According to Wallstreetcn, citing a recent Morgan Stanley research report, venture funding for US AI infrastructure-related startups reached $33.5 billion in 2026, nearly doubling the total for all of 2025. The report indicates that capital is undergoing a structural shift, no longer solely pursuing individual elements like hashrate or power, but accelerating towards systemic solutions that integrate both. Data centers are evolving into "AI factories" requiring unified orchestration of power, hashrate, networking, cooling, and data flow.

Capital is highly concentrated in two scarce elements: hashrate per unit of power consumption and stable power supply, which together account for over 80% of the total funding in 2026. Concurrently, the participation of cross-path investors (investing in both power and hashrate) surged from 16% before 2021 to 73% in 2026, demonstrating a significant increase in market recognition of the system integration logic. Crusoe, valued at $30 billion, has become the highest-valued company in this sector, with several other companies like Etched, FluidStack, and Helion exceeding $10 billion in valuation, confirming the market's pricing preference for integrated business models.

Furthermore, the focus of seed-round funding has shifted significantly from hashrate in 2025 to power and its surrounding bottlenecks in 2026, with areas such as subsea geothermal, on-site power, transformers, and advanced nuclear energy becoming the largest recipients of funding. Morgan Stanley emphasizes that the next phase of validation for AI infrastructure investment will shift from "funding size" to "actual deployment capacity."