Macro & Markets Daily — Mar 16, 2026

Oil pulled back from triple digits, a few tankers squeezed through the Strait of Hormuz, and Jensen Huang told a packed arena he's sitting on a trillion dollars in chip orders — markets rallied amid those developments. The S&P 500 gained 1.0% on the session to close at 6,699, the Nasdaq closed up 1.2% on the session, and the VIX closed around 24, down from Friday's 27. Enjoy the relief rally, but the Fed starts its two-day meeting tomorrow with growth at 0.7% and inflation re-accelerating — and that math hasn't changed.

Nvidia's annual GTC conference opened in San Jose, and CEO Jensen Huang delivered the number everyone will be repeating for the rest of the week: $1 trillion in confirmed purchase orders for Blackwell and Vera Rubin chips through 2027 — double the pipeline he cited a year ago. Nvidia shares rose about 2% on the session. He also unveiled Kyber, a next-generation rack architecture packing 144 GPUs into vertical compute trays for higher density and lower latency, expected in 2027. The Vera CPU — purpose-built for AI workloads — and NemoClaw, an enterprise agent platform, rounded out a keynote that positioned Nvidia as a full-stack company, not just a chipmaker.

The framing shift matters as much as the numbers. Huang spent significant time on inference — the work of running models inside products and workflows, as opposed to training them — signaling that the next phase of the AI boom is about commercialization at scale, not just building bigger models. "I am certain computing demand will be much higher than that," he added, which is either visionary confidence or the kind of sentence that ages poorly. GTC runs through March 19; watch for software and partner announcements that could move the application layer more than today's hardware headlines.

The semiconductor complex responded accordingly. The VanEck Semiconductor ETF rose 1.7% on the session, and Micron — which reports earnings imminently — jumped 4–6% on the session after news it acquired Powerchip's Taiwan P5 manufacturing site, adding 300,000 square feet of fab capacity. Micron's guidance on AI memory demand will be the first supply-chain reality check on whether Huang's trillion-dollar order book extends beyond Nvidia's own orbit.

The energy story that's been choking markets for two weeks loosened its grip today. Over the weekend, select LPG tankers successfully transited the Strait of Hormuz, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirmed the U.S. is allowing Iranian oil tankers through, with reports of a multinational escort coalition forming. WTI crude fell toward $94–95, down roughly 3–4% from Friday's close near $98, after plunging more than 5% intraday from last week's highs above $100.

Context: Friday's Brent close above $103 was cited as a key driver of last week's equity selloff. Today's pullback gave risk assets an early bid, but a weak Empire State Manufacturing reading (see below) capped gains into the close. The critical distinction investors should hold onto: LPG carriers got through, not commercial crude tankers. Until the latter resume normal transit, the Strait crisis is easing, not resolved. Oil and AI are now joined at the hip for anyone running large data-center fleets — power costs for training and serving models move directly with crude, making every barrel a margin story for the hyperscalers writing those trillion-dollar checks.

The FOMC begins its two-day meeting Tuesday with the worst possible hand: Q4 GDP revised to 0.7% for Q4 (half the initial estimate), core PCE — the Fed's preferred inflation gauge — re-accelerated to 3.1% year-on-year, and oil above $90. Slow growth plus rising prices is the scenario where rate cuts make inflation worse and rate hikes make the recession worse. There's no clean move.

The Fed is expected to hold rates at 3.50–3.75%. Markets are pricing in only one cut for all of 2026. The 10-year Treasury yield settled near 4.22% at the close, down a few basis points on the session, but still up 32 basis points from its late-February low. The bond market's message has been unusually blunt: Treasuries have stopped behaving like safe havens. Aberdeen Investments' Luke Hickmore noted that government bonds have "defied safe haven status" because higher oil feeds directly into transport costs, heating bills, and goods prices — making the crisis inherently inflationary rather than the kind of shock that sends investors rushing into bonds.

Wednesday's press conference, not the rate decision, is the real event. Specifically: does Chair Powell signal that the Iran oil shock is "transitory" or structural? His answer determines whether the one remaining expected cut survives — and whether the bond market's two-week selloff extends or reverses. One more variable: Powell's term expires May 15, and uncertainty about his successor has left a vacuum in forward guidance that's allowing yields to drift higher on their own.

Jensen Huang standing on stage promising a trillion dollars in chip orders while 16,000 Meta employees clean out their desks so the company can afford to buy those chips, all while a handful of LPG tankers tiptoeing through the Strait of Hormuz somehow convinced the entire S&P 500 that everything is fine.

Somewhere, a Pokémon Go player is finding out their weekend walks trained a pizza delivery robot — which feels about right for a market that just rallied on the news that the world's most important shipping lane is slightly less closed than it was Friday.

Watch what Powell does with his hands Wednesday.

If someone you know is trying to make sense of oil, AI, and the Fed colliding in the same week — forward this.