department official focused on infrastructure, tells EnterpriseAM. “Companies should look at a layered physical security approach including site design, hardening, backup power and cooling, multiple connectivity routes and making sure they have rapid recovery capability.”

Context: Iranian drones hit two Amazon Web Services data centers in the UAE and one in Bahrain during the early days of the war, causing structural damage, power outages and fires, according to the cloud provider’s service dashboard, dramatically jeopardizing the Gulf’s status as a safe haven for Western tech investment. Amazon said last week that the center in Bahrain and one of the two in the UAE cannot be brought back online.

Iran explicitly identified Stargate UAE as a potential target in early April. Later, it published a list of 18 Western tech firms the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps considers legitimate targets because of their US ties.

From G42: “The [Stargate] project’s specifics are subject to continuous review in line with the security, resilience and operational standards expected of critical infrastructure at this scale,” G42 told Reuters.

Humain is also working on “hardening” its data centers against attack, CEO Tareq Amin told Semafor earlier this month. He added that Saudi “data centers are treated like critical national infrastructure,” though he didn’t provide extensive details.