Airstrike on Sharif University of Technology

At approximately 02:41 a.m. on April 6, 2026, US-Israeli airstrikes struck the campus of Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, one of Iran's leading academic institutions widely compared to MIT. The attack destroyed or severely damaged multiple buildings: the university's High-Performance Computing (HPC) Center — which served over 3,000 registered researchers and six other universities across the country — was obliterated along with its AI research infrastructure, which had been training Persian-language AI models for two years. The Faculty of Civil Engineering, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Department of Philosophy of Science, Nanotechnology Research Center, Environmental Science Center, and the Convergent Technologies Research Building all sustained significant damage. The campus mosque and an adjacent District 9 gas distribution station were also hit, causing gas outages in surrounding residential neighborhoods. The university's website went offline following the attack. No on-site casualties were confirmed at the time of the strike, as all university classes had been moved online since the start of the war. University president Masoud Tajrishi told Xinhua that the destruction of the AI center was intentional, stating the attackers "did not want us to achieve AI technology." Iran's First Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref accused the US of deploying a bunker-buster bomb in the attack. Science Minister Hossein Simaei Sarraf stated that over 30 Iranian universities had been attacked since the war began on February 28, 2026, with five professors and more than 60 students killed across all university-related strikes.