US Stock Surge Weather Vane: Cloud Computing+Data Center

Overnight, the stock prices of the three major US stock companies surged again. The stock price of Google-A (GOOGL.US) rose 4.88%, surpassing Apple (AAPL.US) to second place in the world; Microsoft (MSFT.US) stock price rose 4.93%, with a cumulative increase of about 25% in the past three trading days; Amazon (AMZN.US) stock price rose 4.58%, with a total market capitalization above $3 trillion.

Meanwhile, the data center concept stock CoreWeave surged 19.49%, while Nebius rose 11%.

Recently, market capital has continued to flow to cloud computing and AI software-related sectors. Driven by the digital transformation of enterprises, accelerated implementation of AI applications, and expectations of growth in demand for cloud services, the overall performance of cloud vendors is better than the market.

A collective explosion of the financial reports of the three major cloud vendors for the second quarter of 2026.

The market was previously most worried about tech giants investing heavily in AI but the return is far from expected, and the latest financial report completely dispels this concern:

Amazon AWS: Revenue in a single quarter was $42.2 billion, up 37% year over year, the fastest growth rate in 18 quarters, and AI-related annual revenue exceeded 25 billion US dollars.

Microsoft Smart Cloud: Azure surged 43% year over year, exceeding the company's previous guidelines, and annual annualized revenue exceeded 100 billion US dollars for the first time.

Google Cloud: Single quarter revenue surged 82% year over year, far exceeding market expectations, and operating profit margin increased sharply to 35.6%.

These realistic data prove that AI investment is shifting from a “money-burning” stage to a “rent collection” model that can generate real money.

Cloud vendors not only have impressive current performance, but future demand is also extremely visible. At present, the total backlog of orders in the tech giant's cloud business has exceeded 2.3 trillion US dollars, an increase of 16% over the previous month.

Facing a situation where supply is in short supply, giants such as Amazon, Google, and Meta have raised their capital expenditure forecasts for the full year 2026 (for example, Amazon raised to 220 billion US dollars), and major domestic and foreign manufacturers are simultaneously increasing the construction of intelligent computing centers and GPU clusters.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassi even said bluntly that even with a sharp increase in capital expenditure, the supply of computing power in 2026 and even 2027 will not be able to fully meet all customer needs, which has provided a demand guarantee for the cloud computing industry chain for several years.

Notably, the investment logic of the current market is undergoing profound changes. The capital is no longer simply looking for vendors selling hardware, but is clearly concentrated on cloud service providers that have the ability to make a profit.

AI infrastructure software and hardware switch domestic institutions focus on falling computing power leases

Guohai Securities released a research report saying that Meta's transformation to cloud computing is mainly due to consideration of its own business model, and AI computing power is expected to continue to grow in the long term. It is expected that the tight supply and demand for AI computing power in China will increase, the medium- to long-term growth logic of the computing power leasing industry is more determined, and it has already entered a dividend period for performance release.

CITIC Construction Investment released a research report saying that with 2026Q2, the capital expenditure of leading North American cloud vendors continues to rise high. The total capital expenditure guidelines for the four North American cloud vendors in 2026 are about US$720 billion to US$745 billion, reflecting that North American cloud vendors are still expanding around AI infrastructure.

Looking at it now, the AI computing power industry chain is still booming, but the market has recently undergone significant adjustments, and there is a situation where there is a sharp decline. Future suggestions to continue to pay attention: first, the big model ARR, especially the growth of ARR in the coding scenario. After all, the big model in North America has recently been reduced in price. If ARR growth hits a bottleneck in the short term, it may affect the market's expectations for future computing power demand; second, the implementation and development of the big model in other application scenarios other than coding; third, the price trend of the computing power inflation chain for some time; and fourth, the financing situation and market trends in various parts of the AI industry chain.

Furthermore, in view of the heavy holdings of the AI industry chain in the second quarter, the market recently adjusted, showing signs of being high or low. It is recommended to focus on undervalued and high dividend targets.

Individual Hong Kong stocks involving cloud computing+data centers include: Guangdong-Gangwan Intelligent Computing (01396), Jinshan Cloud (03896), GDS (09698), Alibaba-W (09988), China Telecom (00728) (Tianyi Cloud), etc.

This article is reprinted from the “Hong Kong Stock Connect” official account, Zhitong Finance Editor: Jiang Yuanhua.