Iranian authorities are moving quickly to launch a new project designed to make it possible to cut the country off from the global internet completely and for extended periods, according to information obtained by Iran International.
The project aims to build a national network on a Huawei-based platform, doing work similar to services provided by Iranian cloud firm ArvanCloud (Abr Arvan) but on a far larger scale, the information said.
It is intended to host widely used public services as well as banking and payment platforms and other critical infrastructure.
Huawei did not respond to Iran International’s request for comment.
According to the information, the project is in its final stages and is being brought online under ArvanCloud’s management, through a company called Ayandeh Afzay-e Karaneh.
The project is linked to individuals and companies under US sanctions, including Fanap and its CEO Shahab Javanmardi – sanctioned by the US Treasury in August over alleged ties to Iran’s intelligence ministry and the Revolutionary Guards.
Sources said Huawei supplied the required equipment covertly, and the company’s name does not appear in related documentation.
President Masoud Pezeshkian visited the construction site of the project in March 2025. According to the sources, China’s ambassador also visited the project.
Sources said the project is estimated to cost between $700 million and $1 billion, and that all equipment – supplied by Huawei in China – entered Iran after the 12-day war, shipped in 24 containers.
Sources said the data center would have capacity for about 400 server racks and would incorporate ArvanCloud, with much of the country’s core digital infrastructure eventually moved to the site.
They said the data center is located beneath Fanap’s administrative building in Pardis IT Town, about 20 kilometers northeast of Tehran, in a place designed to be difficult to strike by missile.
Blackout continues
Iran has remained under sweeping internet and phone disruptions as protests continue, limiting reporting on casualties, according to rights groups and internet monitors.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said he was deeply disturbed by reports of violence during nationwide protests and expressed concern about internet and communications shutdowns, calling on authorities to restore access.
NetBlocks said on Wednesday that Iran remained largely offline as the nationwide blackout passed its 132nd hour, adding that limited connectivity was obscuring the scale of casualties.
Fars news agency, which is affiliated with the IRGC, argued that internet restrictions should continue as protests persist, linking the limits to what it described as security concerns.
Iran International has reported that, amid the communications shutdown, particularly on January 7 and 8, at least 12,000 protesters were killed.
Iranian government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani said decisions on internet and phone cuts were outside the control of government ministries in a security situation.
In recent weeks, millions have taken part in an unprecedented challenge to the Islamic Republic — and under a nationwide communications blackout, at least 12,000 people have been shot dead in what amounts to the largest mass killing of Iran’s contemporary history.
The collapse of the rial may have ignited the protests, but this wave of defiance runs far deeper than exchange-rate volatility. It reflects a society exhausted by decades of strategic deprivation.
The poverty pushing millions to the brink is not simply the result of policy error or mismanagement. It is the by-product of a conscious political choice: a calculated trade-off.
Tehran and its defenders routinely blame sanctions. Western analysts point to corruption or incompetence. Both explanations miss the governing logic at work.
What defines the Islamic Republic’s decision-making is not a lack of alternatives, but a rigid hierarchy of priorities: ideological integrity and regional reach consistently outrank broad-based prosperity.
In this calculus, economic crisis is not an unintended detour from the leadership’s path; it is the terrain on which that path has been chosen.
Fear of external influence and so-called “cultural invasion” reinforces this worldview. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has repeatedly framed material prosperity and deep integration with global markets as vulnerabilities that erode faith and weaken resistance.
His much-touted “Resistance Economy” is not designed to escape sanctions, but to endure them. It promises resilience, not growth; survival, not transformation.
That trade-off cascades through policy. The drive for agricultural self-sufficiency, promoted as revolutionary virtue, has drained aquifers and destabilized rural livelihoods, as water-intensive crops and inefficient irrigation exhaust already scarce groundwater.
Meanwhile, a maze of subsidies, multiple exchange rates, and import restrictions creates rents that enrich well-connected actors while suffocating independent enterprise. These distortions are tolerated—even sustained—because they preserve political control and reward loyalty over innovation.
Even when officials acknowledge the scale of failure, they remain bound by the same red lines that produced it.
The water crisis lays this contradiction bare. Faced with mounting shortages, authorities warn of “water bankruptcy” and champion desalination plants and transfer megaprojects as proof of resolve, while continuing to treat self-sufficiency in water-intensive crops as a strategic achievement rather than a structural mistake.
The result is improvisation without reform: capital flows to spectacular projects that buy time, while the incentives driving depletion and waste remain untouched.
In such a system, rising living standards are irrelevant. Economic pain does not trigger reform because reform risks undoing the political architecture that keeps the Islamic Republic intact.
On the streets today, that logic is meeting its reckoning. Protesters are not merely rejecting inflation or unemployment; they are rejecting the premise that their suffering serves a higher purpose.
In recent remarks, Khamenei praised young people who aspire to “meet their maker” and embrace sacrifice over material advancement. Yet the chants echoing across Iranian cities demand something else entirely: dignity over obedience, participation over submission, a future to build rather than one to forfeit.
Confronted with this unrest, the leadership retreats to its familiar narrative of foreign plots, dismissing protesters as agents of outside powers. That rhetoric cannot conceal the deeper confrontation underway: two visions of national purpose that cannot coexist within a single political order.
One demands a society willing to trade its welfare, opportunities, and youth for an ideological project. The other, facing bullets and batons, is signaling that this exchange—their lives for the regime’s vision—is no longer acceptable.
For a generation that refuses to be treated as collateral, the Islamic Republic and its leader have no answer.
