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On the evening of April 1, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps followed through on a threat it had made three days earlier. Eighteen American companies, among them Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, Palantir, Tesla, IBM, Boeing, and JPMorgan Chase, had been named as military targets.¹ The IRGC set a deadline of 8 p.m. Tehran time and told employees to evacuate. It told civilians within one kilometer of any listed facility to leave. Then it started hitting buildings.
Bahrain’s Interior Ministry confirmed that Iranian aggression set Batelco’s Hamala headquarters on fire, the country’s largest telecommunications company and a host site for Amazon Web Services infrastructure. The IRGC claimed it also struck an Oracle data center in Dubai. Dubai called that claim false. A Bellingcat investigation published the same week documented a pattern of the UAE downplaying confirmed Iranian strikes on its territory, mischaracterizing interceptions, and in some instances not acknowledging successful attacks at all.² Whether Dubai was struck or not, Bahrain was, and the IRGC said this was only a first warning.
The IRGC was direct about why it targeted these companies: “We launched attacks on data centers of two US companies. We warned earlier that our actions in response to the killing of Iranians will be aimed at stopping the terror machine.”³ The war between the US and Iran began on February 28, 2026, with coordinated American and Israeli airstrikes on Iran that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and several senior military commanders. Iran’s response has included closing the Strait of Hormuz, striking US military installations across the Gulf, and now, explicitly, targeting the commercial technology infrastructure it holds responsible for enabling the assassinations of its leadership.
Under international humanitarian law, a lawful military target is any object that by its nature, location, purpose, or use makes an effective contribution to military action. The United States has been bombing Iranian bridges and power plants, strikes that legal scholars and human rights organizations have described as attacks on civilian infrastructure that likely constitute war crimes. The IRGC is hitting data centers that the companies themselves have documented as integral to US and allied military operations. By the standards the US applies to justify its own strikes, these are more defensible targets than the ones the US is hitting.
The US military and its Israeli ally run AI targeting systems on cloud infrastructure supplied by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Palantir. Those systems generate kill lists. Palantir’s Maven Smart System, built in partnership with the Pentagon, powered AI targeting throughout Operation Epic Fury; CENTCOM’s commander publicly confirmed the use of advanced AI tools to process battlefield data at a pace unprecedented in American military history.⁴ In April 2024, Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham published an investigation in +972 Magazine based on testimony from six Israeli intelligence officers, exposing two of those systems by name.⁵ One, an AI program called Lavender, generated a ranked kill list of up to 37,000 Palestinians by analyzing phone metadata, social media activity, and movement patterns, assigning each person a threat score from one to one hundred. A companion program called Where’s Daddy tracked each name on that list to their family home, timing strikes for when they were inside with their families at night. Six active Israeli intelligence officers confirmed to a journalist, on the record, that their military ran a program designed specifically to bomb people when their entire families were home. One officer told Abraham: “We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building... the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”⁵ Another described the process plainly: “You put hundreds into the system and wait to see who you can kill.”⁵
That system runs on American corporate infrastructure. Israel’s IDF computer chief described cloud technology as part of “a collection of systems with which the IDF fights,” citing Amazon, Google, and Microsoft in her presentation.⁶ After Gaza began in October 2023, the Israeli military dramatically increased its purchases from all three companies. When the US went to war with Iran in February 2026 and began assassinating Iranian military and political leadership, the IRGC looked at what was powering the targeting apparatus and started hitting it. The data centers in Bahrain and Dubai are a core part of that architecture. Gaza is where the infrastructure was initially tested; it’s now seeing greater deployment in Iran.
The companies built the argument for their own targeting before a single Iranian drone left the ground. Their lawyers documented what the technology would enable. Their executives signed the contracts. Then they went on record confirming it.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, signed off on Project Nimbus after his own lawyers warned him in writing it could facilitate human rights violations. Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, personally approved the contract submission with full knowledge of those risks, according to internal documents obtained by The Intercept.⁷ Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, received a petition from 1,700 of his own employees warning him that AWS was bolstering Israeli military surveillance capabilities and kept the contract anyway. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, confirmed his company provided AI and cloud services to the Israeli military and gave the IDF access to GPT-4 after OpenAI changed its policies to permit military clients.⁸ Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, needs no inference drawn; he said publicly and repeatedly that his company’s targeting technology was being used in the war and that he was proud of it. Peter Thiel, Palantir’s co-founder, held the company’s board meeting in Tel Aviv in January 2024 as a declared gesture of solidarity with Israel while the Gaza campaign was underway.⁹ When asked directly about Lavender and Palantir’s role in AI targeting at the Cambridge Union in May 2024, Thiel said: “My bias is to defer to Israel. It’s not for us to second-guess everything. And I believe that broadly the IDF gets to decide what it wants to do, and that they’re broadly in the right.”¹⁰
Amazon Web Services (AWS) first contracted with the CIA in 2013. By 2020, the CIA had awarded its Commercial Cloud Enterprise contract, potentially worth tens of billions of dollars, to five companies: AWS, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and IBM, enabling them to compete for intelligence community task orders across every US spy agency.¹¹ In 2022, the Pentagon awarded Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle a share of its $9 billion Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract, designed to provide the US military with cloud services across all classification levels, from strategic command to the tactical edge.¹¹ The NSA awarded AWS a separate $10 billion contract to host its most sensitive signals intelligence data.¹¹ These companies are the digital backbone of the US military and intelligence apparatus, and Israel was simply the next client in line. In 2021, Google and Amazon signed Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion deal providing Israel’s defense establishment with cloud computing and AI, contractually forbidding the companies from denying service to any entity of the Israeli government, including its military.¹² Google’s own lawyers warned in writing before signing that the services could be linked to the facilitation of human rights violations, which is a legalese way of saying “the tools we share with them will result in innocent people being killed.” A human rights consultancy Google commissioned recommended withholding AI specifically from the Israeli military.⁷ Google signed anyway, locking itself into a deal extendable up to 23 years with limited ability to exit.⁷ Microsoft confirmed it provided the IDF access to GPT-4.⁸ Palantir has supplied its Gotham targeting platform to Israeli military and intelligence agencies since at least 2014, and formalized that relationship with a strategic partnership with Israel’s Ministry of Defense in January 2024, explicitly described as supporting war-related missions.⁹
The people who understood what was coming tried to say so. Google fired at least 28 employees for staging sit-ins against Project Nimbus. At least nine were arrested.¹² One employee who resigned wrote to company leadership that “no one came to Google to work on offensive military technology.”¹³ She lost her job over the letter.
A single data center holding 50,000 of Nvidia’s current processors contains roughly $1.5 billion in hardware. The drones reaching those buildings cost tens of thousands of dollars each.¹⁴ That gap defines the military economics of this era, and it explains why the IRGC is hitting data centers while its missiles fall short of aircraft carriers ringed by layers of air defense. The most expensive military infrastructure in the world sits in commercial districts in Dubai and Bahrain, unfortified, reachable by consumer-grade drones, belonging to companies whose shareholders care about quarterly earnings.
The United States hosted a series of trials after World War II that established a legal framework specifically to address what happens when corporations knowingly supply the infrastructure of atrocity. The sixth of the subsequent Nuremberg trials, United States v. Carl Krauch, prosecuted 24 executives of IG Farben, the German chemical company that manufactured Zyklon B for the Nazi death camps. The charge was that they knowingly supplied a machine whose purpose they understood and documented. Telford Taylor, the chief US prosecutor at those trials, stated in his 1947 opening: “The crimes of these men were not committed in rage, nor under the stress of sudden temptation. One does not build a stupendous war machine in a fit of passion, nor an Auschwitz slave factory during a passing spasm of brutality.”¹⁵ Google’s lawyers documented in writing that they understood what this technology would be used for. The IG Farben executives at least claimed ignorance. Sundar Pichai, Andy Jassy, Satya Nadella, Alex Karp, and Peter Thiel cannot make that claim. The precedent for what accountability looks like already exists.
Google once operated under the motto “Don’t be evil.” The company removed it quietly in 2018. The people who now govern it are individuals with public profiles, professional reputations, and LinkedIn pages where the public can reach them directly.
Sundar Pichai, CEO, can be found at linkedin.com/in/sundarpichai.
John L. Hennessy, Chairman of the Alphabet board, is the former president of Stanford University.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, co-founders and controlling shareholders with 51 percent of voting power, bear ultimate responsibility for every decision this company makes.
Frances H. Arnold, Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, sits on the board at linkedin.com/in/frances-arnold-b4992313.
L. John Doerr, venture capitalist and Kleiner Perkins chairman, is at linkedin.com/in/john-doerr-03248211.
Roger W. Ferguson Jr., former Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve, is at linkedin.com/in/roger-w-ferguson-jr-69bb73a2.
R. Martin Chávez, former Goldman Sachs CFO, is at linkedin.com/in/r-martin-chavez-095116.
Robin L. Washington, now President and COO of Salesforce, is at linkedin.com/in/robinlwashington.
K. Ram Shriram is a founding board member and one of Google’s earliest investors.
Tag them. Write to them. File a formal complaint over accusations of committing war crimes with the SEC at sec.gov/tcr.
Mail the board directly at:
Alphabet Inc., 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, Attn: Corporate Secretary, or email directors@abc.xyz.
I’d also encourage you to contact your state and city representatives, your governor, and your state treasurer and demand they divest public pension funds and state contracts from these companies. Reach out to your union if you have one. The pressure that moves corporations runs through the people who control their access to public money and public contracts, and those people answer to us at the state and local level in ways that federal officials increasingly do not. The American public and the international community are watching, and these people should know it.
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Works Cited
Winbuzzer. (2026, April 1). Iran threatens strikes on 18 U.S. tech firms. Winbuzzer. https://winbuzzer.com/2026/04/01/iran-irgc-threatens-strikes-us-tech-companies-april-2026-xcxwbn/
Vandermeersch, S. (2026, April 2). The war you’re not allowed to see: How the UAE rewrites the story of Iranian strikes. Bellingcat. https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2026/04/02/war-uae-iran-infuencer-dubai-conflict-drone-successful-strike-intercept-fire/
TASS. (2026, April 2). Iran targets Oracle data center in Dubai. TASS. https://tass.com/world/2111181
IBTimes. (2026, April 5). AI central in US-Iran 2026 war as targeting systems speed strikes but spark accuracy and ethics. IBTimes. https://www.ibtimes.com/ai-central-us-iran-2026-war-targeting-systems-speed-strikes-spark-accuracy-ethics-3800880
Abraham, Y. (2024, April 3). Lavender: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza. +972 Magazine. https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
Progressive International. (2025, August 26). UN calls out Google and Amazon for abetting Gaza genocide. Progressive International. https://progressive.international/wire/2025-08-26-un-calls-out-google-and-amazon-for-abetting-gaza-genocide/en/
Biddle, S. (2025, May 12). Google worried it couldn’t control how Israel uses Project Nimbus, files reveal. The Intercept. https://theintercept.com/2025/05/12/google-nimbus-israel-military-ai-human-rights/
Data Center Dynamics. (2026, February 11). Microsoft confirms it’s providing AI and cloud services to Israeli military for war in Gaza. Data Center Dynamics. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-confirms-its-providing-ai-and-cloud-services-to-israeli-military-for-war-in-gaza/
Business and Human Rights Resource Centre. (2024, January). Palantir allegedly supplying Israel with AI tools amid Israel’s war in Gaza. https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/palantir-allegedly-supplying-israel-with-ai-tools-amid-israels-war-in-gaza/
Responsible Statecraft. (2024, July 25). Peter Thiel: ‘I defer to Israel.’ https://responsiblestatecraft.org/peter-thiel-israel-palantir/
Nextgov/FCW. (2022, December 7). Pentagon awards $9B cloud contract to Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle. https://www.nextgov.com/digital-government/2022/12/amazon-google-microsoft-oracle-awarded-9b-pentagon-cloud-contract/380596/
Al Jazeera. (2024, April 23). What is Project Nimbus, and why are Google workers protesting Israel deal? Al Jazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/4/23/what-is-project-nimbus-and-why-are-google-workers-protesting-israel-deal
Perez, M. (2024, April 10). Exclusive: Google workers revolt over $1.2 billion Israel contract. TIME. https://time.com/6964364/exclusive-no-tech-for-apartheid-google-workers-protest-project-nimbus-1-2-billion-contract-with-israel/
Shilov, A. (2026, April 3). Iran says it has struck Oracle data center in Dubai, Amazon data center in Bahrain. Tom’s Hardware. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/iran-claims-it-has-hit-oracle-data-center-in-dubai-amazon-data-center-in-bahrain-country-has-threatened-to-attack-nvidia-intel-and-others-too
Taylor, T. (1947). Opening statement, United States v. Carl Krauch et al. Nuremberg Military Tribunals. Reprinted in Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals Under Control Council Law No. 10, Vol. 8.
It can only be a good thing if Palantir, and all of these web services are knocked out. I don't think that it will stop Thiel's, Musk's, Ellison's national security state, but will set it back.
With AI I can only image what they have on file for each of us, and how it will be used when the time comes.
This is such an excellent piece because it cuts straight to it: the names that make global violence inevitable and profitable. Like so much of your writing, this one goes to the root of the issue, not the symptoms - and certainly not the PR theater we call "news" or the cafeteria food fight we call "social media". Thank you for continually advocating on behalf of humanity, Christopher. It does matter.
And -
"Google’s lawyers **documented in writing that they understood what this technology would be used for**. The IG Farben executives at least claimed ignorance. Sundar Pichai, Andy Jassy, Satya Nadella, Alex Karp, and Peter Thiel cannot make that claim. The precedent for what accountability looks like already exists."
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