By Michael Kern
Publication Date: 2026-03-20 23:00:00
The stock market spent the first week of the Iran war doing something strange: mostly shrugging its shoulders. Oil has increased. The insurance markets effectively collapsed. Amazon had two data centers blown up. And the Nasdaq fell, stabilized, and within days the discussion shifted to whether the Fed could still cut interest rates in June.
The prevailing reading was: disruption, yes. Disaster, no. This thing will be over soon. I think this reading is wrong.
And wrong in specific, structural ways, not because the war will necessarily continue to escalate, but because the damage currently being done is the kind that is quietly getting worse.
It hits a system that no longer had room to accommodate it. And it targets, with surprising precision, the biggest economic bet America has ever made.
Add it up. Meta has committed over $600 billion to AI infrastructure in the US by 2028. Apple has committed $500 billion over four years. Amazon forecasts $200 billion in data center spending in 2026 alone, up from $131 billion…
