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Written by Micah Zimmerman for The Motley Fool->
The AI supply chain crisis showed that software companies are insulated from the physical bottlenecks hurting chipmakers.
More AI adoption means more demand for observability and cybersecurity platforms like Datadog and AI platforms like CrowdStrike.
The crisis that exposed the artificial intelligence (AI) supply chain also revealed which companies sit above it.
Since Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz on Feb. 28, the global helium market has lost access to roughly 30% of total output. Qatar's Ras Laffan facility, the world's largest helium production site, has been idle since early March. Moody's confirmed in April what semiconductor engineers had already calculated: There is no viable substitute for ultra-high-purity helium at scale, and the gas is indispensable at multiple stages of chip manufacturing. The companies that build the physical chips are working against a six-month stockpile clock.
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For investors trying to buy into AI right now, the supply chain question has a clear answer. The companies that matter most are the ones whose products are pure software. Two reported earnings this week make the case for them.
Datadog (NASDAQ: DDOG) reported Q1 2026 results on May 7, and the stock surged roughly 30% in trading, the largest single-session move in the company's history. Revenue hit $1 billion, up 32% year over year, crossing the billion-dollar quarterly threshold for the first time. Non-GAAP earnings per share (EPS) grew roughly 30% to $0.60. Free cash flow came in at $289 million. The company raised its full-year 2026 outlook.
But the number beneath the headline matters more than the headline itself. Datadog now has approximately 4,550 customers with annual recurring revenue of more than $100,000. That's a cohort that represents the company's most durable revenue base and one that grew meaningfully year over year. These are enterprises with AI and cloud infrastructure that generate logs, traces, and metrics at a scale that demands a dedicated observability platform.
Datadog doesn't need the Strait of Hormuz. Its product is pure software. The product is a cloud-hosted observability platform that monitors AI workloads, infrastructure, and applications through a browser and an API. There is no physical manufacturing process, no semiconductor fabrication, and no industrial gas in its cost structure; when a customer deploys Datadog, the only thing that ships is code.
What changed in Q1 is that AI workloads, GPU clusters, LLM inference pipelines, and agentic workflows started showing up in Datadog's billing in a material way. The company's GPU monitoring product, launched this quarter, gives AI teams visibility into their fleets' cost and performance, a capability that did not exist two years ago and that every serious AI deployment now needs. The more AI deployments that go into production, the larger Datadog's addressable market becomes -- regardless of whether the Strait of Hormuz reopens tomorrow.
Like Datadog, CrowdStrike (NASDAQ: CRWD) manufactures nothing. Its product is the Falcon platform, an AI-native cybersecurity engine that monitors endpoint behavior, threat intelligence, and identity in real time, and runs on software subscriptions that renew at a 98% gross retention rate. The Strait of Hormuz is not included as a line item in CrowdStrike's cost of goods sold.
The most recent results for Q4 of fiscal year 2026, ending Jan. 31, showed annual recurring revenue of $5.25 billion, up 24% year over year, and total revenue of $1.31 billion, up 23%.
The under-discussed angle with this ticker is that AI makes CrowdStrike more relevant, not less. Every AI agent deployed inside an enterprise is a new attack surface. Every API call between an LLM and a corporate database is a new vector. The Falcon platform was built to monitor exactly the kind of distributed, high-velocity environment that AI creates at scale. CrowdStrike guided for fiscal year 2027 revenue of $5.86 to $5.92 billion, representing roughly 13% growth. This is a deliberately conservative number from a management team that has beaten guidance in each of the past eight quarters.
The risk is the same one it always has been with CrowdStrike: The 2024 software update incident scarred a segment of enterprise buyers, and competitors have used that window to compete. The recovery in net new annual recurring revenue has been steady, but the scar tissue remains. Investors buying at this valuation are pricing in a return to 20%-plus growth that has not yet been confirmed for fiscal 2027.
The supply chain crisis clarified something the market was slow to price: Software platforms that sell the intelligence layer of AI (the monitoring, the security, and the observability) do not need a single atom of helium to grow. They need customers whose AI deployments are becoming increasingly complex.
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Micah Zimmerman has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends CrowdStrike, Datadog, and Moody's. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.
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