GoKawiilIran's Revolutionary Guard has threatened attacks on a swath of U.S. tech companies with operations in the Middle East, including Nvidia , Apple , Microsoft and Google .
The Guard warned on Tuesday that 18 tech companies would be considered as "legitimate targets" in retaliation for U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran.
"From now on, for every assassination, an American company will be destroyed," they said in an Guard-affiliated Telegram channel.
Attacks on those companies would begin from 8 p.m. on Wednesday, April 1, Tehran time (12:30 p.m. EDT), the Guard said in a post on Telegram translated by Google, warning employees at those companies to leave workplaces immediately to protect their lives.
The list of companies also featured Cisco , HP , Intel , Oracle , IBM , Dell , Palantir , JPMorgan, Tesla , GE, Spire Solutions, Boeing and UAE-based artificial intelligence company G42.
It follows Iranian strikes on AWS data centers in the Middle East earlier this month, which caused outages in a number of apps and digital services in the United Arab Emirates.
U.S. tech firms have been funneling resources into the Middle East in recent years, specifically around the AI infrastructure build-out, with the region offering cheap energy and access to land.
"The safety and wellbeing of our team is our number one priority," an Intel spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC. "We are taking steps to safeguard and support our workers and facilities in the Middle East and are actively monitoring the situation."