Oil’s wild ride, Oracle earnings, Kevin Warsh’s ‘perfect storm’ and more in Morning Squawk

Happy Wednesday. If you’re a fan of commercial real estate, or Netflix’s “Owning Manhattan” (or both), check out Ryan Serhant’s sitdown with CNBC’s Diana Olick.

Stock futures are around flat this morning. The three major indexes finished yesterday’s session little changed.

Here are five key things investors need to know to start the trading day:

Yesterday, Energy Secretary Chris Wright shared — and then deleted — a post on X saying that the U.S. Navy escorted a tanker through the Strait of Hormuz. Oil prices tanked amid hopes of the crude trade normalizing. The problem: The escort didn’t happen.

Here’s what to know:

• Shortly after the post was deleted, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that “the U.S. Navy has not escorted a tanker or a vessel at this time.” She said she had not talked to Wright about the post.
• An Energy Department spokesperson later said the posted video was “incorrectly captioned” by staff.
• U.S. and Brent crude prices ended yesterday down more than 11%, paring some of their losses after it became clear Wright’s post was inaccurate.
• Oil prices are rising this morning after the United Kingdom said three ships were struck off Iran’s coast — one in the Strait of Hormuz.
• All eyes are on the International Energy Agency as the group considers releasing oil from its reserves.
• Stock futures, meanwhile, are little changed as investors await February’s consumer price index report due in at 8:30 a.m. ET.
• Follow live markets updates here.

Shares of Oracle are 10% higher this morning after the company topped Wall Street’s quarterly estimates and raised its guidance for the 2027 fiscal year.

The software firm said its cloud revenue surged 44% to $8.9 billion in the third quarter. What’s more, Oracle’s remaining performance obligations more than quadrupled from a year ago to over $550 billion. The software vendor said it has the necessary capital to back up that growth.

On a call with analysts, Oracle CEO Clay Magouyrk namedropped Cerebras as a key maker of artificial intelligence hardware, alongside chip titans Nvidia and AMD. As CNBC’s Jordan Novet notes, the notable mention comes as Cerebras aims to go public after withdrawing its filing for an IPO last year.

Kevin Warsh, President Donald Trump’s nominee for Federal Reserve Chair, could take the central bank’s helm at a perilous time. As one economist told CNBC’s Jeff Cox, Warsh is facing a “perfect storm.”

Warsh would have to decide whether to focus on batting down inflation or supporting labor market growth. It’s a decision that could be made even trickier by the potential for rising energy prices amid the U.S.-Iran conflict.

But Warsh’s confirmation in the Senate could still be an uphill battle. Sen. Thom Tillis said yesterday that he would not back down from his blockade of Fed nominees until the criminal investigation into outgoing Chair Jerome Powell is resolved. “This is not about people, it’s about process,” said Tillis, who later on Tuesday met with Warsh.

Big Tech is taking sides in Anthropic’s standoff with the Pentagon.

Microsoft came to Anthropic’s defense yesterday, saying in a court filing that a judge should issue a temporary restraining order barring the Pentagon from designating the AI startup as a supply chain risk.

On the other hand, Alphabet is looking to strengthen its relationship with the Defense Department. As CNBC’s MacKenzie Sigalos reports, the Google parent said yesterday that it would roll out a feature for building custom AI agents on the Pentagon’s enterprise AI portal.

Amazon won a temporary injunction yesterday blocking Perplexity’s AI browser Comet from accessing its site.

The e-commerce giant sued Perplexity late last year, alleging the startup was concealing its AI agents that were scraping Amazon’s site. U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney said Amazon showed “strong evidence” that Comet accessed Amazon’s website without the company’s authorization.

Meanwhile, CNBC’s Annie Palmer confirmed that Amazon held an internal meeting yesterday focused on recent outages. While an internal document initially placed some blame on generative AI-assisted production changes for the incidents, those references were removed before the meeting.

The average cost for a gallon of gas hit the highest level since 2024 yesterday, according to AAA. Here are the numbers to know:

• Yesterday’s average price per gallon: $3.54
• Increase from a month ago: 21%

— CNBC’s Spencer Kimball, Sean Conlon, Pia Singh, Dan Mangan, Jordan Novet, Annie Palmer, Ashley Capoot and MacKenzie Sigalos contributed to this report. Josephine Rozzelle edited this edition.