Disclaimer: This is not financial advice. These are personal observations from a developer who watches geopolitics through the lens of infrastructure costs and tech investment. Do your own research before making any investment decisions.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about why I think SpaceX is the most important tech company and how developers can think about long-term investment differently. That post was about conviction — picking a direction and staying patient.
Today I want to talk about the other side of the equation: risk.
The Iran nuclear deal is back in the news. The UN nuclear agency has confirmed that inspections will proceed. Trump says Iran has agreed to no tolls on ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz. Some frozen Iranian funds will reportedly be released for US agricultural purchases. Whether you think this deal is good or bad politically — that is not what this post is about.
What I want to explore is simple: how does a geopolitical event like this ripple through the tech world and affect us as developers and investors?
Oil Prices → Server and Energy Costs
Let us start with the most direct connection. Any Iran deal affects global oil supply. More Iranian oil on the market means downward pressure on prices. Less tension in the Strait of Hormuz — through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil passes — means less risk premium baked into energy costs.
Why should a developer care about oil prices? Because energy is the single largest operational cost for data centers.
- AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud all factor energy costs into their pricing. When energy gets cheaper, there is room for cloud pricing to stabilize or decrease.
- AI training runs are extraordinarily energy-intensive. A single large language model training run can consume as much electricity as a small town uses in a year. Lower energy costs make AI development more accessible.
- For someone like me, running a blog on a $6/month VPS, the effect is indirect but real. My hosting provider’s margins are affected by energy costs. Stable energy prices mean stable hosting prices.
The math is straightforward: geopolitical stability in the Middle East → more predictable energy costs → more predictable infrastructure costs for tech.
Global Trade Routes → Supply Chains for Tech Hardware
The Strait of Hormuz is not just an oil chokepoint. It is a critical shipping lane for global trade. When tensions rise in that region, shipping insurance costs spike, routes get diverted, and delivery timelines stretch.
For tech, this matters more than most people realize:
- Semiconductor supply chains are already fragile. Any additional disruption to global shipping routes adds delays and costs to chip delivery. Remember the GPU shortages during the AI boom? Shipping disruptions made those worse.
- Server hardware — the physical machines that run our cloud infrastructure — travels through these trade routes. Longer shipping times mean delayed data center buildouts.
- Consumer electronics — the devices your users access your apps on — are affected by every link in the supply chain.
A stable Strait of Hormuz with no tolls, as reportedly agreed in this deal, removes one friction point from an already complicated global supply chain. For developers building products, fewer supply chain disruptions mean more predictable hardware costs and timelines.
Investor Confidence → Tech Stock Valuations
This one is less about technology and more about money — but money funds technology.
Geopolitical uncertainty is one of the biggest factors in market volatility. When investors are worried about potential military conflict in the Middle East, they pull money out of growth stocks (which includes most of tech) and move into “safe haven” assets like bonds, gold, or defense stocks.
When a deal reduces that uncertainty, even temporarily:
- Capital flows back into tech. Venture funding becomes slightly easier. IPO windows open. Startups get funded.
- Public tech valuations stabilize. Less geopolitical risk premium means investors are willing to pay more for future growth.
- Developer hiring benefits. When tech companies feel confident about the future, they hire. When they are scared, they freeze and lay off.
I wrote in my SpaceX post about timeline uncertainty being the biggest investment risk. Geopolitical events like the Iran deal are exactly the kind of external factors that create that uncertainty. Any reduction in geopolitical tension is, indirectly, good for the tech ecosystem.
Defense Spending → AI and Cybersecurity Investment
Here is an angle most tech bloggers miss. Geopolitical deals do not just affect commercial tech — they reshape defense spending priorities.
When military tensions decrease in one region, defense budgets do not necessarily shrink. They redirect. And increasingly, they redirect toward:
- AI and autonomous systems — military AI spending continues to accelerate regardless of specific regional deals.
- Cybersecurity — as physical conflict risk decreases, cyber conflict risk often increases. Nations invest more in offensive and defensive cyber capabilities.
- Space and satellite systems — surveillance, communication, and positioning systems get more funding as part of modern defense strategy.
For developers, this translates to job opportunities and contract work. Companies like Palantir, Anduril, and Shield AI are hiring aggressively. The skills you build as a developer — especially in AI, machine learning, and systems engineering — are directly applicable to these growing sectors.
Connecting to My SpaceX Thesis: Diversification Matters
In my SpaceX investment post, I argued that the company is building infrastructure for the next century. I still believe that. But the Iran deal situation illustrates an important complementary principle: diversification is not just a financial strategy — it is a risk management framework.
Think about it as a developer:
- You would never build a system with a single point of failure. You have redundancy, failover, multiple data centers.
- Your investment portfolio should work the same way. Conviction in SpaceX or AI does not mean putting all your money in one basket.
- Geopolitical events are like unexpected server failures — you cannot predict them, but you can architect your portfolio to survive them.
The Iran deal could fall apart tomorrow. Another deal could emerge next month. The specific event matters less than having a system designed to handle uncertainty. That is true for both software architecture and personal finance.
Geopolitical stability also directly benefits tech infrastructure. Starlink, the global internet backbone I discussed in my SpaceX post, operates across international airspace and territorial waters. The fewer conflicts and trade restrictions there are, the more efficiently these global systems can operate. Peace is good for infrastructure, and infrastructure is what enables everything else.
The Korean Perspective: Why This Hits Close to Home
I want to share something personal here. As a Korean developer, the Iran nuclear deal is not just an abstract geopolitical event for me. It directly affects my home country’s economy.
South Korea imports roughly 70% of its oil from the Middle East. We are one of the most energy-import-dependent developed nations on Earth. When tensions rise in the Persian Gulf, Korean energy prices spike. When the Strait of Hormuz is threatened, Korean strategic reserves are at risk.
This has real consequences:
- The Korean won weakens when oil prices spike, because Korea needs more dollars to buy oil. A weak won makes imported tech — chips, servers, cloud services priced in USD — more expensive for Korean companies.
- Korean manufacturing costs rise. Samsung, SK Hynix, and other semiconductor giants are massive energy consumers. Higher energy costs eat into margins and can slow production.
- Korean consumer spending contracts. When gas and heating costs rise, people spend less on everything else — including the apps and services developers build.
So when I see headlines about an Iran deal potentially stabilizing Middle East energy markets, I do not just think “interesting geopolitics.” I think: “This could lower the production costs for the chips in my server, stabilize my country’s currency, and keep my hosting costs predictable.”
Korea’s experience also offers a cautionary lesson. Being highly dependent on a single region for critical resources — whether it is Middle East oil or TSMC for chips — is a systemic risk. Diversification at the national level mirrors what I preach at the portfolio level.
What I Am Actually Doing About It
I want to be transparent about my approach, because I think too many investment posts are all theory and no action:
- I am not trading the news. The Iran deal could collapse, be renegotiated, or evolve. I am not making investment decisions based on a single headline. I am staying with my long-term thesis.
- I am tracking energy costs. As someone who runs a VPS and cares about infrastructure, I keep an eye on energy prices as a leading indicator for tech costs.
- I am maintaining diversification. My conviction in tech infrastructure (SpaceX, AI, cloud) is strong, but I make sure my exposure to geopolitical risk is managed through diversification across sectors and geographies.
- I am staying informed but not reactive. As a developer, I know the difference between monitoring and alerting. I monitor geopolitical events. I only “alert” — meaning take action — when fundamentals change, not when headlines change.
The Bottom Line
The Iran nuclear deal is not a tech story on the surface. But underneath, it touches everything we care about as developers and tech investors:
- Energy costs that power our servers
- Supply chains that deliver our hardware
- Capital flows that fund our startups
- Defense budgets that drive AI innovation
- Currency stability that affects our global purchasing power
As developers, we are trained to think in systems. Every component connects to every other component. Geopolitics is just another dependency in our stack — and like any dependency, it needs to be understood, monitored, and managed.
My advice? Keep building. Keep investing for the long term. Understand that events like the Iran deal are inputs to your risk model, not signals to panic or celebrate. The developers who thrive are the ones who build resilient systems — in code and in life.