Highlights of the week: oil supply disruption, Nvidia and Nebius deal, new billionaires

The war in the Middle East has caused the biggest oil supply disruption in history, affecting about 7.5% of global supply. An investment boom brought 45 new billionaires linked to AI companies to the Forbes ranking. Nvidia announced a $2 billion investment in Arkady Volozh's cloud AI company Nebius to develop computing power and "AI factories." The main events of March 9-13 are in our review.

U.S. GDP grew at an annualized rate of 0.7% in the fourth quarter of 2025, according to a revised estimate from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's down from 4.4% growth in the third quarter, economists surveyed by Dow Jones had expected about 1.5%. The revision is due to weaker data on exports, consumer and government spending, and investment. For 2025 as a whole, the U.S. economy grew 2.1% after 2.8% in 2024.

The Core Personal Consumption Expenditures Index (Core PCE), which excludes volatile food and energy prices and is considered a key indicator for the Fed, rose by 3.1% year-on-year in January and by 0.4% from a month earlier. Analysts had forecast a 2.9% increase. The overall PCE index increased by 2.8% in annualized terms, which coincided with the forecasts of economists.

The data show that inflation in the country is still noticeably above the 2% target level set by the Fed. This strengthens the regulator's arguments in favor of keeping interest rates at the current level, Barron's noted. According to the FedWatch monitoring tool, traders estimate the probability of keeping interest rates at the current level following the Fed's March 18 meeting at 99.2%.

The 32 member countries of the International Energy Agency have agreed to provide the market with 400 million barrels of oil from strategic reserves to ease supply disruptions caused by war in the Middle East. This is the largest collective release of reserves in IEA history, CNBC noted. Amid the news, the price of Brent crude oil temporarily dipped to $88 a barrel on Wednesday, March 11.

The decision comes after a sharp drop in exports in the Strait of Hormuz, through which about a fifth of the world's oil passes: supplies from the region have fallen to less than 10% of pre-war levels. However, the key issue is the speed at which supplies are coming to the market: realistic rates are estimated at about 1.2 million barrels per day, while possible supply disruptions through the strait could reach about 15 million barrels per day, Bloomberg writes.

The war has caused the biggest oil supply disruption in history, affecting about 7.5% of global supply, the IEA said in a report. According to its assessment, as early as March, global supplies could be reduced by 8 million barrels per day, and rising prices and economic uncertainty are beginning to curb demand, because of which the forecast of its increase for 2026 is reduced to 640 thousand barrels per day.

What else is there to read about it?

- The loss of 20% of the world's oil and gas supplies due to the war in the Middle East forces analysts to allow prices to reach $200 per barrel. Oninvest columnist Mikhail Overchenko explained why such a scenario could trigger a new round of inflation in his article "Incredible Shift: Where Two Weeks of War in Iran Have Taken the World Economy".

- Why China has become the main beneficiary of the war in the Middle East was explained by investor and author of the Kubyshka Telegram channel Evgeny Marchenko in his column "How China tacitly benefits from the war in the Persian Gulf".

- How the war in the Middle East will affect Kazakhstan's economy, which depends on oil revenues, was discussed by Olga Moshkina, Junior Director for Corporate Ratings at Expert RA Agency, in the article "War in the Middle East: Will Kazakhstan be able to benefit from it?".

AI startup Anthropic has filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Defense and other federal agencies, seeking to challenge a decision to deem the company a "supply chain risk" and ban it from government-related projects. The company claims the punishment stems from its refusal to lift restrictions on the use of the Claude chatbot - specifically the ban on mass surveillance of citizens and use in fully autonomous weapons.

Following the conflict, the White House banned federal agencies and contractors from working with Anthropic, and US President Donald Trump publicly criticized the company. The startup considers these measures illegal and claims they could jeopardize hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and its contracts with private clients.

What else is there to read?

- The war with Iran and the attack on the AI giant Anthropic may become a dangerous reason for the US authorities to finally get rid of any legal restrictions, Nobel laureate Daron Adzhemoglu warned in his column "Why an attack on Anthropic is more dangerous than a war with Iran: a Nobel laureate's opinion".

Oracle's revenue from cloud infrastructure for AI in the reporting quarter grew by 84% to $4.9 billion, exceeding analysts' expectations. The growth rate also accelerated, up 68% in the previous quarter. The company said it is starting to turn its huge portfolio of AI-powered orders into real revenue: outstanding contracts reached $553 billion. After the publication of the report, Oracle shares rose more than 9% in trading on March 11.

The company's total quarterly revenue rose 22% to $17.19 billion and net income rose 27% to $3.72 billion, or $1.27 per share. It was the first quarter in more than 15 years that Oracle was able to achieve revenue and profit growth of more than 20%, the company said. Oracle raised its sales forecast for fiscal 2027 to $90 billion.

The increase in demand is due to large cloud infrastructure contracts for OpenAI, Meta and other customers. However, Oracle's large-scale investments in data centers and Nvidia GPU leases continue to put pressure on cash flow. Such businesses also generate lower margins than traditional software license sales, and the company's free cash flow has been negative about $13.18 billion over the past 12 months.

The investment boom in the field of artificial intelligence over the past year has brought 45 new members to the Forbes list of billionaires whose fortunes are linked to AI companies. In total, Forbes-2026 lists a record 3,428 billionaires, with at least 86 of them directly related to the AI industry, and their combined fortune is estimated at about $2.9 trillion.

The richest new AI billionaire is Surge AI platform founder Edwin Chen, formerly an engineer at Google and Meta ($18 billion), followed by Liu Debing of language model developer Z.ai ($9.1 billion) and Daniel Nadler of medical search service OpenEvidence ($7.6 billion). The new billionaires also include the founders of startups Perplexity, Cursor and Lovable, as well as companies building infrastructure for AI.

Nvidia will invest $2 billion in Nebius, a cloud AI company founded by Arkady Volozh. The companies plan to cooperate in building AI infrastructure, managing computing clusters, developing inference systems and creating so-called AI factories. Following the news, Nebius shares rose more than 16% in U.S. trading on March 11.

Nebius will get early access to new generations of Nvidia gas pedals and expects to deploy capacity in excess of 5 gigawatts by 2030. In late 2024, Nebius raised $700 million from a group of investors that included Nvidia. According to corporate filings published shortly after the deal, Nebius' stake in Nvidia was worth about $33 million as of December 2024. Nebius founder and CEO Arkady Volozh's fortune is $3.7 billion, according to Forbes data as of March 13, 2026.

Apple for the second time postponed the release of a smart home screen with artificial intelligence, as the key element of the device - the updated voice assistant Xi - is still not ready. This was written by Bloomberg, citing sources. The gadget itself has already been developed, but the company was unable to integrate new AI functions into Siri in time, including Google technologies, so the launch has been pushed back to about September.

Apple envisions the device, codenamed J490, to be the central hub for the smart home, with a 7-inch screen that can recognize the user's face and show personalized data like calendar events, reminders, music and news. Apple expects to unveil it in the fall, along with an updated version of Siri and new AI features in time for the release of the iPhone 18 Pro.

British fintech startup Revolut has announced that it has received a full banking license in the UK. This will allow the company to start full operations as a bank and launch bank accounts for new customers in the coming days. Until now, the service had a restricted banking license in the country, where Revolut already has about 13 million customers, which it received in July 2024 after a three-year approval process.

The lifting of restrictions will allow Revolut to offer loans and other banking products, and customer deposits will be protected by the FSCS deposit insurance system. The company expects that this will strengthen its position in its home market in competition with large British banks.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor