Wars don't wait for your roadmap

The US-Israel-Iran conflict has killed hundreds since late February 2026. Oil prices have more than doubled. Undersea cables connecting continents are compromised. Semiconductor supply chains are under strain. And most of the tech industry is still arguing about model benchmarks. Geopolitical instability doesn't stay in its lane. It ripples through the systems that the entire technology industry depends on, from energy grids to shipping lanes to raw materials. If you build software, run infrastructure, or make product decisions, this is not background noise. It's a forcing function.

The second-order effects are already here

The most immediate impact is energy. Oil prices surged from around $67 per barrel before the conflict began on February 28 to over $119 a barrel by mid-March, their highest level since June 2022. Brent crude jumped 13% in a single day of trading on March 2. The White House has tried to reassure Americans that the spike is temporary, but "temporary" is doing a lot of heavy lifting when supply cuts from Saudi Arabia and other producers are compounding the disruption. For tech, this translates directly into cost. Data center construction costs were already climbing at 7% annually, reaching $10.7 million per megawatt in 2025. With energy prices spiking, those numbers are moving further in the wrong direction. Electricity prices in the US rose 6.7% last year, faster than inflation, and that was before the war escalated. Every increase in energy cost flows downstream: higher cloud bills, higher API pricing, higher operational costs for anyone running compute-intensive workloads. The chain is simple. Energy prices spike, data center operating costs rise, cloud providers pass costs along, and your AWS bill goes up. If you're training models or running inference at scale, you feel it fast.

Supply chains are more fragile than you think

The Strait of Hormuz, one of the world's most critical shipping chokepoints, has seen tanker traffic drop sharply since the conflict began. Vessels are waiting outside the strait due to security threats. The Red Sea, another vital corridor, is similarly compromised. This matters for tech in ways that aren't immediately obvious. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google spent years building data centers across the Gulf, betting the region would become a major hub for AI infrastructure. The undersea cables connecting those facilities to Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia pass through both the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz. Both are now effectively closed to commercial traffic. Meta's 2Africa undersea cable project has been delayed after its cable-laying contractor declared force majeure, stating it could no longer safely operate in the Persian Gulf. Microsoft engineers have had to reroute Azure traffic via longer alternative paths after multiple cable cuts in the Red Sea. Then there's the semiconductor supply chain. South Korea's industry ministry has identified 14 items in chip supply chains facing severe exposure due to the conflict, including helium and bromine, both essential for chip fabrication. Samsung and SK Hynix, which together account for roughly 70% of the global DRAM market and 80% of the high-bandwidth memory market, are directly affected. Taiwan's chipmaking costs are climbing as energy prices rise, putting pressure on TSMC, the foundation of today's technology industry. Bloomberg reported that the conflict is beginning to cast doubt on the reliability of the entire global chip supply. The Gulf's $300 billion in planned spending on data centers and AI infrastructure is now at risk. Microsoft's $1.5 billion investment in G42, a UAE-based AI company, is directly exposed to regional instability. These aren't abstract risks. They're assets in a conflict zone.

Export controls reshape who gets to build

Conflict accelerates the fragmentation of the technology landscape. As geopolitical tensions rise, sovereign cloud infrastructure spending is forecast to hit $80 billion in 2026, a 35.6% increase from 2025. Organizations outside the US and China are investing to gain what Gartner calls "digital and technological independence." This is the less visible but equally important shift: wars don't just disrupt supply, they reshape access. Export controls and sanctions determine which AI tools, chips, and cloud services are available in which countries. The technology stack is no longer global by default. It's increasingly partitioned by geopolitics, and every escalation accelerates that partitioning. For builders, this means the tools and infrastructure you rely on may not be available everywhere you want to ship. The assumption that cloud services are universally accessible is already breaking down.

This has happened before

The pattern is familiar. During the Gulf War in 1991, oil price shocks rippled through the global economy, affecting everything from manufacturing costs to consumer spending. The conflict demonstrated how military operations thousands of miles away could reshape economic conditions overnight. The Ukraine conflict, starting in 2022, was an even clearer preview. Russia's invasion disrupted neon gas supplies critical for semiconductor lithography, contributed to a global chip shortage, and triggered waves of sanctions that reshaped technology trade flows. Cyberattacks targeted power grids, banks, and communications infrastructure, proving that digital systems are frontline targets. The war forced rapid innovation in areas like drone technology and electronic warfare, while also revealing the vulnerability of undersea cables and satellite communications to state-level threats. Ukraine also demonstrated something that the current conflict is reinforcing: data centers are strategic infrastructure, not just commercial real estate. As the Atlantic Council noted, sustaining compute under attack is a national security imperative, comparable to shipbuilding capacity or semiconductor production. Each conflict teaches the same lesson. The global systems that technology depends on are more interconnected and more fragile than the industry tends to assume.

The privilege of treating geopolitics as optional

There's a disconnect worth naming. Tech discourse, especially in US and Western European circles, tends to treat geopolitics as someone else's problem. The timeline is full of debates about agent frameworks and context windows while hundreds of people are dying and the infrastructure those frameworks run on is under genuine threat. Not everyone has the luxury of ignoring this. If you're a developer in the Gulf region, your data centers are in a conflict zone. If you're building for users in South Asia or Africa, the undersea cables carrying your traffic are compromised. If you're sourcing components from East Asia, your supply chain runs through disputed waters. Treating geopolitics as optional is itself a position, one that's only available to people whose infrastructure happens to be far from the current blast radius.

What builders should actually do

None of this means you should panic. It means you should plan. Understand your supply chain. Most software teams have no idea where their compute physically lives, what cables carry their traffic, or where the chips in their servers come from. That's a problem when any of those things can be disrupted by events outside your control. Map your dependencies. Know which regions your cloud provider uses. Understand the physical infrastructure behind the abstractions. Diversify your infrastructure. Multi-cloud and multi-region aren't just reliability strategies anymore, they're geopolitical hedges. If your entire stack runs through a single provider in a single region, you have a single point of failure that a conflict halfway around the world can trigger. Build for resilience, not just performance. The industry optimizes relentlessly for speed and cost. Resilience, the ability to keep operating when things go wrong, is treated as a nice-to-have. That's backwards when the systems you depend on are visibly fragile. Cache aggressively. Design for graceful degradation. Plan for scenarios where latency increases or services become temporarily unavailable. Watch energy costs. If you're making infrastructure decisions, factor in the possibility that energy prices stay elevated for longer than the market expects. The Chatham House analysis suggests that even if the Iran conflict subsides, structural factors in US energy policy point toward long-term price increases. Stay informed. You don't need to become a foreign policy expert. But you do need a basic mental model of the physical infrastructure your software depends on and the geopolitical forces that can disrupt it. Read beyond the tech press. The signals are there if you're looking.

The roadmap is not the territory

Product roadmaps assume a stable operating environment. Quarterly plans assume that the infrastructure you're building on will keep working the way it did last quarter. These are reasonable assumptions in peacetime, but we're not in peacetime. The war between the US, Israel, and Iran is the most significant geopolitical disruption in years. Its effects on energy, supply chains, infrastructure, and the regulatory landscape are real and measurable. The tech industry's habit of treating the world outside the screen as a distraction is not just naive, it's a business risk. Wars don't wait for your roadmap. Your roadmap needs to account for the wars.

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