New York, New York
— March 10, 2026

Oil Whiplash, AI Infrastructure Costs, and a Big Week for Software Earnings

Oil is back in the driver’s seat, and it’s moving so fast that gas prices can barely keep up. After spiking on Middle East supply fears, crude sold off hard when President Trump signaled he expects de-escalation and markets started pricing in “oil will keep flowing” scenarios again. In one of the biggest one-day moves since 2022, Brent and WTI fell sharply, with WTI settling in the low-to-mid $80s (for now).

If you’re an oil trader, good luck. This tape is brutal to time.

But for tech investors, the point is that energy volatility ultimately bleeds into the cost structure of AI infrastructure.

Why oil volatility matters for AI

AI “factories” run on three core inputs: chips, power, and cooling. When energy markets get jumpy, it can ripple into:

• Power prices and hedging costs for data centers
• Operating costs for running dense clusters
• CapEx planning for hyperscalers and cloud providers (even if demand remains strong)

AI has already gotten expensive. It’s hard to justify a world where the compute bill keeps climbing and the power bill gets more volatile at the same time. Oil doesn’t set electricity prices directly everywhere, but it’s a clean real-time signal for broader energy and geopolitical risk.

Meanwhile, software is sitting in the mid-80s too

Speaking of mid-$80s, the software complex still feels like it’s living in a “repricing” regime. And this week, we get two important software prints: Adobe and Oracle.

We’ve covered Oracle separately, so let’s talk Adobe.

Adobe: hated stock, loved product, high-stakes earnings

Adobe is one of those names where sentiment and product reality can diverge. Plenty of people love the tools. The stock, on the other hand, has been punished, and the main debate hasn’t gone away: how durable is Adobe’s moat as AI-native creation tools proliferate?

What makes this earnings report interesting is the setup:

• The valuation looks more reasonable than it did at the highs
• Expectations are reset
• Options markets are implying a big move around the print (recent estimates put it around ~7% in either direction)

So the question for investors is simple: does Adobe prove it can translate AI into defensible growth and pricing power, or does it confirm that “creative software” is entering a more competitive era?

Bottom line

This is one of those weeks where the market is processing multiple narratives at once:

• Energy volatility and geopolitics feeding into macro uncertainty
• Software earnings acting as a sentiment reset button
• AI infrastructure costs still front and center

We’ll have more soon. Busy week. Be good.