🛬 Soft lows, semi highs 🛫

With investors now less worried about what a war and spike in oil prices will do to the global economy, they’ve returned to worrying about what AI tools will do to software stocks.

• The iShares Expanded Tech Software ETF was dumped hard again on Thursday to the tune of nearly 4%. That comes after having given up a gain of nearly 4% on Wednesday to close about 1% lower. 

• That was the biggest reversal from well in the green to deep in the red for the software ETF in exactly one year, when stocks hit their 2025 lows the day before President Trump watered down his reciprocal tariff regime.

• The drop comes a day after Anthropic launched Claude Managed Agents, designed to streamline, automate, and increase the use of its tools in workflows. 

• The Claude maker, which seems to be going from strength to strength, recently talked up the power of its upcoming Mythos model, with OpenAI then saying similar things about one of its own tools.

While the software ETF hit a fresh 52-week low, the VanEck Semiconductor ETF posted a record closing high. The divergence between the two industries within tech should come as no surprise. In fact, it’s never been more likely that if semis are outperforming the S&P 500, software is lagging (and vice versa).

The Takeaway

The fundamentals behind the mechanics: the true enablers of software disruption (presumably Anthropic, and to a lesser extent OpenAI) may be privately held. Those are the firms that are lowering the barriers to entry to software and raising the prospect of lower supply, or a lower cost of production. But in order to do that, these AI tools need to be powered by a ton of chips (and memory, and networking equipment), making that hardware scarce. And there’s certainly a number of publicly traded companies available that investors have loved as beneficiaries of this demand for compute.

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Amazon finished Thursday up 5.6% after the company disclosed that its cloud unit’s AI revenue run rate topped $15 billion in the first quarter of 2026, the first hard number the company has provided for its top-line AI performance.

• Sales generated from the emergent technology are “ascending rapidly” and already 260x what Amazon Web Services revenues were at a similar time in its maturity, CEO Andy Jassy wrote in his letter to shareholders.

• Amazon’s most defining feature that allowed the e-commerce and cloud company to scale to the behemoth it is today is its unrelenting willingness to invest. Jassy’s letter affirmed that the company is applying that exact same approach to AI across multiple business lines.

• “We’re not going to be conservative in how we play this — we’re investing to be the meaningful leader, and our future business, operating income, and FCF [free cash flow] will be much larger because of it,” he wrote.

• Amazon also said its custom chip business, including Graviton, Trainium, and Nitro chips, has now exceeded a $20 billion annual revenue run rate, doubling from the $10 billion reported earlier this year.

He acknowledged that AWS could be growing “even faster,” noting that the cloud division continues to face “capacity constraints that yield unserved demand.” He added that Amazon had to turn down two large AWS customers that wanted to buy all of its custom Graviton CPU chip capacity this year.

The Takeaway

On the investment side, Amazon reiterated its plans to spend roughly $200 billion in capital expenditure in 2026. While investors have become somewhat reticent to buy into the promise of future AI-generated cash flows, Jassy pushed back on those concerns, saying that the company isn’t investing “on a hunch” and offering a timetable for when these investments will pay off.

Much of the capex is expected to be monetized in 2027 and 2028, he said, and is already supported by customer commitments, including more than $100 billion from OpenAI, as well as several other deals completed or “deep in process.”

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The oil and gas crisis sparked by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz — which the head of the International Energy Agency called “more serious than the ones in 1973, ​1979, and 2022 together” — is far from resolved. Commodities analyst Rory Johnston lays out how to better understand the oil market’s situation.

Here’s what to watch for

• ⛳ Golf: It’s the biggest weekend in golf, as the sport convenes upon Augusta, Georgia, for the Masters Tournament. Scottie Scheffler is seen as having the best shot at winning, with a 23% chance,* followed by Rory McIlroy with 14% and Ludvig Åberg with 11%. 

• ⛳ The Masters: If you’re mostly skipping the golf and just waiting for the SportsCenter highlights, though, markets are pricing in a 47% chance of at least one hole-in-one, a 17% chance of two or more, and an 11% chance of three or more. 

• 🤖 AI: Anthropic’s revenue run rate is coming in at $30 billion, which, depending on how you count it, comes in ahead of OpenAI. Flagship product Claude has the inside track to finish the year as the top AI, with markets pricing in a 56% chance it tops the LMArena Leaderboard.

*Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.

• March CPI inflation data