The Paths to 25-50% GenAI ROIC

Research evidence excerpt

The Paths to 25-50% GenAI ROIC

Foundation

July 27, 2026 08:24 PM GMT

Morgan Stanley & Co. LLCMInternet | North America Brian Nowak, CFA

Equity Analyst

The Paths to 25-50% GenAI Brian.Nowak@morganstanley.comStephen C Byrd +1 212 761-3365

Stephen.Byrd@morganstanley.com +1 212 761-3865

ROIC Adam Wood

Adam.Wood@morganstanley.com +1 212 761-3656

AI capex and model training spend are surging with investors Julian Herrera

questioning ROIC. We are bullish these investments as 3 new ResearchJulian.Herrera@morganstanley.comAssociate +1 212 761-1784

bottom-up GenAI ROIC frameworks across GPU IaaS and model Gregory Gao

APIs show paths to 25-50% ROIC. This is bullish hyperscalers ResearchGreg.Gao@morganstanley.comAssociate +1 212 296-3125

AMZN, GOOGL, MSFT and model developers GOOGL and Nikhil Javeri

Research Associate

META. Nikhil.Javeri1@morganstanley.com +1 212 761-3742

Kavya A Narayanan

Capex, Capacity and Model Training Spend Continue to Ramp, With ROIC The Research Associate

Lingering Debate: In Internet: $1.4trln of Capex, 4X in Compute Capacity, and AI Kavya.Narayanan@morganstanley.com +1 212 761-4183

Revenue Streams to Watch into '28 (12 Jul 2026), we detailed the path to $1.4trln+ Internet

of capex across the major hyperscalers...with compute capacity expected to North America

Industry View Attractive

quadruple from '25 to ’28 (reaching an estimated ~120 GW). And while the compute

is being used, a substantial part of it is being allocated toward training large

(frontier-leading), medium, and small models as private and public companies

(GOOGL, META and others) spend billions of dollars to develop models to

eventually monetize through inference. All of this spending is causing investors to

question ROIC and weighing on Internet/hyperscaler sentiment and multiples.