WTO warns that costly oil from the Iran war could slow the AI boom

The WTO has warned that a prolonged oil price spike caused by the war in the Middle East could put the brakes on the current AI boom. The logic is simple: generative AI, data centers and server hardware production consume enormous amounts of energy, and expensive energy quickly hits investment.

Why AI is vulnerable

Robert Staiger, chief economist of the World Trade Organization, linked two processes that are usually discussed separately: the war around Iran and the boom in artificial intelligence spending. According to him, if energy stays expensive throughout the year, it could noticeably slow the growth of the AI sector.

For the market, this is not an abstract risk. The current AI race rests not only on software but also on mass purchases of servers, accelerators and networking equipment, and on the construction of ever more data center capacity.

"If energy stays expensive all year, it could slow the AI boom."

The problem is compounded by the fact that this investment is concentrated in a relatively small number of very large companies. When the cost of electricity, fuel and logistics rises, capital-intensive projects are the first to be reviewed. Another factor is uncertainty over AI returns: businesses are already spending tens of billions, but it has not been conclusively proven how quickly that spending will turn into sustainable profit. If infrastructure costs rise further, some companies may slow their expansion or postpone purchases.

The WTO forecast in numbers

The WTO stresses that in 2025 global merchandise trade performed unexpectedly well, even with new US tariffs. Growth reached 4.6%, driven in large part by demand for AI-related goods as well as strong exports from Asia. In other words, AI is already affecting not just the tech market but global trade flows.

Here are the figures the organization points to:

• global merchandise trade grew 4.6% in 2025;
• the baseline forecast for 2026 is a slowdown to 1.9%;
• if oil and LNG stay expensive throughout 2026, merchandise trade growth could fall to 1.4%;
• such a scenario could remove 0.3 percentage points from the global GDP forecast and 0.5 points from the trade forecast, and the hit to energy importers could be even larger;
• about 70% of investment growth in North America in the first three quarters of 2025 came from AI-related goods.

These estimates matter also because the AI boom has become one of the main offsets to weaker global conditions. The WTO itself allows for a more positive outcome: if the conflict does not drag on and AI investment keeps its pace, trade in 2026 could get additional support. But the baseline scenario now looks noticeably more cautious than it did a year ago.

Risks reach beyond tech

The story is not limited to data centers becoming more expensive to run. The WTO considers the war, and its effect on energy and fertilizer costs, the main risk to the global economy. The Gulf countries play a key role not only as suppliers of oil and gas but also as an important link in the fertilizer supply chain. If disruptions are prolonged, the pressure would quickly move from energy to agriculture, and then to inflation and consumer prices.

That makes for a double blow. On one side, the infrastructure that AI is built on gets more expensive. On the other, costs rise for businesses far beyond the tech sector, leaving companies less room for risky or long-term investment.

For North America this is especially sensitive, because demand for AI goods grew fastest there, while Asia remains the main manufacturing hub for those shipments. If American corporations start spending more cautiously on AI, chip, server and equipment makers across the Asian supply chain will feel it quickly.

What it means

The AI boom has turned out not to be a purely digital story but part of the larger industrial and commodity economy. If expensive oil lingers, the market will begin to judge AI not only by model quality and user numbers but also by the price of electricity, logistics and hardware, without which all this growth simply does not scale.