Citi Research's Atif Malik team, in their Q3 forward-looking report released on October 8th, raised their capital expenditure forecasts for hyperscale cloud vendors: the combined data center capital expenditure growth rate of the five major cloud vendors is projected to increase by 93% year-on-year in 2026, an upward revision of approximately 10% from the June forecast, primarily driven by memory price inflation. This is the most direct earnings forecast revision before the earnings season.
The signals for 2027 are equally clear: Citi analysts have across-the-board raised their forecasts for data center capital expenditure growth in 2027, with the combined growth rate rising from "over 30%" in June to "over 40%" currently. Looking at individual vendors, AWS, Meta, and GCP have been revised upwards, Azure slightly downwards, and OCI remains unchanged—one downward revision and three upward revisions indicate that the driver is industry-wide investment rather than individual demand.
