AI infrastructure still driving capex
Analysts project hyperscalers will spend heavily on AI infrastructure in 2026, and coverage says Nvidia now accounts for roughly 22% of TSMC's revenue—potentially overtaking Apple as TSMC's largest customer. Commentary notes the demand is shifting investor views toward a long-duration industrial build‑out that benefits chipmakers and second‑source suppliers like AMD. (ibtimes.com.au, 247wallst.com)
The biggest technology companies are still raising spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure in 2026, even after investor worries about returns. (finance.yahoo.com) Amazon said it plans about $200 billion in 2026 capital expenditures, Alphabet guided to $175 billion to $185 billion, Meta forecast $115 billion to $135 billion, and Microsoft’s run rate points to about $145 billion for its 2026 fiscal year. Together, that implies roughly $635 billion to $665 billion of spending, up from about $381 billion in 2025. (finance.yahoo.com) Alphabet said most of its 2026 spending will go to artificial intelligence computing capacity for Google DeepMind and to meet cloud demand, and its cloud backlog reached $240 billion at the end of the fourth quarter. The company spent $91.4 billion in 2025, so the top end of its new range would be more than double last year’s total. (cnbc.com) A data center build-out starts with chips, then racks of servers, then buildings, power gear, and networking to connect them. Analysts at S&P Global said consensus estimates for Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft point to nearly $500 billion of capital expenditures in 2026, up more than $100 billion from 2025. (spglobal.com) That spending is changing the semiconductor supply chain. CNBC reported on January 26 that analyst Ben Bajarin projected Nvidia would generate about $33 billion of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing revenue in 2026, or roughly 22%, versus about $27 billion, or 18%, for Apple. (cnbc.com) Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing does not rank customers by name in its public filings, but it said in March that its largest customer accounted for 22% of net revenue and its second-largest customer accounted for 12%. Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang said on a podcast in January that Nvidia is now Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing’s largest customer. (cnbc.com) The shift marks a break from the smartphone era, when Apple was widely seen as the foundry’s anchor customer for iPhone and Mac chips. Now the fastest-growing orders are tied to graphics processors and other accelerators used to train and run artificial intelligence models in cloud data centers. (cnbc.com) Investors have not treated all of that spending as automatically positive. Yahoo Finance reported Amazon shares fell more than 8% after its 2026 capex plan, Alphabet shares fell 3% after its guidance, and Microsoft shares fell more than 11% after quarterly results that coincided with concerns about spending and Azure growth. (finance.yahoo.com) Even with that skepticism, the money keeps moving into the same bottlenecks: advanced chips, servers, and data centers. As long as hyperscalers keep writing larger checks in 2026, suppliers from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing to Nvidia and rival chipmakers such as Advanced Micro Devices remain tied to the same build-out. (finance.yahoo.com)
