Jim Chanos stated in a recent podcast that Chanos & Co has been focusing on the capital returns of hyperscale cloud vendors since early 2025, finding that their incremental return on invested capital (ROIC) peaked in 2024 and has been rapidly declining ever since. He predicts that if the current downward trend continues, these cloud giants' returns will fall below their weighted average cost of capital (WACC) by mid-2027, and believes the market is unprepared for this. Chanos pointed out that AI data centers are essentially a capital-intensive, continuously depreciating, and low-return equipment leasing business, with economic logic identical to traditional data centers. Goldman Sachs on the same day raised its total data center spending forecast for the next five years to an incremental $2.5 trillion to $3 trillion, bringing the total scale to $10 trillion to $12 trillion.