Tech's hyperscalers face Wall Street for first time since U.S. Iran war sent oil prices soaring

Device makers are responding. A Microsoft spokesperson said memory and component costs pushed the company to raise prices on Surface PCs by hundreds of dollars.Technology industry researcher IDC is forecasting that dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, will cost $9.71 per gigabyte in 2026, compared with $3.76 in 2025. Marta Norton, chief investment strategist at Empower Investments, said the scale of cost increases for memory is "startling," with implications for cloud providers and Nvidia.Spot prices for Nvidia H200 GPUs reached $3.82 per hour this month, up from $2.27 in January, according to data from Ornn, a startup that compiles market data and is building an exchange for computing power.Gil Luria, a D.A. Davidson analyst who covers Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle, said the "hyperscalers are absorbing those increased costs." He said one concern is that "these bottlenecks are going to make everything more expensive and put pressure on everybody along the way."Baird analyst Will Power cited shortages and mounting memory costs in a note on April 15, as he lifted his estimate on Microsoft's fiscal 2027 capex to $180 billion from $161.6 billion. He bumped up his projection for the 2026 calendar year by about 4% to $157.5 billion. For Acre Security, which sells physical and digital security products to data center operators and critical infrastructure providers, rising oil prices haven't had an effect yet, but they could, said CEO Kumar Sokka.Well before the war began, President Trump's tough tariffs made it challenging for Acre to source components for products like cameras and intrusion detection systems, Sokka said, adding that the company's contract manufacturers have shifted production to places like Portugal, the Philippines, Mexico and parts of the U.S. The speed of data center construction and unforeseen speed bumps like tariffs are forcing companies to learn how to quickly react to sudden changes, Sokka said."You've got to be smart and watch the funnel and the pipeline and your supply chain very closely to ensure that you're not at all hurting your business," he said.One thing that's clear heading into this week's earnings reports is that equity investors remain bullish on the AI trade. Nvidia climbed to a record on Monday and has surpassed a $5 trillion valuation. And Intel, which is finally elbowing its way into the AI chip market, had its best day on Wall Street since 1987 on Friday after stronger-than-expected earnings. The Nasdaq is up 15% in April, and is headed for its best month since April 2020."There's a high level of confidence that either these shocks will not last a long time, or that they will get passed through quite perfectly to keep margins intact," said Skanda Amarnath, executive director of think tank Employ America.Dan Taylor, chief investment officer at Man Numeric, had an even more succinct explanation: "It pays more to be bullish than to be bearish." WATCH: Barclays' Nicholas Campanella talks the state of the AI data center buildout

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