Weekly|Historical Week, MSFT Rewarded, META Punished, AWS Fastest in 18 Quarters, SPCX First-Print Setup & xAI 8GW Mapping, Memory Unwind, INTC, AMD, PLTR

Where should we start? This is probably one of the most extreme weeks we have seen in our career history, if not the most extreme, by the pace and magnitude of drawdown in momentum. In hindsight, there were multiple narrative shifts we could point to, including open-source model competition, new methods in model distillation, increasing memory cost burden on capex, etc. However, if we focus on frontier model development and industry ARR growth, fundamentals haven’t seen a meaningful downturn. Therefore, we have kept pointing towards positioning as the main source of vulnerability. This argument is probably validated this week, after brutal deleveraging at certain star AI funds. You probably have read a lot on that matter, and we won’t elaborate. Still, we do believe this drawdown creates attractive entry opportunities for many names with visible growth and profitability outlook.

Switching gears to new narratives, the verdict on the heart of hyperscaler earnings season came down on a single axis: AI ROI specificity. Microsoft disclosed 30m+ paid M365 Copilot seats with roughly 10m net adds in a single quarter — double the prior pace — and got rewarded; we think that re-rating is only beginning. Meta grew 28% to the high end of guidance but raised CapEx to $130–145bn and OPEX to $165–169bn without putting numbers on the AI revenue increment, and was punished for exactly the gap our preview framed: does AI need to recreate another META? AWS settled the argument by simply delivering — 36.7% growth, the fastest in 18 quarters and a fifth straight acceleration, with backlog up 36% QoQ to $496bn.

The detail worth sitting with is AWS raising its 2026 CapEx guide from ~$200bn to ~$220bn mainly because of memory costs — in the same week memory equities went through a historic momentum unwind. The largest memory buyers on the planet are lifting CapEx because of memory prices while telling you they still cannot meet 2027 demand; that is not consistent with the top of a pricing cycle. Kioxia’s own print made the point from inside the unwind: an F2Q guide implying ~+30% ASP, SSD & Storage revenue up 390% YoY, and an ¥800bn buyback that sets the shareholder-return benchmark for the whole memory group.

The other place we spent the week is SpaceX, ahead of its first print as a public company on 8/4. The quarter itself has almost no surprise room; what matters is the FY26 capex disclosure and the lock-up calendar that starts two days later. The bigger question — whether xAI can actually plug in the ~8GW of compute it has ordered for 2027 — is the subject of our deep dive: the demand is locked into tier-1 OEM production schedules, but nobody on the supply side underwrites more than 5GW. In all, we published fifteen reports across our channels this week; the full rundown is below.

This Week’s Reports

MSFT 2Q26 — the market is only beginning to reward better ROI. Our preview flagged a Copilot beat from channel checks, and the print delivered: 30m+ paid M365 Copilot seats with ~10m net adds in a single quarter, roughly double the prior pace. With E7 ramping and monetization expanding from seats to usage, we think the ROI re-rating has further to run.

SPCX — the compute is ordered; can it be plugged in? xAI’s ~8GW of 2027 demand is locked into tier-1 OEM schedules, yet six independent supply-side sources converge on only 3.5–5GW deliverable. The gap sits at power generation and permitting — our base case is 5GW installed by end-2027.

PLTR — growth momentum is still accelerating into the 2Q print. Record 1Q obligations point to roughly $1,030mm of 2Q government revenue, up 86%+ YoY and accelerating from 76%, while AIP adoption and Ontology keep US commercial demand intact.

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