TrendForce: nine cloud giants' 2027 capex could top $1.5T
TrendForce raised its forecast for the combined capital spending of nine major cloud service providers — Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, ByteDance, Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu — saying their combined 2026 capex will exceed $957 billion, up 106% year over year, and rise another 60% in 2027 to $1.531 trillion. The firm attributes the upward revision to higher complete-server prices, component shortages pushing up quotes, and prepayment demands from some upstream suppliers. It also expects AI server shipments to grow 32.2% this year to about $479 billion in output value, or 74.9% of total server value, then grow nearly 36% more in 2027 to roughly $920 billion and an 81.1% share, with total server output value potentially passing $1 trillion next year.
If the forecast holds, spending on AI compute infrastructure is still expanding fast, while rising prices and prepayment demands show supply-chain pressure moving in both directions.