TrendForce: CSP capex to top $1.5T in 2027, AI server output up over 90%
TrendForce's latest AI server research estimates that the nine largest cloud service providers — Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, plus ByteDance, Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu — will spend more than $957 billion on capital expenditure in 2026, up 106% year over year, and over $1.5 trillion in 2027, up 60%, above its earlier 50% forecast. It attributes the upgrade to rising server system prices, component shortages pushing quotes higher, and some component suppliers requiring prepayments to guarantee supply. AI server shipments are projected to grow 32.2% in 2026 and close to 36% in 2027, driven by hyperscalers, neoclouds, sovereign AI projects and LLM providers' new models. On value, AI servers should generate about $479 billion in 2026, nearly 75% of roughly $639.2 billion in total server output; in 2027 total server value is expected to pass $1 trillion for the first time while AI servers reach about $920 billion, up over 90% and about 81% of the total, with orders led by rack-scale NVIDIA GB300, VR200 and AMD Helios systems and continued buying from Tier-2 data center operators such as Tesla and CoreWeave.
The forecast offers a quantified picture of how much compute infrastructure the largest cloud buyers plan to fund over the next two years, a useful reference for AI server, memory and component supply-and-demand trends.