Oil crisis? What oil crisis? IT spending de-coupled from wider war shock A day after the International Energy Agency (IEA) said the US/Israel/Iran war was creating the worst energy crisis ever faced by the world, Gartner increased its growth forecasts for global IT spending by nearly three percentage points. The spike in the cost of oil and gas caused by the on-going conflict has no direct …
Let's completely ignore that the prices of everything computing have already been shot sky-high before everyone learned, the hard way, what the Gulf of Hormuz was and why it mattered.
Now you're telling me that IT spending is going to skyrocket when a major transport route is being chocked to hell ?
Do you know where all that wonderful IT equipment comes from ?
Hint : it's not Made in USA.
“The price of oil has very little to do with it,” Lovelock said. ... The only other effect that we could be looking for is business confidence change, and we don't see that occurring either.”
In other words the vast majority of people are just trying to get on with their lives whilst some orange moron causes whatever destruction he sees fit today.
Humans don't sit still. Fuel prices could go up by 10 times and people would still drive. It's just that more might, you know, steal as has been reported recently (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2drmm1mglo)
A small handful of idiots trying to control the whole world badly will never work. The majority will always find a way around it. It's just sad that we're having to live in a world like that when it could be so much better.
“To say that a business or a technology provider is going to change their plans based on the price of electricity just isn't [true].”
Didn’t I just read last week a story about OpenAI claiming that they were pulling out of building a UK datacentre because of the cost of electricity here?
Ok, so they were probably just looking for any excuse to avoid some of the spending they cannot afford, but still.
And look at the very next article on El Reg's RSS feed https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/22/brit_firms_look_to_deploy/
Higher oil prices mean the cost of everything becomes more expensive. From concrete and steel used to build AI datacenters, to shipping stuff around the world, and (especially in Europe/Asia) the price of natural gas many are using to get their power from - given that nuke plants take forever to commission and renewables require a lot of batteries to smooth their output.
And it isn't just oil prices. Helium is going to become scarcer soon, and will be a particular problem for Taiwan and Korea. You know, where most of the AI chips and memory chips are being made!
I can't understand the stock market's lax reaction to what is going on. Not sure if the people who know what is coming for us are just whistling a nice tune keeping stock prices up for now (and allowing them better opportunities to short) or they truly believe that if Trump caves and everything basically goes back to where it was before the war that there will be little impact to a 2+ month near complete closure of Hormuz. Even if he caves an hour from now it will take weeks before the majority of shippers trust that it really is over and safe to move through the Strait. It isn't like he's exactly stable or trustworthy so he could say its over today and then a day, a week or a month from now if he feels like he's seen as "weak" or a "loser" for having caved he'll start the war back up to assuage his damaged ego.
It didn't after 1973.
The world economy is a complex system composed of complex systems, arguably chaotic in one sense or other, which typically behave in a thoroughly unpredicable fashion following a significant perturbation. Amazonian butterflies aren't in it.
In the last few years it has been capering on the edge of chaos which characteristically presages a catastrophe.
If you work through a Feynman type diagram of all the paths out the current middle eastern shambles it is pretty clear that as expected no one "wins," certainly in the long view. The party that loses least (generally by a large margin) is equally clearly Iran.
