Wall Street is back on oil watch Tuesday, tracking movements in global crude prices, developments in the Strait of Hormuz, and President Donald Trump’s request for help from U.S. allies three weeks into the war with Iran. 

Oil has dictated broader market moves since the conflict began at the end of last month, with surging crude prices weighing heavily on stocks, and intermittent pullbacks enticing investors back into risk markets. 

Tuesday’s session is likely to reflect the former, as Iran steps up attacks on its Gulf neighbors, including a gas field in the United Arab Emirates, and traffic through Hormuz remains crippled by the ongoing war. Brent crude jumped nearly 4% in overnight trading and was marked firmly north of $100 a barrel. 

Trump’s efforts to convince major allies to assist in policing the strait, meanwhile, appear to have been unsuccessful so far, and he has said he may delay a long-planned meeting on trade with China’s President Xi Jinping as result of the widening conflict. 

Both events suggest the war is likely to last much longer than first forecast, which is also adding to the upward pressure in crude markets and the pullback in other risk assets.

It’s also sure to influence debate at the Federal Reserve, which begins its two-day policy meeting in Washington today under a heavy fog of war uncertainty—crude’s year-to-date rally is stoking inflation pressures and chipping away at job and GDP growth prospects. 

The central bank’s reaction will be crucial for markets heading into the spring, but without visibility toward a conclusion of the conflict, investors will have to settle for more “wait and see” from policymakers.

And it’s these sorts of crude realities that make a near-term market rebound much less likely, as long as the world’s most important oil region is beset by a war with no end in sight.

—Martin Baccardax

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One takeaway from the first day of Nvidia’s GTC conference stood out: CEO Jensen Huang sees data center hardware sales bringing in $1 trillion through 2027, twice what he said last year through 2026. In the last 12 months, the data center segment has seen sales jump 66%.

• Wedbush tech analyst Dan Ives says in a note that demand strength is coming from every direction, with enterprises, sovereigns, and AI-natives all deepening their commitments to Nvidia’s infrastructure as agentic and physical AI applications drive computational requirements beyond anticipated even a year ago.

• Huang’s 140-minute presentation began with a discussion of the free software that comes with Nvidia’s hardware. Most of the keynote was dedicated to the AI models, software, and services that Nvidia provides, much of it without cost. Nvidia’s products are built around its hardware, as Apple does with its expensive devices.

• Last year Nvidia entered into an expensive licensing agreement with Groq, a maker of AI chips optimized for running AI models for applications like chatbots or coding assistants. At GTC, Nvidia laid out how Groq’s chips will fit into a data center, side-by-side with Nvidia’s chips.

• Running models is called inference, a concept that was front-and-center during Huang’s keynote. Nvidia won the first round of AI computing—making AI models—but its advantage is less clear with inference. One of Huang’s main goals with the keynote was to reassure that Nvidia would also come to dominate this, too.

What’s Next: Nvidia’s upcoming Vera Rubin AI servers are in production now, and due to ship in the second half of the year. Microsoft has already taken delivery of its first server. Huang introduced the road map through 2028, with new server and networking configurations each year.

—Adam Levine

Investors in Treasuries and European government bonds should prepare for steeper losses because of the inflation risk from higher prices for oil, data-center chips and military spending, according to BlackRock.

• Tom Becker, a bond fund manager at the firm, told Barron’s he’s confident that Treasuries, U.K., German, and Italian government bond yields will keep rising. As bond yields and bond prices move in opposite directions, it means prices will fall more.

• Since the U.S. and Israel first attacked Iran on Feb. 28, Treasuries have sold off, with yields on the 10-year rising 0.270%. Yields on U.K., German and Italian bonds that mature in a decade are also up by 0.433%, 0.260%, and 0.403%, respectively.

• Yields are “still quite a bit lower than they were even in the summer of last year,” Becker said in a phone interview on Friday. “And so we think there’s actually a fair amount of scope for them to rise further.”

• A surge in defense spending by Europe, coupled with spending on artificial intelligence and supply-chain shortages in all products that pass through the Strait of Hormuz—from oil to fertilizer and more—could lead to an inflation shock, which would raise yields even further. 

What’s Next: The European Central Bank, the Federal Reserve, and the Bank of England are meeting this week to decide interest rates amid the inflationary threat in the wake of the war in Iran. Holding interest rates steady or raising them is another reason for yields to stay higher.

—Karishma Vanjani and Alex Kozul-Wright 

AI infrastructure company Nebius has reached a cloud-computing deal with Meta Platforms valued at up to $27 billion. It’s the second big win for the Nvidia-backed neocloud company after a Microsoft deal last year. It also spotlights Meta’s AI spending amid a report that the Facebook parent is discussing massive layoffs.

• Nebius, which first signed with Meta last year, will provide $12 billion of dedicated capacity for Meta across multiple locations, based on the next-generation Nvidia Vera Rubin platform, starting in early 2027. Nebius in November signed a five-year agreement to deliver AI infrastructure to Meta.

• Meta has agreed to purchase additional available computing capacity—up to $15 billion over five years. Nebius intends to sell this capacity to third-party customers of its AI cloud business, with Meta buying the remaining capacity.

• Meta is planning to cut 20% or more of its 80,000 employees, according to a Reuters report, which said it was looking to offset heavy AI infrastructure costs. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone told Barron’s it was “speculative reporting about theoretical approaches.”

• A reduction that big could save Meta $5 billion to $6 billion annually, assuming costs of $300,000 to $400,000 a worker, according to JPMorgan analysts. But that doesn’t make as big of a dent in a projected $162 billion to $169 billion total expense base, they said.

What’s Next: Developing an advanced large-language model is crucial to Meta’s long-term control of its computing platform, as is the buildout of AI products beyond advertising, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg has tempered expectations. A Meta spokesperson told Barron’s it would “steadily push the frontier over the course of the year.”

—Adam Clark, Mackenzie Tatananni, and Janet H. Cho

The White House asked to delay the summit in China between President Donald Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping for a month because of the Iran conflict. Analysts don’t expect any delay to scuttle the fragile U.S.-China truce or a future meeting, with modest demands from both sides still likely.

• Trump disclosed the request to reporters Monday afternoon. But earlier, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC that a delayed summit wouldn’t be because Trump asked China to police the Strait of Hormuz, which remains effectively closed, it would be because he wants to stay in D.C. with the war effort. 

• The president has said countries should join in U.S. efforts to restart traffic in the strait, including China, but so far there hasn’t been a lot of movement toward a coalition. A spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington said China was in communication with relevant parties to work for a de-escalation.

• Although Iran depends on China to buy its oil, the U.S.-China Economic Security and Review Commission that counsels Congress said Beijing is taking a cautious approach to avoid rattling its relationships with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and is unlikely to offer Iran support. 

• Because of the potential for Republicans to lose both houses of Congress in the midterm elections this fall, the Chinese aim to “get as much as soon as possible in terms of elevating the relationship” now, said Dennis Wilder, senior fellow for Georgetown University’s Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues. 

What’s Next: While the strait is an important source of energy and commodities for China, 22V Research’s Michael Hirson notes that Beijing’s efforts to shore up its supply chains make it less vulnerable than its Asian neighbors. “Trump doesn’t have great options for forcing China to play a more proactive role,” he said.

—Reshma Kapadia

J.P. Morgan’s leadership is trying to get a handle on the fast-growing world of prediction markets, where regulation is still taking shape and insider trading often goes unchecked. It is reviewing company policies to decide whether it should add new guidance around employees’ participation in the platforms.

• Separately, the bank, which has a vast trading business, has no current plans to hire traders of its own to bet on prediction markets, according to people familiar with the matter. Any new guidance from JPMorgan, which has some 320,000 employees, could set the tone for other companies.