Goldman Sachs estimates cumulative AI capital spending will reach approximately $7.6 trillion from 2026 through 2031. However, current revenue from major AI players like OpenAI and Anthropic, which generated over $105 billion in combined annualized revenue by August 2026, significantly lags behind this infrastructure buildout. The industry needs to scale its annual recurring revenue past $1 trillion by 2030 to avoid substantial hardware write-downs.

This gap poses a risk for Nvidia, whose high gross margins depend on demand for scarce, high-end GPUs. If enterprise demand fails to meet new capacity, hyperscalers may slow purchases, demand lower prices, and increasingly rely on internal chips (such as Google's TPUs, Amazon's Trainium, and Microsoft's Maia), potentially leading to slower growth and more cyclical margins for Nvidia.

Conversely, Microsoft is well-positioned to benefit from