AI Capex Surge, Carbon Credit Reset, And Urea Squeeze
Three threads ran through market talk today and none of them feel small. AI capital spending is showing up in actual GDP numbers. The voluntary carbon removal market is rethinking its dependence on a single buyer. And a closed Strait of Hormuz is rewriting the math for global fertilizer prices.
AI capex is finally showing in GDP
Fixed investment in information technology equipment and software ran about 0.4% of GDP higher across the last two quarters of US data through Q1 2026. That is a meaningful step up from the prior trend, and most of it traces back to data center build-out, custom silicon, and server capacity tied to large language models.
A pass through publicly available research suggests AI-related investment may have added roughly 1% to US GDP growth. If that estimate even half holds up, AI capex is no longer a story about a few names trading at strange multiples. It is a macro line item now.
The skeptic case has always been that capex like this burns hot and short. The bull case argues the build phase can run for longer than people think because the marginal use cases keep expanding. The data here leans toward the second view, at least for now.
OpenAI versus Anthropic in the IPO queue
Traders are starting to position around which of the two leading AI labs reaches public markets first. Current chatter favors OpenAI, but Anthropic has been closing the gap on enterprise wins and model evaluations. Either listing would force a repricing of the listed AI stack, from cloud vendors to GPU makers to power utilities.
Income investors usually do not buy into IPO hype, and rightly so. But the secondary effect matters. A successful AI lab listing pulls capital toward growth names and away from steady payers in the short term. That has been the pattern for every prior tech IPO wave.
Carbon removal looks for buyers beyond Microsoft
Microsoft accounted for more than 90% of all carbon removal credit purchases last year. That is not a market. It is one contract with many counterparties. Reporting last month suggested staff at the software giant told carbon project developers that purchases were on hold while the company recalibrates for AI data center load.
The reaction from the industry has been mixed. Climeworks, which runs the largest direct air capture plant, frames it as a normal coming-of-age moment rather than a collapse. The case rests on two shifts. More voluntary buyers moving from pilot orders to commitments in the hundreds of kilotons. And regulators building carbon removals into compliance schemes, with the EU exploring inclusion in its emissions trading system and the UK targeting 2029.
The countervailing view is blunt. Many projects effectively depend on a single anchor buyer, and a real pause would cause severe pain across the sector. By the math, researchers estimate the world needs 7 to 9 gigatons of CO2 removed per year by 2050 to stay under 2C of warming. The current annual run rate is a tiny fraction of that.
For investors, the takeaway is that the carbon removal credit market is still pre-revenue at a structural level. Public equity exposure is thin, and the listed proxies are more about industrial gas, energy efficiency, and utility positioning than pure carbon removal play.
Hormuz closure squeezes fertilizer supply
About a third of internationally traded urea comes from the Gulf region. With the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed by overlapping US and Iranian actions, urea prices have pushed to multi-year highs. Farmers are improvising ahead of the fall planting season, switching to manure, crushed almond shells, and microbial products that looked niche a year ago.
The United Nations has warned that an additional 45 million people may face acute food insecurity if the disruption extends. From a pure market lens, this is a tailwind for nitrogen producers outside the Gulf, for shipping rates on alternative routes, and for some agricultural input names that had been written off as low-growth. It also lifts protein and grain prices, with knock-on effects through grocery inflation.
Equity exposure to fertilizer is concentrated in a handful of names, most of them payout-friendly. Nutrien, Mosaic, CF Industries, Yara, and ICL all sit on the income radar for investors who like the cyclical but cash-flow profile of the sector.
What this means for income investors
Three things stand out.
First, AI capex is real enough to lift GDP, which supports earnings growth for the broad index, but the gains keep concentrating in non-dividend names. A balanced sleeve in equal-weight and dividend ETFs hedges that concentration risk without giving up the macro tailwind.
Second, the carbon removal pullback is a reminder that voluntary ESG demand is fragile when corporate budgets tighten. Investors with exposure to clean-tech infrastructure should anchor on regulated cash flows, not voluntary credit markets.
Third, the Hormuz fertilizer story is the kind of slow-burning supply shock that rewards patience. Yields on the major nitrogen producers have already drifted higher. If the disruption holds, dividend coverage on that group strengthens before equity prices catch up.