Compute & Infrastructure

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told crowds at GTC 2026 that the company expects to generate at least $1 trillion from its Blackwell and Rubin chip families through the end of 2027, up from $500 billion a year ago, as reported by Bloomberg and Tom's Hardware. The announcement accompanied a wave of product launches including the Vera Rubin GPU platform, Groq 3 inference accelerators based on Nvidia's $20 billion acquisition, and 88-core Vera CPUs positioned to compete with Intel and AMD in data centre workloads. Tom's Hardware reported the new Vera CPU rack architecture features 256 liquid-cooled processors delivering up to 6x throughput gains over standard CPUs. Intel announced at the event that its Xeon 6 processors will serve as the host CPU in Nvidia's DGX Rubin NVL8 systems, as covered by Tom's Hardware, though Nvidia's own CPU push suggests the chipmaker is hedging its supplier dependencies.

Micron entered high-volume production of HBM4 36GB 12H memory stacks for the Vera Rubin platform, delivering over 2.8 TB/s bandwidth — a 2.3x improvement over HBM3E — according to Tom's Hardware and Data Center Dynamics. Nvidia also unveiled space-based compute modules including a Space-1 Vera Rubin variant already deployed by six commercial space companies, as reported by Tom's Hardware and Data Center Dynamics, though details on power, cooling, and radiation hardening remain sparse.

SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won warned that a global memory chip shortage will likely persist for another four to five years due to endemic constraints in semiconductor production, as reported by Bloomberg. The warning came as MSI told investors it plans gaming product price increases of up to 30%, describing 2026 as the most severe year since the company was founded, according to Tom's Hardware. Chinese GPU vendor Zephyr cancelled a planned single-fan RTX 4070 Ti Super due to VRAM price hikes, pivoting to a lower-spec RTX 4070 Super instead, as covered by Tom's Hardware.

The memory shortage is driven by surging AI training and inference demand colliding with capacity constraints in advanced packaging and high-bandwidth memory production. Micron's move to HBM4 production for Nvidia addresses bandwidth needs but does not resolve the underlying capacity bottleneck affecting consumer and enterprise markets downstream from AI buildout.

AWS announced it will deploy more than one million Nvidia GPUs over the next 12 months, as reported by Data Center Dynamics. Meta signed a contract with Nebius worth up to $27 billion over five years for large-scale deployments of Nvidia's Vera Rubin platform, according to Data Center Dynamics and Bloomberg. Bank of America increased its 2026 forecast for investment-grade debt issuance by hyperscalers by 25% to $175 billion, with $65 billion expected in new issuance remaining this year, as noted by Bloomberg.

DayOne Data Centers is reportedly nearing a confidential US IPO filing, according to Bloomberg, signalling investor appetite for data centre capacity plays despite broader market uncertainty. Applied Digital indicated that a data centre near Toronto, South Dakota, is unlikely to proceed, as covered by Data Center Dynamics, while Microsoft committed $52 million for data centres in Medina, Texas, according to Data Center Dynamics.

The UK government announced over £1 billion in quantum computing research spending over the next four years, as reported by Bloomberg, and pledged £45 million for an AI supercomputer at the UK Atomic Energy Authority's Culham campus to model nuclear fusion plasma behaviour, according to The Register. UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves vowed that Britain will adopt AI faster than any other G7 nation, framing the technology as central to economic growth, as covered by Bloomberg.

Canada announced a 10-year, C$200 million agreement to lease a spaceport on the country's east coast, aiming to establish satellite launch capability independent of the US and other nations, as reported by Bloomberg. The move reflects growing concern over dependency on US launch providers including SpaceX for critical satellite infrastructure.