South Korea's KOSPI index surged more than 4 percent on July 23, reclaiming the 7,000 level for the first time in five sessions, as Alphabet's stronger-than-expected cloud revenue and raised capital expenditure guidance drove foreign investors into Samsung and SK hynix, lifting the won against the US dollar
The combined US$700bn-plus annual capital investment by US tech giants Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta, directed almost entirely at AI data centers.
full dossier ›AMD unveiled the Instinct MI400X graphics processor and EPYC 9006 server CPU at its Advancing AI 2026 conference on July 22-23, claiming both are the fastest in their class and forming the core of its new Helios rack-scale AI system; the company also launched ROCm.ai software and announced major customer deployment plans, positioning the full stack as a direct challenge to Nvidia's installed base
Google's parent Alphabet posted second-quarter 2026 revenue of US$119.8 billion after the market close on July 22, beating analyst expectations, but Alphabet's shares fell as the company signalled higher capital spending for 2026, raising investor concerns about the pace of AI infrastructure investment
Hyperscalers plan US$725 billion in 2026 capex for GPU campuses, chip contracts, and power deals that determine who can train and serve frontier AI models.
AI data centres globally consume billions of gallons annually for server cooling, triggering water-rights conflicts across the US Southwest, Spain, and other drought-stressed regions.
Data-center revenue ~$72.8bn; Vera Rubin ramps to full production by fall; guidance assumes zero China data-center compute, and the stock still slid
Amazon ~$200bn, Microsoft ~$190bn, Alphabet $175–185bn, Meta $125–145bn, a combined AI buildout larger than most national budgets, with component inflation now a line item
Nvidia invests in OpenAI; OpenAI commits to Oracle clouds; Oracle buys Nvidia chips, a self-referential money wheel as Oracle/Microsoft CDS spreads roughly double
Two Fairwater sites stitched by a dedicated AI wide-area network train one model in tandem, hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GB200/GB300 GPUs, 140kW racks, no UPS or gen-sets
Indiana's $11bn AWS megacampus runs ~500,000 Trainium2 chips for Anthropic; the partners now target up to 5GW, with Amazon guiding to ~$200bn capex in 2026