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This week, we looked at how oil crossed $110 a barrel, and diesel surpassed $5 a gallon.

In this edition, we also covered the electricity crisis hiding inside the AI boom, the U.S. income divergence defining consumer spending, and what February's last clean inflation read means now that the war has started.

Now, let's dive into the insights.

— Insights Team, Rwazi

In 2022, dedicated AI data centres consumed 30 terawatt-hours of electricity globally. By 2026, that figure will have reached 220 TWh, a more than seven-fold increase in four years.

Combined with traditional data centres, which have grown from 380 to 620 TWh, total global data centre electricity demand has doubled to 840 TWh and is still accelerating.

The reason is structural. A standard Google search uses 0.3 watt-hours of electricity. A single ChatGPT request uses 2.9 watt-hours, nearly ten times as much.

This is happening at precisely the moment when the Middle East conflict is pushing energy prices higher from an entirely separate direction. Two compounding pressures on the same grid, arriving simultaneously.

Between 2019 and 2024, median household income in the United States rose 21.9% nationally.

The problem is that 21.9% is an average, and averages over this much geographic divergence hide as much as they reveal.

Colorado led every other state at 46.9%, more than double the national rate. Georgia followed at 43.4%, Maine at 36.3%, Montana at 36.1%, and Tennessee at 34.0%.

For consumer-facing businesses, this geographic divergence is a segmentation problem disguised as a macroeconomic story.

When diesel prices rise, everything that moves becomes more expensive. On Tuesday, U.S. diesel prices surpassed $5 per gallon for the first time since 2022.

The trigger is the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world's oil flows daily. By Wednesday, Brent crude reached $110 per barrel after Iran and Qatar accused Israel of striking a shared Gulf natural gas field.

Gas prices have already risen roughly 20% since the conflict began. The broader transmission is already in motion: freight surcharges, insurance premiums, and cold chain logistics costs are all moving.

The Consumer Price Index rose 0.3% in February and 2.4% year over year, numbers that, taken alone, suggest a stable inflationary environment. February's CPI does not include a single day of the Iran war's impact. The conflict began on the final day of the month.

Within February's data, food prices were already running above the headline rate, up 0.4% month over month and 3.1% year over year.

The March CPI, arriving in mid-April, will be the first measure of how quickly the war is being passed through to prices. Based on what energy and freight markets are already showing, the answer will not be comfortable reading.

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