Energy and chemical stocks tumbled early Wednesday on growing expectations that the US participation in the Iran war is nearing an end, and West Texas Intermediate crude oil futures slipped back below $100 a barrel.

LyondellBasell, APA Corporation, Dow, Inc., CF Industries, and Marathon Petroleum — the S&P 500’s top 5 gainers last month — all sank.

Natural gas drillers EOG Resources, Devon Energy, Coterra Energy, and Diamondback Energy dropped, as did integrated oil giants Exxon and Chevron. Fuel refiners and marketers such as Phillips 66 and Valero also fell.

Don’t shed too many tears for these energy giants; the S&P 500 energy sector rose 10% in March and 37% in Q1 2026.

The Energy Select Sector SPDR Fund is coming off its second-best quarter on record relative to the SPDR S&P 500 ETF, based on data going back to 1999.

Memory, networking, chipmaking machinery, semiconductor, and rack-building stocks were all up early Wednesday, in a broad-based reboot of the data center trade on growing optimism about America’s potential exit from the Iran war.

Companies that make all the core components of data center were on the move early. Memory plays Micron, Sandisk, Western Digital, and Seagate Technology Holdings all opened near the top of the S&P 500’s leaders, as they shook off last week’s jitters related to a Google Research announcement about an AI algorithm that might cut demand for memory.

Fiber-optic and networking shares like Ciena Corp., Arista Networks, Corning, Coherent, Amphenol, and Lumentum — popular recent data center plays — also rose. OG data center trades like chip companies Nvidia, Intel, and Advanced Micro Devices gained. And the companies that make the machines that make the chips, like Lam Research and KLA Corp, are also catching a bid.

Even the more hard-hat elements of the AI boom were up, with Comfort Systems USA, Eaton Corp, Carrier, and Quanta Services rising. Server rack builders Dell and HP Enterprise also increased.

Clearly, there’s a big element of relief rally at play in the early bounce, building on Monday’s advance, which saw the S&P 500 post its biggest one-day gain since May.

Intel is spending $14.2 billion to take back full ownership of a manufacturing facility in Ireland, the company announced on Wednesday.

“The agreement reflects Intel’s continued business momentum underpinned by the growing and essential role CPUs play in the era of AI,” according to the company’s press release.

Shares are soaring, up around 6% in early trading.

Investors appear to be viewing this measure as a concrete sign that Intel’s turnaround plan is entering a new phase — growth mode, powered by AI — after years of sluggish sales forced a focus on cost controls.

The chipmaker had previously sold a 49% stake in this fab for $11.2 billion to Apollo Global Management in order to raise cash for other investment opportunities, including its 18A manufacturing process in the US.

Intel intends to fund the transaction through available cash and an additional $6.5 billion in debt.

Sportswear kingpin Nike is tumbling on Wednesday morning after saying it doesn’t expect to grow sales this year.

On its fiscal Q3 earnings call, management said that revenue is expected to drop 2% to 4% in the current quarter, and that overall they “expect revenues to be down low-single-digits versus the prior year, with gains in North America offset by declines in Greater China.” That’s a disappointment to analysts, who were anticipating 2% growth in Q4 and even more in the latter stages of the year, per Bloomberg.

Nike’s Q3 sales in China — where the company earns about 15% of its revenue — fell 7% to $1.62 billion. The company had issued weak guidance for this quarter considering continued softness in the region. That’s its seventh straight quarter of sales declines in the market. While this quarter’s was decline was less than feared, management warned that more pain is in the offing.

Nike’s turnaround effort “is complex work, and parts of it are taking longer than I’d like,” said CEO Elliott Hill.

Nike’s fiscal Q3 results (the three months ended February) were solid at the headline level:

• Earnings of $0.35 per share, comfortably above the Wall Street consensus estimate of $0.29 per share compiled by FactSet.

• $11.28 billion in total revenue, roughly in line with the $11.26 billion estimate.

But the gloomy sales outlook has Wall Street analysts souring on the stock:

• JPMorgan downgraded the shares to “neutral” from “overweight” and cut its price target to $52 from $86.

• Citi reduced its target price to $53 from $65,

• Stifel lowered its price target to $56 from $65,

• Truist reduced its price target to $57 from $69, and

• Barclays cut its target price to $67 from $73.

Nike shares are trading near decade lows this month, as tariffs continue to weigh on profits and shipping costs rise amid the war with Iran. As of Tuesday’s close, the stock was down 17% year to date.

Memory stocks rose Tuesday, after Bernstein analysts called the recent panic over Google’s TurboQuant AI algorithm “overdone.”

Bernstein analyst Mark Newman wrote:

“[Hard disk drive] and Memory stocks have sold off significantly due in part to fears from Google’s TurboQuant report. This however, should have zero impact on HDD demand and negligible impact on NAND demand. Given the stock sell-off we see this as an attractive entry point for Seagate Technology Holdings, Western Digital and Sandisk’s and upgrade WDC to Outperform.”

All three stocks were up early Tuesday, as was memory chip maker Micron.

Today’s rally stands in stark contrast to the pummeling these shares have endured over the last week, after Google Research published a technical paper on March 24 detailing its TurboQuant AI algorithm, which compresses the amount of data associated with AI operations without affecting the accuracy of AI models.

That was seen as a threat to surging AI demand for memory storage, which has supercharged prices for memory chips and memory-related stocks over the last year.