AI infrastructure has stopped being a chip beauty contest and turned into a supply-chain knife fight.
GlobalData said AI infrastructure spending has moved into a new phase, with demand outrunning semiconductors, memory and power capacity.
The outfit said this earnings season shows capital investment, geopolitics and supply-chain resilience now set the pace of AI deployment.
Compute demand still matters, but the chip race is being warped by bottlenecks across the global semiconductor chain.
An analysis of GlobalData’s Company Reports Database found SK Hynix net income jumped 397.5 per cent year on year.
Samsung managed a 486.7 per cent surge, with both outfits riding an HBM shortage that has sold out DRAM through 2026.
Micron posted a daft 1,398.3 per cent net income surge on 345.7 per cent revenue growth.
That confirms AI accelerators are just as memory-hungry as they are compute-hungry, with supply still lagging badly.
Nvidia’s net income more than tripled, rising 210.6 per cent on data-centre demand.
Its operating cash flow growth of 83.6 per cent trailed capex growth, which was down 70.9 per cent quarter on quarter but up 43.2 per cent year on year.
That shows how much cash is being redirected into supply-chain commitments, including extra TSMC capacity for H200 production.
GlobalData, Company Profiles Analyst Murthy Grandhi, said: “TSMC’s 77.4 per cent net income growth against a 33.8 per cent YoY capex rise reflects its race to add advanced-node capacity, which is running short of AI demand. Constellation Energy’s 1,247.5 per cent net income growth underscores that power, not chips, is now the binding constraint, a point hyperscalers have made explicitly on recent earning calls.”
Intel narrowed its net loss by 278.1 per cent year on year, helped by what GlobalData called a genuine turnaround. Chipzilla’s 18A node hit high-volume manufacturing in January 2026, with yields improving by about seven per cent each month. Its 9.9 per cent CHIPS Act equity stake has appreciated on paper.
Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon and the Fruity Cargo Cult Apple have all opened foundry talks with Intel. The catch is that Intel does not expect meaningful foundry revenue before 2027.
Marvell’s net income fell 80.6 per cent year on year despite 27.6 per cent revenue growth. That shows custom-silicon suppliers can still have their margins squeezed by ramp costs, even while AI demand looks bonkers.
Hyperscalers Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta each posted capex growth above 65 per cent year on year. That matched public guidance, with Alphabet raising 2026 spending to $175 billion to $190 billion.
Meta has guided toward $125 billion to $145 billion, while Microsoft is heading toward $120 billion to $190 billion. GlobalData reckons the four hyperscalers are on pace for roughly $700 billion to $725 billion in 2026 capex.
That is up about 77 per cent from 2025 and would be the largest peacetime capital cycle in corporate history.
The spending is being funded even as free cash flow tightens, which should make the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street twitchy.
Grandhi said: “Geopolitics is now embedded in these numbers. In January 2026, the Trump administration invoked Section 232 to impose a 25 per cent tariff on select advanced AI chips, with a two-phase plan that could raise rates further while rewarding domestic production. Separately, the Bureau of Industry and Security shifted H200 and MI325X export reviews for China from presumptive denial to case-by-case approval, capped near 50 per cent of prior US sales, a partial reopening that still left buyers like ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent able to secure only a fraction of the over two million H200s they’d ordered. TSMC, Samsung and SK Hynix lost blanket Validated End-User exemptions on 1 January 2026 and now need annual US licenses to ship equipment into their China fabs.”
Layered on top is Pax Silica, the US-led pact signed by two dozen nations in December 2025. It locks allied countries, including India, Japan, South Korea and the Philippines, into a trusted semiconductor and critical-minerals chain outside China’s orbit. India is a direct beneficiary.
Micron’s Sanand, Gujarat assembly-and-test plant opened in February 2026 and is now packaging DRAM and NAND for Micron’s global supply chain. That gives Micron an India-origin option just as DRAM prices rose roughly 90 per cent in the first quarter of 2026.
The Tata Electronics and PSMC wafer fab at Dholera has passed the halfway mark. It is targeting trial production by December 2026 at the 28nm node.
“GlobalData sees none of this capex as optional now: HBM and advanced-node capacity are sold out, tariffs and export licensing are permanent cost variables, and Pax Silica signals self-reliance blocs, not free trade, will govern chip supply chains for the rest of the decade. The risk isn’t slowing AI demand, but power, memory and licensing constraints capping deployment speed,” Grandhi said.
