Gustavo Neffa
Partner & Director at Research for Traders, Economist & Professor
AI data-center spending should reach chips first, then racks, power and cooling, benefiting Nvidia, AMD, Vertiv, Bloom Energy, Credo, Marvell, Lumentum and Micron. BofA forecasts the global data-center market at about $1T in 2026, $2.1T in 2028 and nearly $3T by 2030, a 37% annual rise; roughly 80% of a new AI site's $57M per MW cost goes to servers, networking and storage. x.comÂ
AI infrastructure bottlenecks could give eight stocks as much as 18x upside. Nvidia supplies frontier-model GPUs; Broadcom and Marvell supply custom silicon and networking; TSMC makes advanced chips; Micron supplies sold-out HBM; Vertiv provides power and cooling; Palantir monetizes enterprise AI; Alphabet spans TPUs, research, cloud and apps. The list tracks where AI infrastructure spending is flowing. x.com x.comÂ
AI suppliers' demand may not justify today's investment. Roughly $3 trillion in revenue absent last year is needed to support the spending, yet GDP growth is weak and many companies may be seeing only incremental gains. If the estimate that Anthropic uses two-thirds of its compute for training is right, it could triple inference supply. The most likely outcome for many companies, roughly half the S&P 500, is slowing growth, compressed margins and multiples; when the bubble ends is uncertain. … Show more
Inference's move toward edge devices and dense, memory-hungry racks should drive demand for specialized chips, links, power delivery and cooling. McKinsey projects inference at 60% of AI computing demand by 2030. Ambarella makes on-device AI chips; Astera Labs links GPUs, memory and networks; Credo supplies short copper connections; Rambus earns from memory interfaces; Navitas reduces power waste; Modine cools dense racks; and Super Micro builds inference-specific server racks at volume. x.com … Show more
TSMC's capex plans suggest the AI chip trade is not over for semiconductors, Nvidia, AMD and Micron. CFO Wendell Huang cites robust multi-year demand, including agentic AI, behind $60-64 billion of 2026 capex; TSMC expects 2026-28 spending to be even more significantly higher than in the prior three years. Hyperscaler earnings should reinforce the higher AI capex trajectory. CoreWeave-driven fears feel overdone, though the neocloud model does not appeal long term. x.com x.comÂ
Low Anthropic spending relative to customer expenses points to an enterprise AI adoption gap that leaves Nvidia reliant on intermediaries able to build their own chips. Anthropic's S-1 says over half the Fortune 500 were $100k+ annual customers as of September, yet spending among its publicly traded customers averaged under 0.1% of expenses in Q3 2026. That measures one provider and cannot show whether AI deployments succeed; Nvidia needs more enterprises buying its compute directly. x.comÂ
AI software and hardware advances make GPUs and power more valuable, creating huge long-term tailwinds for compute providers and AI model and app businesses. Each new software generation increases a GPU's value; each hardware generation increases the value of a gigawatt of power. That favors Nvidia, Broadcom, Intel and AppLovin. x.comÂ
A rising value of compute per watt should benefit AI cloud, chip, connectivity and power suppliers. Elon Musk says that value will rise over time. Nebius has Microsoft and Meta deals; Marvell benefits from custom silicon demand; Credo connects GPUs; Vistra has long-term nuclear supply deals with Amazon and Meta; Nokia's Nvidia partnership could help it capture data-center networking growth. x.com x.comÂ
NVIDIA faces rival chips from every Mag 7 customer, which has an incentive to cut GPU spending and improve margins on its AI buildout. If they can make a GPU 85% as good for 50% less, it is worth using instead of NVIDIA's; the shift will take time. NVIDIA makes a GPU for $5,000 and sells it to those customers for $50,000, leaving them an incentive to save 90% by building their own. x.com x.com x.com x.comÂ
Inference demand, not model release cadence, drives AI infrastructure, so dips in inference suppliers are unwarranted. Anthropic's CEO, with OpenAI's Sam Altman agreeing, committed only to third-party evaluations before releases, saying pacing does not mean halting training. Even if releases slowed, inference demand keeps climbing and older models need more infrastructure, benefiting Nvidia's GPUs, Micron's memory, Astera Labs' GPU connectivity, Marvell and Broadcom. x.com x.com x.comÂ