AI Server OEM & System Integration

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.

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.

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.

AXG and Digital Realty announced a partnership to help global system integrators and managed service providers deliver fully hosted, lifecycle-managed private infrastructure as a service across more than 30 countries. The joint offering combines Digital Realty's global data center platform, PlatformDigital, and its ServiceFabric interconnection and orchestration solution with AXG's multi-technology infrastructure-as-a-service model, covering data center space, power, cooling, connectivity, interconnection, and sovereign-ready colocation. Under the arrangement, GSIs and MSPs retain ownership of the customer relationship, solution design, managed services, orchestration, and the application layer, while AXG and Digital Realty provide the underlying hosting, commercial, and operational infrastructure. The offering targets four areas of enterprise and government demand: private AI, edge as a service, cloud repatriation, and neo-cloud capacity, and is available today across 31 markets spanning North America, EMEA, APAC, and LATAM. Digital Realty's Jules Johnston, Senior Vice President of Channels and Alliances, said the combination creates a powerful new route to market, while AXG CEO Bo White said the partnership closes the gap between dedicated infrastructure economics and cloud-style simplicity.

Cisco Systems has pushed Splunk AI deeper into private infrastructure with a new Nvidia-backed AI POD built for self-managed and air-gapped environments. The platform, available now, pairs Cisco infrastructure with Nvidia computing and Kubernetes, while Splunk's Tokenomics tool is designed to track AI spending across agents and employee coding tools and estimate future consumption before the billing cycle closes. Cisco is also widening the commercial opportunity beyond the data center after signing a multiyear agreement with Amazon Web Services to jointly develop security products. Cisco said it received $9.3 billion of hyperscaler AI-infrastructure orders during fiscal 2026, equal to roughly 14.7% of its $63.3 billion annual revenue, though orders are not revenue. Cisco shares were up roughly 0.1% at $110.24.

Fabrinet shares have dropped about 22.3% since its last earnings report, underperforming the S&P 500. The company reported fourth-quarter fiscal 2026 non-GAAP earnings of $4.10 per share, up 54.7% year over year and beating the Zacks Consensus Estimate by 6.49%, while revenues rose 44.6% to $1.316 billion, beating consensus by 2.64%. Data center revenues totaled $669 million, up 68% year over year and 13% sequentially, becoming the largest category at 51% of sales, with data center interconnect exiting the quarter at an annualized revenue run rate above $1 billion. For the first quarter of fiscal 2027, Fabrinet expects revenues of $1.375-$1.425 billion, implying 43% year-over-year growth at the midpoint, and non-GAAP earnings of $4.10-$4.25 per share. Management estimates Building 10 at the Chonburi campus, on track for completion by early 2027, can add $3-$3.5 billion of revenue capacity, taking total capacity to roughly $8.5-$9.3 billion, with a path to $12.5-$14 billion of annual revenue capacity over the coming years.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing reported second-quarter 2026 EPS of $4.31 against a $3.8866 estimate, a 10.89% beat, on revenue of $40.2 billion, up 36.0% year over year, with gross margin of 67.7%, up 9.1 percentage points year over year. Advanced nodes at 7nm and below accounted for 77% of wafer revenue, with 3nm at 30%, 5nm at 33%, and 2nm debuting at 3% in its first commercial quarter. August monthly revenue rose 53.3% year over year, and management raised full-year 2026 growth guidance to slightly above 40% year over year in U.S. dollar terms. Management said packaging capacity is so tight that it is now a little bit of customers' growth, pointing to the CoWoS advanced packaging step as the industry's real choke point. The company guided that the steep 2nm ramp will dilute third-quarter gross margin by about 3 to 4 percentage points, while citing an additional $100 billion U.S. investment and a total Arizona commitment of $265 billion, $110 billion in cash and marketable securities, a 2024 to 2029 revenue CAGR approaching 25% in USD, and a long-term gross margin above 56%.

Meta Platforms Inc. has elevated Dina Powell McCormick, a former Trump administration official and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executive, to president, vice chairman and co-leader of Meta Compute, the company's effort to build and monetize the infrastructure fueling its artificial intelligence ambitions. Powell McCormick resigned from Meta's board about a week after Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg asked her to take the internal role during a December board retreat at his Kauai compound, and she assumed the position in January. Meta is expecting to spend more than $600 billion on its AI buildout before the end of the decade, not including the many billions more it is leveraging from Wall Street. In one benchmark deal, Meta and BlackRock Inc. agreed to build a $14 billion data center in El Paso, Texas, with BlackRock raising more than $12 billion in debt to fund the facility and holding an 80% interest in the joint venture while Meta retains 20%. Meta used a similar joint-venture structure with Blue Owl Capital Inc. to help finance its Louisiana data center, dubbed Hyperion, and NextEra Energy Inc. announced Wednesday it will hire 1,000 people out of Meta's America's Workforce Academy, an initiative Powell McCormick stood up, with Meta investing $115 million in the academy in its first year. Powell McCormick's remit extends to countering public backlash to AI and data centers, weighing in on legal and reputational fights including Meta's settlement of up to $18 billion with state attorneys general over children's safety on Instagram and Facebook, and helping lead a $1 billion fund to invest in communities where Meta builds.

Yuanta Securities issued an analysis stating that SMT is clearly entering a turnaround phase, with second-quarter 2026 results recovering across revenue, capacity utilisation and margins. The company expects third-quarter to fourth-quarter 2026 results to improve significantly versus the prior quarter, supported by advance orders covering production for the next 8 to 12 months. The company guided 2026 revenue of not less than 2.6 billion baht and expects growth of more than 10% in 2027, or above the 3 billion baht level. The Optical and OSAT businesses are new growth engines that benefit directly from AI, with AI-related revenue still accounting for less than 5% of current revenue after starting production for 2 to 3 customers in the second half of 2026, with the opportunity to rise to at least 10% next year. On capacity expansion, capex may need to increase from the normal level of about 100 million baht per year to 450 to 500 million baht per year if it is to support revenue growth of more than 10% per year. The analyst maintained a 2026 normal profit forecast of 150 million baht, a turnaround from a loss of 146 million baht in 2025, rising to 256 million baht, or 70% year-on-year growth, in 2027, while maintaining a fair value of 7.60 baht per share at end-2027 based on a PER of 25 times and keeping a Buy recommendation. The stock currently trades at about 19 times 2027 PER, significantly below the sector's 28 to 58 times. The key risk is high dependence on a major customer.

Hammerhead AI announced a collaboration naming TD SYNNEX as distributor for its ORCA software, giving the distributor a standardized AI power-orchestration SKU that lets data center operators convert stranded power into AI-ready capacity through TD SYNNEX's global reseller network. The agreement aligns with TD SYNNEX's Destination AI program and lands as the market watches its Hyve data center segment ahead of upcoming earnings. TD SYNNEX's narrative projects $90.7 billion revenue and $1.6 billion earnings by 2029, yielding a $333.55 fair value and 27% upside to its current price, while some of the most optimistic analysts already assumed revenue of about US$97.9 billion and earnings of US$1.7 billion by 2029. The company still faces risks around margin pressure, customer concentration, and a possible slowdown after recent pull-forward demand.

Technology component stocks led by KCE and HANA rose more than 2%. At 10:55 a.m., KCE stood at 67.25 baht, up 1.50 baht or 2.28%, with trading value of 764.19 million baht, while HANA stood at 49.50 baht, up 1.00 baht or 2.06%, with trading value of 677.56 million baht. This followed an analysis note from KGI Securities (Thailand) stating that KCE has an opportunity to expand into the printed circuit board, or PCB, business for humanoid robots, after KCE informed the Stock Exchange of Thailand on September 11, 2026, that it is in negotiations to buy and sell products with a company in the United States, which KGI believes could be Tesla, and the product could be PCBs for the Tesla Optimus robot. Tesla aims to scale up robot production from about 10,000 units initially to 1 million units per year, and eventually to 10 million units in the long term. KGI preliminarily estimates that revenue from this project could account for roughly 0.3% to 1.3% of KCE's total revenue, under the assumption of production of 1 million robots using PCBs worth 150 to 200 US dollars per unit and KCE holding an order share of about 1% to 3%. It has therefore not yet included revenue from this project in its forecasts. It also raised its core business profit forecasts for 2026-2027 by 6% to 25%, recommended "Hold" on KCE, and raised its end-2027 target price to 62 baht from 48 baht, based on a PER of 40 times. Meanwhile, HANA is expected to benefit indirectly from the upgrading of the AI server supply chain through three key businesses: thermal solutions for HBM and GPU through a partnership with Phononic, high-density PCBA testing equipment, and SiC solid-state transformers. KGI raised its profit forecasts for HANA by 6% to 11%, maintained its "Buy" recommendation, and raised its end-2027 target price to 63 baht from 45 baht, based on a PER of 40 times, expecting normal operating profit in 2027 to grow 44%.

Qualcomm's September 8 SEC filing ties Amazon warrants to commercial arrangements, binding orders and actual purchases that can reach a maximum of $60 billion, a ceiling rather than a guaranteed order. Qualcomm issued Amazon a warrant for up to 25 million shares at $161.26, with 3.75 million shares vested at issuance from initial commitments, and the companies will work on server chips, systems and optical connectivity. For Qualcomm, the attraction is customer validation for a data-center push that management wants to scale toward $15 billion of annual revenue by fiscal 2029, though much of the equity vests only if future purchasing milestones are met. The timing matters because Apple is moving modem work in-house, reducing a long-standing source of Qualcomm revenue. Insider Monkey counted 95 hedge funds holding Qualcomm in Q2 2026, up from 71 in Q1, while Amazon ownership climbed to 369 funds from 353 and Apple slipped to 169 funds from 170. At the August 31 settlement, about 33 million Qualcomm shares were sold short, 3.21% of float, with 3.31 days to cover.

Auride announced on the evening of September 14 that it plans to issue A-shares to no more than 35 qualified investors, raising up to 868 million yuan for an Inner Mongolia sapphire production base project, a western domestic server cluster project, and supplementary working capital. Of this, 282 million yuan is earmarked for the Inner Mongolia sapphire production base project with a two-year construction period; 346 million yuan will go to the western domestic server cluster project, which involves leasing a data center in Ulanqab and purchasing domestic servers and supporting equipment, with a construction period of just three months; and the remaining 240 million yuan will be used to replenish working capital. The number of shares to be issued will not exceed 30 percent of total share capital, the issue price will be no lower than 80 percent of the average stock trading price over the twenty trading days before the pricing reference date, and the subscription shares will be subject to a six-month lock-up period. The plan still requires approval from the shareholders' meeting, review by the Shanghai Stock Exchange, and registration approval from the China Securities Regulatory Commission. A separate announcement on the same day showed that Auride's wholly owned subsidiary Shenzhen Zhisuanli Digital Technology Co., Ltd. plans to sell 22 servers to Hainan Jingshu Technology Co., Ltd. for 51.5 million yuan. The net book value of the underlying assets is 24.9143 million yuan, meaning the transaction price represents a premium of 20.6609 million yuan over book value. Preliminary estimates put the asset disposal gain at about 20.5905 million yuan, which will be recognized in the company's current-period profit or loss for 2026. Auride's main businesses are integrated computing power services and sapphire products. In the first half of 2026, revenue reached 303 million yuan, up 38.29 percent year on year, with integrated computing power services contributing 213 million yuan, or 70.13 percent of total revenue.

Xiangshan Co. announced that it plans to issue shares and pay cash to Ningbo Genxi, Zhejiang Qintong, Zhiyan Xinhe, Wenzhou Qunhong, Ruisheng Intelligent, and Wang Ling to acquire 100% of Wuluo Smart, and to raise supporting funds, with the total consideration tentatively set at 800 million yuan. After the transaction, the company will add AI computing equipment business, forming a dual-engine business structure of auto parts plus AI computing power. Its shares will resume trading on September 15, 2026. On the same day, Focus Lightings Tech delivered its first CPO optical chip samples to an important customer, with the prototype delivery milestone met on schedule, marking the product's move from development to customer validation. Trading data shows institutional seats net bought Yihua Co. shares worth 199 million yuan, accounting for 12.29 percent of total turnover.

Cisco rolled out version 1.0 of Cisco AI POD for Splunk on Monday, giving enterprises a way to run Splunk's AI capabilities inside their own infrastructure. The September 14 release brings Splunk's AI tier onto Red Hat OpenShift while combining Cisco compute infrastructure, Nvidia GPU acceleration and Splunk software, letting customers deploy tools including AI Assistant and AI Toolkit while keeping the OpenShift environment under their own control. Cisco Systems traded about 1.5% lower at $110.395, though the documentation itself does not tie the launch to the share-price decline. The stock trades 48.38% above a GF Value estimate of $74.40, a premium that suggests investors are already paying for substantial execution. Cisco is positioning itself to collect infrastructure demand as enterprises move AI workloads from experimentation into production, but the real test will be whether customers deploy these systems at scale and generate enough recurring economics to justify both the operating cost and the elevated valuation.