1 week ago
10
Micah Zimmerman, The Motley Fool
Sun, May 10, 2026 astatine 12:20 PM CDT 5 min read
The situation that exposed the artificial quality (AI) proviso concatenation besides revealed which companies beryllium supra it.
Since Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz connected Feb. 28, the planetary helium marketplace has mislaid entree to astir 30% of full output. Qatar's Ras Laffan facility, the world's largest helium accumulation site, has been idle since aboriginal March. Moody's confirmed successful April what semiconductor engineers had already calculated: There is nary viable substitute for ultra-high-purity helium astatine scale, and the state is indispensable astatine aggregate stages of spot manufacturing. The companies that physique the carnal chips are moving against a six-month stockpile clock.
Will AI make the world's archetypal trillionaire? Our squad conscionable released a study connected a little-known company, called an "Indispensable Monopoly," providing the captious exertion Nvidia and Intel some need.
For investors trying to bargain into AI close now, the proviso concatenation question has a wide answer. The companies that substance astir are the ones whose products are axenic software. Two reported net this week marque the lawsuit for them.
1. Datadog
Datadog (NASDAQ: DDOG) reported Q1 2026 results connected May 7, and the banal surged astir 30% successful trading, the largest single-session determination successful the company's history. Revenue deed $1 billion, up 32% twelvemonth implicit year, crossing the billion-dollar quarterly threshold for the archetypal time. Non-GAAP net per stock (EPS) grew astir 30% to $0.60. Free currency travel came successful astatine $289 million. The institution raised its full-year 2026 outlook.
But the fig beneath the header matters much than the header itself. Datadog present has astir 4,550 customers with yearly recurring gross of much than $100,000. That's a cohort that represents the company's astir durable gross basal and 1 that grew meaningfully twelvemonth implicit year. These are enterprises with AI and unreality infrastructure that make logs, traces, and metrics astatine a standard that demands a dedicated observability platform.
Datadog doesn't request the Strait of Hormuz. Its merchandise is axenic software. The merchandise is simply a cloud-hosted observability level that monitors AI workloads, infrastructure, and applications done a browser and an API. There is nary carnal manufacturing process, nary semiconductor fabrication, and nary concern state successful its outgo structure; erstwhile a lawsuit deploys Datadog, the lone happening that ships is code.
What changed successful Q1 is that AI workloads, GPU clusters, LLM inference pipelines, and agentic workflows started showing up successful Datadog's billing successful a worldly way. The company's GPU monitoring product, launched this quarter, gives AI teams visibility into their fleets' outgo and performance, a capableness that did not beryllium 2 years agone and that each superior AI deployment present needs. The much AI deployments that spell into production, the larger Datadog's addressable marketplace becomes -- careless of whether the Strait of Hormuz reopens tomorrow.
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