The AI you chat with every day doesn't float in a cloud — it sits inside concrete buildings the size of several football fields, drawing as much power as a whole city. This lesson takes you to AI's 'physical body': the race to build gigawatt-scale data centers that's become the largest construction in human history — and why 'electricity,' not chips, has turned out to be the real bottleneck.
IREN Fair Value Trimmed to US$79.03 as AI Cloud Wins Meet Build Out Risks
IREN's fair value estimate has been trimmed from US$80.93 to US$79.03, a modest adjustment reflecting a mix of growing AI cloud contracts and ongoing questions around execution and supply build out through 2027. The revision lifts revenue growth assumptions to 168.01% from 125.79% and net profit margin expectations to 11.73% from 5.79%, while the future P/E assumption drops to 31.26x from 90.29x and the discount rate rises to 9.41% from 8.83%. On the bullish side, JPMorgan shifted IREN from Underweight to Overweight with a US$65 price target, citing a partnership with Nvidia, new customer signings and higher industry pricing, while H.C. Wainwright raised its target to US$90 after IREN announced US$2.8b of new multi year AI cloud contracts and lifted its 2026 AI cloud annual recurring revenue target to more than US$4b. Northland initiated IREN at Outperform with a US$99 price target, and Freedom Capital upgraded the stock from Hold to Buy. Freedom Capital nonetheless flagged execution on supply additions over the next two years as a central risk, noting the story depends heavily on adding capacity on schedule.
Nvidia-Backed Nscale Files for US IPO After $1.02 Billion Loss
Nscale, the London-based AI data center developer backed by Nvidia and Microsoft, filed publicly for an initial public offering in New York, seeking to raise as much as $3 billion. The company reported a net loss of $1.02 billion on revenue of $140.6 million for the six months ended June 30, compared with a net loss of $368.9 million on revenue of $10.4 million a year earlier, according to its Friday filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Spun off from a cryptocurrency mining operation in early 2024, Nscale was valued at about $14.6 billion in a March Series C round led by Aker ASA and 8090 Industries, with Nvidia and Nokia Oyj also participating. The company has agreed to add more than 30,000 Nvidia chips to an existing rental agreement with Microsoft at its Narvik, Norway gigafactory, and Anthropic has agreed to spend $45 billion to rent AI cloud computing power from its flagship West Virginia data center development. The offering is being led by Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, with shares expected to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol NSCL.
Goldman Sachs Warns S&P 500 Earnings Growth Set to Cool
Goldman Sachs Group expects the rapid rise in S&P 500 earnings to cool rather than reverse, saying several temporary forces are currently lifting profits. S&P 500 earnings per share rose 51% year over year in the second quarter, with growth over the past four quarters reaching 26%, a pace the firm said has pushed profits above their longer-term trend, though the index's forward price-to-earnings ratio has eased to 19 from 23 a year ago and now matches its 10-year average. Artificial intelligence spending is a major contributor, with Amazon, Meta Platforms, Microsoft and Alphabet expected to spend about $800 billion on capital projects this year, nearly double 2025 levels, and Goldman expects that earnings boost to fade as spending growth slows and depreciation rises. Semiconductor margins and gains from technology companies' investment holdings are also supporting earnings, and Goldman said weaker chip margins could cut S&P 500 earnings by about 10%, while investment gains that helped second-quarter profits are expected to contribute less in 2027.
Nvidia, Google and Emerald AI Launch AI Energy Management Alliance
Nvidia, Google and Emerald AI have launched the AI Energy Management Alliance, or AEMA, a coalition that dynamically manages the electricity use of data centers in response to grid conditions. Emerald AI founder and CEO Varun Sivaram said the alliance's founding members are joined by a cohort of 20 launch partners, including the AI lab Anthropic, the semiconductor firm Analog Devices, and the energy companies AES, NRG, Constellation, RWE and National Grid. Sivaram said Emerald AI, which was founded under two years ago, is building with Nvidia and Digital Realty the world's first from-the-ground-up power-flexible AI data center, a 100 megawatt facility in Manassas, Virginia, that comes online later this year. He said Google, one of the founding members, has already done a gigawatt of demand response for its data centers, while Emerald and Nvidia have completed six demonstrations around the world, in London, Phoenix and Virginia. Sivaram said the alliance is talking to the FERC commissioners, state regulators and the administration about a grand bargain in which flexible AI data centers act as good citizens to grids and communities in return for faster and larger connections to the power grid.
CleanSpark Data Center Bond Draws $10 Billion in Orders for $2.28 Billion Sale
CleanSpark Inc.'s debut junk-bond offering for a data center tied to Meta Platforms Inc. drew orders of about $10 billion, more than four times the deal's size, according to people familiar with the matter. The five-year notes were set at almost $2.28 billion and launched at 98.5 cents on the dollar to yield 8.25%, roughly 1.75 percentage points above the average for BB rated firms tracked by Bloomberg. The fundraising, led by Morgan Stanley, will help finance construction of a data center in Sandersville, Georgia, that has been fully leased to Anviran LLC, a Meta subsidiary, under a $6.6 billion, 20-year contract. The facility is expected to begin operations in the fourth quarter of 2027, with Meta guaranteeing rent and operating expenses. Data center developers have now sold more than $3 billion of high-yield bonds so far this year, most backed by long-term leases with hyperscalers including Oracle Corp. and Amazon.com Inc.
SoftBank's SB Energy IPO Faces Investor Test as OpenAI Timeline Clouds $50 Billion Listing
SoftBank's push to list SB Energy at a valuation of roughly $50 billion is facing a tougher investor test as uncertainty around OpenAI's IPO timeline raises questions about how much of the data-center developer's future growth depends on a single customer. SB Energy is expected to seek between $5 billion and $7 billion in an IPO within the coming weeks. The company has yet to bring a single data center online, but already carries roughly $439 billion of contracted backlog tied largely to 8.8 gigawatts of future capacity, with roughly $357 billion of that contracted revenue not expected to be recognized until 2034 or later. SB Energy generated only $138.7 million of revenue during the first half of this year, primarily from legacy solar operations, and posted a $551.6 million operating loss. OpenAI is the primary tenant for SB Energy's largest pipeline projects, while Nvidia has provided a $105 billion guarantee for the initial phase of an 8-gigawatt Ohio data-center campus, and both OpenAI and Nvidia are expected to own stakes in the publicly listed company. SB Energy estimates it needs more than $170 billion in capital spending to build its pipeline, and analysts cited in the report estimate it may need another $7 billion of equity beyond IPO proceeds, in addition to substantial debt, just to maintain its typical 10% equity contribution to projects.
Northland Initiates IREN at Outperform With $99 Target
Northland Capital initiated coverage of IREN Ltd. at Outperform with a $99 price target, implying more than 100% upside from the prior close, and the stock rose 1.82% premarket on the call. The bullish initiation adds to an analyst base already skewed positive, with 14 buy ratings and three holds before today. The move follows JPMorgan's September 14 upgrade of IREN two notches from Underweight to Overweight with a $65 target, citing its Nvidia cloud partnership and neocloud pricing power. IREN has retired lower-margin Bitcoin mining hardware to redirect power toward AI compute, taking a large non-cash impairment in its fiscal 2026 results while lifting its contracted annual recurring revenue target to $4 billion for 2026.
HPE's $700 Million AI Networking Backlog Tests Supply Chain
Hewlett Packard Enterprise is sitting on a record pile of AI networking orders it cannot yet ship, and the gap between bookings and revenue is now the central question for the stock. Orders for the Networks for AI portfolio reached $700 million in fiscal Q3 2026, a new high, after the company blew past its cumulative fiscal 2026 target of at least $2 billion and raised that target to $2.5 billion to $3 billion. The hardware behind those orders includes routers and switches HPE is supplying to Oracle for one of the largest AI cloud infrastructure build-outs, work that extends more than a decade of engineering between Oracle and Juniper Networks, the business HPE acquired last year. Networking revenue rose 10% in fiscal Q3 2026 against a prior-year base that includes Juniper Networks, while networking orders rose 36%, and the segment brought in $2.9 billion of the $12.2 billion in total revenue HPE reported for the quarter. Management attributes the gap to supply, citing memory and wafer capacity that have gated supply since the start of fiscal 2026, and HPE has more than doubled its networking purchase commitments quarter over quarter while signing multiyear supply agreements to lock capacity. Networking revenue growth is guided to 11% to 13% in fiscal Q4 2026 and 14% to 17% in fiscal 2027, with the next scheduled look at the business coming at the Networking Investor Day on September 30, 2026.
Goldman Sachs Says Big Tech Valuation Premium Is Fading
Goldman Sachs Research says the forward price-to-earnings multiples of the largest S&P 500 companies have fallen sharply and are now converging toward the valuation of the other 495 stocks in the index, eroding a valuation premium mega-cap technology names have held for years. The firm points to two pressures behind the de-rating: a higher cost of capital and dramatically greater capital intensity. Microsoft, Amazon, Meta Platforms and Alphabet are committing enormous sums to artificial-intelligence infrastructure, including data centers, chips and power capacity, investments that may support future growth but consume cash today, while higher borrowing costs reduce the present value investors assign to future earnings and cash flows. Goldman's takeaway is that mega-cap tech is no longer priced as dramatically different from the rest of the market, leaving those companies to prove their growth deserves a premium, and investors should focus less on headline AI spending and more on the returns generated from it.
Meta Raises 2026 Capex Guidance to $130 Billion to $145 Billion
Meta Platforms raised its full-year 2026 capital expenditure guidance to a range of $130 billion to $145 billion, including principal payments on finance leases, narrowed from a prior $125 billion to $145 billion range in its Q2 2026 report on July 29, 2026. The forward guidance nearly doubles Meta's full-year 2025 capex of $72.215 billion, and Q2 capital expenditures alone reached $31.1 billion, driven by servers, data centers, and network infrastructure. To fund the build, Meta ended Q2 with $90.3 billion in cash and marketable securities and $83.7 billion in debt, and announced a strategic venture with BlackRock to develop a one gigawatt data center in El Paso, Texas. CFO Susan Li said Meta is demand constrained today, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company is receiving quite a number of offers at a meaningful premium over what we paid for the compute, framing direct compute sales as one leg of a portfolio that also includes APIs, business agents, productivity tools, and subscriptions. The strain is visible in the quarterly numbers: Q2 free cash flow was $784 million, down 91.31% year over year, and operating margin compressed to 31% from 43%, even as Q2 revenue reached $60.801 billion, up 27.96% year over year and above the $60.286 billion consensus, with advertising revenue of $59.4 billion, up 27%.
Amazon AWS Revenue Hits $42.23B, Up 37% in Fastest Growth in 18 Quarters
Amazon Web Services posted $42.23 billion in revenue, growing 37% year over year, the segment's fastest growth in 18 quarters, with a 39.4% operating margin and a $496 billion contracted backlog. Amazon's chips and AI businesses each eclipsed run rates of more than $25 billion in the second quarter, both growing at triple-digit percentages year over year, while 98% of Amazon's top 1,000 EC2 customers use Graviton and Anthropic and OpenAI have made multi-year, multi-gigawatt commitments to Trainium. Q2 operating income landed at $27.46 billion, up 43.2% year over year, and advertising is a $70 billion-plus trailing-twelve-month business growing 26%. Capex reached $54.21 billion in a single quarter, up 68.4% year over year, and free cash flow swung to negative $7.6 billion on a trailing-twelve-month basis, though most AI capacity is contracted for at least five-year terms. Since Amazon reported Q2 on July 30, 2026, AMZN moved from $230.08 to $251.19, while SPY went from $747.03 to $762.70 and QQQ went from $687.99 to $716.92. Andy Jassy said AWS could become a few hundred billion dollar revenue business and now believes it will be at least double that and very possibly a trillion dollar annual revenue business in time.
CleanSpark Signs $6.6 Billion AI Data Center Lease in Georgia
CleanSpark has signed a 20-year, $6.6 billion triple-net lease for its Sandersville, Georgia, site, a deal the company expects to generate $330 million in annual revenue. Chairman and CEO Matt Schultz said the site includes a fully energized 250-megawatt substation, that CleanSpark secured an additional 122 acres with community support, and that the tenant received short-term exclusivity for up to 885 additional megawatts in Texas, with the first data hall targeted for delivery in December 2027. The announcement came during an H.C. Wainwright panel where mining and AI infrastructure executives described a broad pivot from bitcoin operations toward AI colocation, cloud services and GPU-as-a-service. Core Scientific's Russell Cann said direct-liquid-cooled construction costs have climbed from roughly $4.5 million per megawatt for early projects to about $10 million to $10.5 million per megawatt for facilities turned on this year and $12 million to $13 million per megawatt for projects expected to start operating in 2027. Cann also said Core Scientific recently announced a roughly 500-megawatt agreement with AMD, with AMD holding rights to the next 2,000 megawatts across sites in Hunt County and Pecos, Texas, and Muskogee, Oklahoma, under a 15-year triple-net lease at $125 per megawatt or a modified gross structure at $145 per megawatt. Executives pushed back on AI bubble concerns, with Cann noting roughly 5 gigawatts of rack space is delivered annually against approximately 15 gigawatts of annual chip demand, while cautioning that many power requests may be duplicative or unsupported by actual transmission, substations or fuel supply.
Caterpillar Expands Robot Trucks to Two More Virginia Quarries
Caterpillar announced on September 15 that its self-driving haul trucks at a Luck Stone quarry are moving large tonnage, with expansion to two more Virginia quarries, Boscobel and Bealeton, including the first autonomous deployment of Cat 775 trucks. The company disclosed no order value, truck count, or profit contribution from the autonomy milestone, and autonomy was named on the earnings call only as a source of higher SG&A and R&D expenses inside Resource Industries. In the second quarter of 2026, revenue reached $20.5 billion, up 24% year over year, with adjusted EPS of $8.17, up 73%, while backlog climbed to $72 billion, up roughly $35 billion versus a year earlier. Power & Energy is the engine, with segment sales up 17% to $8.2 billion and power generation sales up 72% on large gensets and turbines for data centers, and gas prime orders extend toward the back half of 2028 and into 2029. Caterpillar trades at $798.51 against a consensus analyst target of $975.61, a trailing PE of 34x, and full-year tariff costs of around $2.2 billion for 2026, with expected IEEPA tariff recoveries of approximately $400 million.
BofA Forecasts Global Chip Market Nearly Doubling to $3.2 Trillion by 2030
Bank of America forecasts the global semiconductor market will nearly double to $3.2 trillion by 2030 from $1.7 trillion in 2026, citing continued strength in AI infrastructure, memory and data-center demand. Within that total, BofA expects memory sales to climb from $937 billion in 2026 to $1.8 trillion by 2030, core semiconductor sales to rise from $739 billion to $1.35 trillion, and server-related sales to increase from $359 billion to $848 billion. The bank also projects wafer-fabrication equipment spending will more than double to $359.8 billion by 2030 from $155.9 billion in 2026, with 2027 largely fully booked and contracted across compute, networking and memory vendors and supply expected to stay tight in 2028. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index gained around 3.14% on Thursday after five negative sessions, though it remains up about 91.19% over the past year and 59.14% year to date. BofA flagged a potential slowdown in hyperscalers' AI spending as the biggest risk to its outlook, even as recent calls for a more measured pace of AI development from figures including Dario Amodei, Sam Altman and Elon Musk have weighed on the broader AI trade.
CoreWeave exited the second quarter of 2026 with $104.2 billion in revenue backlog, up 246% year over year, a figure that excludes more than $25 billion of net new customer commitments added in the early weeks of the third quarter. Management said more than half of the existing backlog was already tied to contracts where customer delivery had begun, and expects that proportion to exceed two-thirds of the second-quarter backlog by year-end. Quarterly revenues surged $2.6 billion, up 112% year over year, while adjusted operating income rose sequentially to $128 million, prompting the company to raise its 2026 revenue guidance to $12.4-$13.2 billion and adjusted operating income guidance to $960 million to $1.15 billion. CoreWeave also lifted its expected year-end annualized run-rate revenues to $18.5-$19.5 billion, citing the long-term nature and attractive margins of contracted backlog. Supporting that backlog is capital-intensive buildout: capex was $9.4 billion, construction in progress rose sequentially to $11.9 billion, operating expenses reached $2.6 billion including $165 million in stock-based compensation, and interest expense hit $640 million versus $267 million a year earlier, with interest expense expected to climb to $860-$940 million in the current quarter. At the end of the second quarter CoreWeave had 1.5 gigawatts of active power after adding nearly 500 megawatts during the quarter, plus 3.7 gigawatts of contracted power, which management said has since risen to 4.2 gigawatts toward a goal of at least 8 gigawatts by 2030, while competition intensifies from Nebius and Microsoft.
Dell Technologies Earns Zacks Rank #1 as Earnings Estimates Surge
Dell Technologies has been named a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy), driven by sharply rising earnings estimate revisions. The company is expected to post earnings of $6.64 per share for the current quarter, a year-over-year change of +156.4%, with the Zacks Consensus Estimate rising +49.7% over the last 30 days. For the current fiscal year, the consensus earnings estimate of $25.34 points to a change of +146% from the prior year, while the next fiscal year's estimate of $29.46 indicates a +16.3% change. Revenue forecasts are equally robust: the consensus sales estimate for the current quarter of $50.89 billion indicates a year-over-year change of +88.4%, and for the current and next fiscal years, estimates of $195.95 billion and $231.46 billion indicate +72.6% and +18.1% changes, respectively. In its last reported quarter, Dell posted revenues of $46.97 billion, a year-over-year change of +57.7%, and EPS of $7.04 versus $2.32 a year ago, beating the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $45.34 billion by +3.6% on revenue and by +41.65% on EPS. Despite the strong momentum, Dell is graded D on the Zacks Value Style Score, indicating it is trading at a premium to its peers.
Nvidia CEO Huang Says AI Spending Flywheel Is 'Really, Really Flying'
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said demand for artificial intelligence computing is accelerating, describing the resulting investment cycle as a flywheel that is "really, really flying." Speaking with CNBC's Jim Cramer at Dreamforce in San Francisco, Huang estimated that a 1-gigawatt Nvidia AI factory costs about $50 billion to $60 billion to build but can generate roughly $50 billion in annual rental revenue, implying a return on invested capital of about one year. He said token generation has increased 25-fold in less than a year, with open models now accounting for nearly 70% of generated tokens, up from about 30%. Huang also said Nvidia Grace Blackwell systems now rent for about $16 per GPU hour, versus roughly $5 under some contracts signed a year ago, and he expects AI testing to become a third major category of infrastructure alongside training and inference, requiring additional data centers.
BMI raises power demand forecasts for Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam on AI and data centre demand
BMI, a unit of Fitch Solutions, said on Thursday 17 September that capacity constraints across Asia's power grid systems are tightening steadily, as rising electricity demand from artificial intelligence technology and data centres puts heavy pressure on power systems. In a report, BMI Country Risk and Industry Research said the firm had raised its electricity consumption forecasts for several markets, including Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam, driven by data centre investment and the expansion of AI computing workloads. It expects electricity consumption to grow at an average annual rate of 2.9% in Thailand, 3.3% in Malaysia and 5.6% in Vietnam over the next 10 years. The report also said tighter regulation in Thailand, Malaysia and Australia is limiting growth in demand for power connected to transmission systems, and regulators are expected to keep scrutiny strict to protect grid stability. BMI also expects a recovery in thermal power plants, particularly in emerging markets, as policymakers turn to dispatchable generating capacity amid strong demand and tightening grid conditions.
PLANET Says Data Center in EEC Is a Hot Commodity as Thai and Foreign Investors Line Up, Plans to Expand Total Power Capacity to 6.8 MW
Planet Communications Asia, or PLANET, disclosed that its data center in the Eastern Economic Corridor, or EEC, is drawing strong interest from both domestic and foreign investors, with operators continuously approaching the company to negotiate service use and joint investment. The momentum is driven by rapidly expanding demand for data, cloud, and AI technology in the region, along with government support through changes to laws, regulations, and investment incentive measures in the EEC. PLANET currently provides co-location data center services under the name STP Planet DC in Ban Chang district, Rayong province, supporting a maximum IT load of 600 kW per data hall, and plans to accommodate an expansion of total gross load of up to 6.8 MW to meet demand and support the future growth of enterprise customers and large cloud service providers.
San Jose residents push back on AI data center construction, demand transparency and environmental impact review
In San Jose, the largest city in California's Silicon Valley, residents and environmental groups are mounting an opposition campaign against plans to build artificial intelligence data centers. San Jose, with a population of about 1 million, is California's third-largest city. Last year it reached an agreement with utility PG&E to strengthen power supply for data centers and other facilities, and it estimates that each data center opened generates 3 million to 6 million dollars a year in tax revenue for services such as police, fire, libraries, roads and parks. Elina Yin, who leads the residents' group I Love San Jose, says companies should prove how they give back to the community, and is calling for stricter public review before construction is approved, greater transparency on energy and water use, and studies of health and environmental impacts. Mayor Matt Mahan told Reuters that the solution is not to stop construction but to carry it out responsibly, and that residents' questions are entirely reasonable. The California State Assembly and Senate recently passed several data center-related bills, including measures to ensure large electricity consumers share the costs of the transmission grid and requirements to increase transparency around energy and water consumption, and Governor Newsom must decide this month whether to sign or veto them.
DigitalOcean Secures $725 Million Equipment Finance Facility for AI Cloud Capacity
DigitalOcean Holdings secured a $725 million equipment finance facility on September 10 to fund the GPU and CPU capacity its AI-Native Cloud business needs, sending the stock up 7.45%. The facility, arranged with MUFG Bank as lead administrative and collateral agent alongside Axos Bank, BMO Bank and Wells Fargo as joint lead arrangers and PNC Bank as document agent, matures on September 10, 2030, and carries an accordion option for another $300 million. CFO Matt Steinfort described the financing as a way to align cash outflows with revenue at an attractive cost of capital, raised from a position of strength. The move follows second-quarter results reported on August 4, when DigitalOcean posted revenue growth of 29% year over year and raised its full-year outlook on accelerating AI demand. Remaining performance obligations reached $894 million in the second quarter, up twelvefold from a year earlier, while AI customer ARR grew 212% year over year and customers spending $500,000 or more grew their revenue contribution 160%. The expansion has come at a cost: operating income fell 18%, operating margin slipped to 10%, net income dropped 4% to $35 million, and adjusted free cash flow margin narrowed from 26% to 22%.
Yuanta Says AI Capex Still Expanding, Recommends 11 Thai Stocks and 8 DRs to Benefit
Yuanta Securities said AI Capex investment is likely to keep expanding over the next one to two years. Although elevated US bond yields will remain a drag, growth in Enterprise AI that is driving cloud and compute demand will offset it. Returns on GPU leasing investment remain high, with payback within 2.2 to 3.1 years, and hyperscalers have the financial strength to invest at least another 2 trillion US dollars in AI infrastructure. The Data Center industry in the APAC region is set to grow at a 25.2% CAGR in 2025 to 2030, the second fastest in the world after North America at 26.8% CAGR, and excluding China it can still grow at 22.9% CAGR. Thailand stands to benefit from its infrastructure readiness and geopolitical neutrality, while the Thai economy is starting to see positive effects through AI-related exports and continued growth in FDI. Thai stocks that Yuanta sees as likely to outperform the market under this theme are divided into the AI Export group, namely DELTA, HANA, SMT and EPG, and the AI and Data Center Deployment group, namely GULF, GUNKUL, AMATA, WHA, STECON, BBL and SCB, for a total of 11 stocks. Foreign companies that stand to benefit include NVDA19, GOOGL19, AMZN19, LITE80, MRVL80, BE80, JPMUS19 and GSUS06, for a total of 8 DRs.
KKP Research raises Thailand's 2026 GDP forecast to 2.5%, flags K-shaped recovery
KKP Research, part of the Kiatnakin Phatra Financial Group, has raised its forecast for Thailand's economic growth in 2026 to 2.5% from 2.1%, and for 2027 to 2.7% from 2.2%, driven by the tourism sector, private investment, and exports linked to the global artificial intelligence investment cycle, or AI capex cycle. It noted, however, that the Thai economy is now fully entering a K-shaped recovery, in which some industries are soaring while the grassroots economy and traditional industries remain sluggish. The main driver comes from the electronics supply chain, particularly the data storage industry and components related to AI infrastructure, in contrast to the country's four core industries, which face continued pressure: the automotive sector, hit by the transition to electric vehicles; petrochemicals, facing regional oversupply; and SMEs and electrical appliances, which must contend with competition from imported goods. KKP Research noted that although the IMF ranks Thailand among the world's four largest exporters of AI-related goods, the country remains constrained by its position at the assembly and contract-manufacturing stage and its heavy reliance on imported raw materials, meaning the domestic economic benefit is smaller than the rise in export value. It proposed that the government link BOI incentives to domestic value creation and set conditions on clean energy and closed-loop water systems. On monetary policy, KKP Research lowered its 2026 inflation forecast to 1.8% and expects the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of Thailand to hold the policy rate through the end of 2027, since inflationary pressure stems from cost factors that are temporary.
Generac to Supply Amazon Data Centers With Up to US$8.00 Billion in Backup Generators
Generac Holdings announced a long-term agreement to supply Amazon with industrial backup generators for its global data centers, with initial deliveries of about US$2.40 billion in 2027–2028 and total potential purchases up to US$8.00 billion. The deal also includes purchase-linked warrants for Amazon to buy Generac shares, tying the two companies together through equity incentives. The arrangement locks in critical power resilience for Amazon's expanding AI and cloud infrastructure, though it does not change the near-term catalyst of AWS execution or the risk around rising capital intensity and debt-funded infrastructure. Amazon's narrative projects US$1152.4 billion in revenue and US$158.3 billion in earnings by 2029, requiring 14.1% yearly revenue growth and a US$23.0 billion earnings increase from US$135.3 billion today, with a fair value estimate of US$327.00 implying 30% upside.
SMT opens its doors to funds and analysts, highlighting Advanced Packaging and Photonics capabilities
Stars Microelectronics (Thailand) Public Company Limited, or SMT, a leading Thai provider of electronics manufacturing and semiconductor services, hosted a Company Visit for fund managers and analysts at the Bang Pa-in Industrial Estate in Ayutthaya Province on September 15, 2026. Chief Executive Officer Prompong Chaikul and the management team presented an overview of the business, its growth direction, and the company's manufacturing technology capabilities. The company reported continuously improving business prospects, particularly in the Optical and Photonics segment and products related to AI Infrastructure, which have the potential to be a key growth driver in the period ahead. It is also pressing ahead with strengthening its full vertical integration services, spanning Wafer Processing, IC Packaging, Optical and Photonics, and PCBA and Box Build, as well as joint product development and design with customers. At the same time, the company is preparing to upgrade its capabilities and expand production capacity in Flip-Chip, Advanced Packaging, and High Density Packaging, alongside developing Wafer Processing for Photonic Integrated Circuits to serve increasingly complex, higher-value semiconductor products and to meet demand from global customers in the AI, Data Center, and Optical Connectivity industries and the continuously expanding digital infrastructure.
Crusoe said Thursday it raised $3.9 billion in a Series F round that pushes its valuation to $30.9 billion. The round was co-led by Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital, and Valor Equity Partners, with Founders Fund, GIC, Nvidia, Qatar Investment Authority, Radical Ventures, and TPG also participating. Crusoe also announced three new board members: Cloudflare CFO Thomas Seifert, Bill Stein, partner and CIO at Primary Digital Infrastructure, and Redwood Materials founder and CEO JB Straubel, who also sits on Tesla's board. The fresh capital will help finance existing data center projects, including a large site in Abilene, Texas, used by OpenAI, as well as smaller, modular AI factories called Spark that can be transported by truck and connected to large power sources almost anywhere. The raise comes 10 months after Crusoe raised $1.38 billion at a $10 billion valuation last October, and follows a reported $13 billion, five-year cloud contract to supply quantitative trading firm Jane Street with GPUs and AI infrastructure.
Generac Surges 18% on $8 Billion Amazon Data Center Generator Deal
Generac agreed to supply up to $8 billion worth of backup generators for Amazon's data centers, sending its shares up 18% and making it the top performer on the S&P 500. The company also issued a warrant for a stake in itself, according to a securities filing, and analysts said the stock could double in price over the next 12 to 18 months. The broader market closed higher, with the Dow Jones industrial average adding about 300 points, or roughly 0.6%, the S&P 500 gaining about 86 points, or 1.2%, and the Nasdaq composite rising about 1.7%. Intel shares climbed more than 7.5% after South Korean memory chipmaker SK Hynix said it might team up with the company, following a Reuters report that it could lease part of Intel's long-planned Ohio chip facility or form a venture, though SK Hynix said no decision has been made. Among decliners, Paramount Skydance fell more than 4.6% as a Barclays analyst argued its proposed merger with Warner Brothers could introduce massive financial and operational risks and predicted the company would eventually split up, while Fluence Energy tumbled 15% after cutting its revenue forecast, which analysts attributed to production issues at its Houston facility.
Oracle Expands Restructuring to $2.8 Billion as AI Backlog Hits $664 Billion
Oracle expanded its fiscal-2026 restructuring plan to roughly $2.8 billion as the company pours more capital into AI infrastructure, Reuters reported. The shares rallied about 5.4% to $150.90 Thursday morning, based on the latest market snapshot, versus the earlier $148.83 quote. That $2.8 billion restructuring bill works out to roughly 14.5% of Oracle's latest $19.35 billion in quarterly revenue and covers severance, contract exits and other restructuring costs, while free cash flow is running at approximately negative $5.4 billion. Remaining performance obligations have climbed to $664 billion after Oracle signed more than $30 billion of additional AI-cloud contracts, with roughly half of that backlog expected to turn into revenue within 36 months. Management says customer prepayments and customer-supplied chips can soften the capital burden, but the real test is execution.
Delta Integrates Power and Cooling Infrastructure for NVIDIA DSX AI Factories
Delta Electronics announced development work to speed deployment of AI factories built on the NVIDIA DSX AI Factory Platform, integrating power and cooling infrastructure from onsite energy through to the AI rack. The company said it bridges energy availability and compute productivity by connecting onsite energy, facility power, row and rack-level power and cooling, and chip-level solutions, aiming to help customers accelerate token production and generate higher AI yield from every available megawatt. Delta's 800 VDC power architecture reduces conversion stages between facility power and compute and delivers up to 98% power conversion efficiency, while high-density In-Row systems deliver up to 800 kW in a single power rack; at the board level, its 800 VDC DC-DC power distribution technology steps down directly to 50 VDC or 12 VDC with peak efficiency up to 98.5%. On the thermal side, Delta's portfolio spans 2.4 MW and 3 MW liquid-to-liquid cooling distribution units, In-Rack cooling, and thermal solutions for next-generation AI racks. Delta also applies prefabrication and modular design, with its Prefabricated AI Modular Data Center Solution integrating 800 VDC In-Row Power and 3 MW of liquid-cooling capacity into infrastructure blocks assembled and tested in the factory. Austin Tseng, President of Delta Electronics Americas, said power quality, GPU load transients and heat must be engineered together all the way into the rack, while Vladimir Troy, vice president of AI infrastructure at NVIDIA, said Delta's expertise in 800 VDC power delivery and liquid cooling will help customers deploy AI factories based on NVIDIA DSX faster.
Oracle Trades at $147 Despite $664 Billion AI Backlog, 24/7 Wall St. Sees 50% Upside
Oracle shares trade at $147.17 even after a fiscal Q1 2027 earnings report that saw revenue hit $19.345 billion, up 29.6% year over year, non-GAAP EPS of $1.92 against a $1.74 estimate, and cloud infrastructure growth of 121%. Remaining performance obligations swelled to $664 billion, with more than $30 billion in new AI contracts booked in the quarter alone, yet the stock has fallen 8.95% over the past week as the market focuses on negative $5.396 billion quarterly free cash flow and a $28.499 billion capex bill. 24/7 Wall St. maintains a buy rating and a $214.69 price target, implying roughly 50% upside, with 90% confidence, citing a forward P/E of 17 that is cheaper than Microsoft at 26 and Alphabet at 22. The bear case centers on FY26 free cash flow of negative $23.686 billion, interest expense up 55% to $1.4 billion, and full-year FY27 capex guidance of $90 to $95 billion, which could force another equity raise beyond the completed $20 billion ATM program. Half of the $664 billion RPO is expected to convert to revenue over the next 36 months, and management guided full fiscal 2027 revenue to at least $90 billion with non-GAAP EPS of $8.10.
Generac Soars 19% on $2.4 Billion Amazon Data Center Generator Deal
Generac struck a deal with Amazon to supply backup power generators for its data centers, with initial deliveries expected to total $2.4 billion between 2027 and 2028, and also granted Amazon the right to buy up to $340 million worth of its stock. Generac shares soared 19% on the news, while Amazon's stock moved 1.3% higher. Fluence Energy shares tumbled 14% after the battery storage maker cut its full-year guidance, now expecting $2.4 billion in revenue for 2026 versus its prior guidance of $2.9 billion to $3.1 billion, and anticipating a loss of $200 million before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, more than its previous guidance range of $30 million loss to $10 million EBITDA. Workday rose 5% after CNBC's David Faber reported that efforts to gain financing for a bid to take the cloud-based human resources software platform private are continuing, citing unidentified sources. Tower Semiconductor rose almost 9% after agreeing with privately-held New Photonics to a high-volume shipment of laser-integrated optical engines designed to meet growing demand for high-bandwidth, energy-efficient optical interconnects in AI infrastructure, and Vital Farms climbed 9% after Axios said the Austin, Texas-based pasture-raised egg and butter producer is exploring strategic alternatives, including privatization.
Nvidia Commits $2 Billion to Brookfield AI Infrastructure Fund
Nvidia Corp. has committed $2 billion to Brookfield Asset Management's global artificial intelligence infrastructure fund, according to investor documents that revealed the size of a previously disclosed investment. The AI giant is an anchor investor for the Brookfield Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Fund, alongside the Kuwait Investment Authority, Brookfield said last year. The fund focuses on the AI buildout, backing factories, dedicated behind-the-meter power solutions and compute infrastructure. Brookfield is raising $10 billion for the AI infrastructure fund as part of a broader plan to raise around $50 billion for the infrastructure group over the next two years, with AI featuring in every strategy. Brookfield is also part of an Nvidia consortium committing to financing AI computing deals totaling more than $500 billion.
Nvidia CEO Huang Says Chip Sales Will Double in 2027 on Vera Rubin Ramp
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang confirmed at a Scotland tech gathering that the company's chip sales in 2027 are projected to roughly double from 2026, echoing management's August 26, 2026 earnings call guidance for about 70% revenue growth in fiscal 2028. The doubling is being driven by the Vera Rubin platform, which entered full production alongside continued Blackwell deployment and is expected to be the fastest product ramp in Nvidia's history, with per-gigawatt revenue opportunity rising to roughly $40 billion from $25 billion on Blackwell. Nvidia's supply obligations swelled to $279.0 billion, largely tied to memory procurement for Vera Rubin, while guarantee obligations for AI cloud partners are capped at $108.5 billion and financing platforms with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR are expected to mobilize over $500 billion of third-party capital for AI infrastructure. Sovereign and enterprise AI is growing 100% a year, with sovereign AI revenue up 35% sequentially and more than tripling year over year, and neocloud partners expected to exit the year with eight gigawatts of installed capacity versus roughly three gigawatts at the end of 2025. Consensus EPS for the fiscal year ending January 2028 has climbed from $12.67 ninety days ago to $15.57 today, with 39 upward revisions in the past 30 days and zero cuts, on revenue now pegged at roughly $678 billion.
SpaceX Targets Late-2027 Orbital AI Data Centers Despite Four Unresolved Hurdles
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is targeting a late-2027 launch for orbital AI data centers, but industry analysts say real scale is more likely a 2030s event, CNBC reported on September 6, 2026. Experts point to four unresolved hurdles: dissipating heat in a vacuum, protecting hardware from radiation, the risk that GPUs become obsolete before an expensive satellite launch pays off, and building enough ground-to-space connectivity to support hyperscale computing. SpaceX went public on the Nasdaq in June 2026 under the ticker SPCX following its merger with Musk's AI company xAI, and shares have since pulled back from a post-IPO high near $225 to around $148. Industry consultant Blaine Curcio noted that experts in the late 2010s would have considered SpaceX launching 10,000 satellites by 2025 almost impossible, yet the company achieved that scale, a track record that gives investors reason not to dismiss the orbital data-center target. Transcelestial CEO Rohit Jha identified high-volume data transfer between orbit and Earth as a key challenge and said hyperscale facilities could require nuclear power, while Neuberger's Evelyn Chow expects significant scale only after several years of satellite launches and connectivity investment, supporting a 2030s timeline rather than Musk's late-2027 target. By the end of its first full quarter as a public company, 119 hedge funds had built a combined position in SpaceX worth $116.45 billion, while Rocket Lab's holder count rose to 52 funds from 43 even as its position value dipped to $736 million from $932 million.
CoreWeave Launches $3.5 Billion Convertible Notes and 35 Million Share ATM Program
CoreWeave is launching a $3.0 billion private offering of 2033 convertible notes, plus up to $500 million of additional notes, alongside an at-the-market program to sell up to 35 million Class A shares, a combined capital raise that sent shares down 3.5% in midday trading near $80 while the S&P 500 ETF SPY rose 0.9%. Indicative terms point to a coupon of 2.375% to 2.875% and a conversion premium of 22.5% to 27.5%, and capped call transactions tied to the convertibles are intended to blunt equity dilution. The raise lands on a balance sheet already carrying roughly $72.05 billion of total liabilities against $5.02 billion of shareholders' equity at quarter end, with Q2 interest expense of $640 million and management guiding Q3 interest expense to $860 million to $940 million and full-year 2026 capex to $35 billion to $39 billion. Demand remains robust, with a revenue backlog near $104 billion as of June 30, 2026, more than $25 billion of net new customer commitments added early in Q3 outside that figure, contracted power of about 4.2 gigawatts by August 11, and a definitive 15-year anchor lease with Blockfusion for the Niagara Falls, NY AI campus. Q2 revenue grew 112% year over year to $2.6 billion, yet the company posted a $626 million net loss and negative free cash flow of $5.74 billion against $9.4 billion of Q2 capital expenditures, while analysts hold an average price target of $144 with 21 buy ratings and 5 strong buys.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy Predicts AWS Could Reach $1 Trillion in Annual Revenue
Amazon chief Andy Jassy said on the company's recent earnings call that he now believes Amazon Web Services could become at least a few hundred billion-dollar revenue business, and very possibly a trillion-dollar annual revenue business in time. The prediction stands out against AWS' current $169 billion annual revenue run rate, and against the $58 million annual revenue run rate AWS reached three years after launch. AWS' AI revenue run rate, roughly three years into the AI boom, now totals more than $25 billion. Amazon said it plans to spend $220 billion this year, up from an earlier forecast of $200 billion, and that even at that level it won't be able to fulfill all of the demand this year and next year. The article was originally published by The Motley Fool.
Corning Expands AI Partner Base With Meta, Amazon, Nvidia, Verizon Deals
Corning Incorporated is expanding its partner base across the technology, cloud, networking and telecom sectors, signing a series of multibillion-dollar agreements tied to AI infrastructure buildouts. In the first half of 2026, Corning entered a multiyear agreement worth up to $6 billion with Meta to supply optical fiber, cable and connectivity products for Meta's U.S. data-center expansion, and also signed a multibillion-dollar, multiyear agreement with Amazon to support its AI data center expansion. Corning has additionally formed a multiyear commercial and technology partnership with NVIDIA under which it plans to increase its U.S. optical-connectivity manufacturing capacity tenfold and expand U.S. fiber production by more than 50 percent. Verizon and Corning announced a multibillion-dollar, multiyear agreement covering more than 80 million miles of high-density optical fiber and connectivity solutions from 2027 through 2032, supporting both broadband expansion and the long-haul network needed to connect AI infrastructure. Beyond those large contracts, Corning is collaborating with US Conec as a licensee of the PRIZM TMT optical ferrule technology, designed to accommodate higher fiber counts in tighter spaces for denser AI data centers. Corning faces competition from Amphenol Corporation and Ciena Corporation, and its growth outlook remains dependent on the pace of AI infrastructure investment and the timing of large customer deployments.
Intel Posts MLPerf Inference Gains Across Xeon 6 and Arc Pro GPUs
Intel reported performance gains in its latest MLPerf Inference v6.1 results across Intel Xeon 6 processors and Intel Arc Pro B-series GPUs. Intel Xeon 6980P processors delivered 2.4x higher Llama 3.1 8B Server throughput and 56% higher Offline throughput than MLPerf v6.0 on the same hardware setup, while customer and partner results rose from 29 to 39, with Oracle, Red Hat, Quanta Cloud Technology and Supermicro making their first submissions. Intel expanded Xeon 6 participation from two to five processor models, lifting CPU inference results from 24 to 35, and its Arc Pro B70 GPUs supported workloads including Llama 2 70B, gpt-oss-120B and Whisper, with a four-GPU system offering 128GB of Video Random Access Memory and Server performance up 36% and Offline performance up 27% versus MLPerf v6.0. Intel also co-developed results for the new end-to-end retrieval-augmented generation benchmark, using a system that paired a Xeon 6787P processor with four Arc Pro B70 GPUs to split the workload between CPU and GPUs. Intel faces competition from Qualcomm, which is expanding into AI data-center infrastructure through its Dragonfly platform, and from AMD, which is strengthening its AI infrastructure with the Helios platform.
ENGIE to Supply Up to 568 MW of Renewable Power for Oracle's Texas Operations
ENGIE North America announced renewable energy supply agreements that will provide up to 568 MW of renewable electricity for Oracle's growing operations in Texas. The power will come from a portfolio of wind energy resources serving the Electric Reliability Council of Texas market, part of ENGIE's roughly 12 GW of new renewable generation and battery storage capacity built across North America over the past six years. Anne-Laure Chassanite, Interim CEO of ENGIE North America, said the agreements reflect the strength of the company's portfolio and its ability to deliver customized energy solutions for customers expanding in Texas. Julia Robin, Head of Infrastructure Planning and Sourcing for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, said the deals advance Oracle's goal to match 100 percent of its AI data center electricity use with carbon-free electricity by 2035 without shifting costs to Texas consumers. ENGIE North America, based in Houston, has approximately 12 GW of power generation in operation or under construction across North America, representing $11 billion of capital employed.
Generac Jumps on $8 Billion Amazon Backup Generator Deal
Generac shares surged 31% after the company and Amazon executed a long-term supply agreement for backup generators for Amazon's data centers, a deal worth up to $8 billion that includes initial deliveries totaling $2.4 billion in 2027 and 2028 and warrants allowing an Amazon subsidiary to buy Generac shares through 2033. CoreWeave kicked off a fresh round of fundraising that includes a $3 billion convertible bond issue and an at-the-market offering program allowing it to sell as many as 35 million shares from time to time, saying the program will provide financing flexibility and help migrate its credit profile toward investment grade. Lockheed Martin moved on news that the Pentagon and the company struck a framework agreement for a multi-year production contract for the Joint Advanced Tactical Missile, or JATM, which is still in development but close to entering production and would become the most advanced air-to-air missile in the US arsenal, a role long held by RTX's advanced medium range air-to-air missile since 1993; the new missile program is receiving a $2 billion boost in the Trump administration's proposed budget for the fiscal year starting October 1. Boeing faces hard months ahead as CEO Kelly Ortberg and the CFO laid out challenges that surprised investors, including additional testing for the 777X that will spill into next year and a more muted cash outlook.