After Iran declared retaliation against global artificial intelligence (AI) and information and communications technology (ICT) companies that cooperate with the United States, it attacked Bahrain's national telecommunications facility.
On the 2nd (local time), the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) claimed it attacked an Amazon cloud center in Bahrain two days earlier in retaliation for the United States "assassinating" Iranian nationals.
A Bahraini official confirmed that the headquarters of the telecom company Batelco was attacked, criticizing it as "a serious and deliberate act of aggression against the sovereign territory of the Kingdom of Bahrain and its civilian economic interests."
However, the official said the strike hit Bahrain's national telecommunications infrastructure, not the Amazon cloud center Iran previously claimed. The facility Iran attacked supports digital services for Gulf-region corporations and financial institutions.
On the 31st, the IRGC said "U.S. ICT and AI corporations are behind the terrorist attack that killed Iranian citizens," singling out 17 corporations, including Apple, Microsoft (MS), Google, Meta and Tesla, as targets.
The "assassination" they mentioned is a term aimed at a string of attacks on senior figures at home, and the IRGC pointed to the United States and Israel as being behind them.
The same day, the IRGC also claimed it struck an Oracle data center in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE), in addition to the Amazon cloud center, but the Dubai government denied this.