Storage & AAPL Surveys; Positioning Update; Data Center Watch & Power Flags; AVGO; GLW; News/Reads

Research evidence excerpt

Storage & AAPL Surveys; Positioning Update; Data Center Watch & Power Flags; AVGO; GLW; News/Reads

Data Center Watch points to datapoints suggesting AI infrastructure demand remains healthy overall.

LLM token spend growth moderated after a robust June, and open-weight models are encroaching on spend. Notably, Kimi K3

has broken into the top five models by spend, a category that has been historically exclusive to closed-weight models. On the

GPU side, A200 rental growth rates fell, while B200 rental price growth accelerated to +7.3%MoM ($5.72/GPU-hr); H100s

actually dipped -1.1%MoM, negative for the first time in seven months… perhaps signaling a demand rotation toward the latest-

gen silicon that is constructive for NVDA's product cycle. Memory is the key watch item: DRAM and NAND contract price

growth is expected to decelerate sharply to +16% and +13%QoQ in 3Q26E, respectively, from +56%/+58% in 2Q26, driven by

higher base effects, weakening consumer demand, CSP long-term agreements, and elevated buyer inventories post 1H26 pull-

forwards. No specific stock rating changes in this report; use the data points as a read-across for NVDA (B200 demand), MU/

WDC/STX (memory pricing), and hyperscaler capex names.

Hardware & Networking: Industry Webinar Flags Massive Power/Supply Chain Constraints as Key Gating Factors for

Build-Out. Here

Joseph Cardoso shares takeaways from recent 3P analyst webinars with BloombergNEF, Gartner, and Datacenter Hawk; the

headline is a massive upward revision to U.S. data center power demand. BloombergNEF's base case now sits at 118GW by

2030 (up from 77 GW in 2H25), with a bull "AI-chip" case pointing to 160GW… requiring the grid to absorb 19 GW annually, a