Last week the tape punished the Q2 winners. This week, we saw a sharp snapback in the latter half. The biggest narrative change came from Meta. Last week's Meta Neocloud news had the market reading it as a prelude to capex cuts, and semis sold off on it. This week, Bloomberg’s reporting on Meta’s capex plans for next year ran counter to the narrative: the company is still hungry for compute, still moving forward with expensive new data centers, and recently signed major compute deals with CoreWeave, Google and Oracle. The sell side moved fast, with some lifting their FY27 Meta capex estimate to $220bn against Street estimates of $160bn or more, and peers calling 2027 spend “shockingly high” after Meta contracted over 5 GWW of data center capacity in 1H26 alone. Add the c. $13bn, 1GW-and-growing Alberta data center announced this week, and the message is consistent. The market spent a week worrying Meta might cut; Meta is planning to spend more. We argued the unwind said more about crowded positioning than fundamentals, and the price action this week backed that view.
Grok 4.5 reinforced the same conclusion from the model side. After months of the market writing xAI down to a neocloud, the release puts SpaceXAI back at the frontier-lab table with near-frontier capability at a clearly lower cost per task, trained on the Cursor data flywheel and tens of thousands of GB300s. Compute remains the binding constraint, and we stay bullish on it.
Semis earnings season starts next week with TSMC. We published our previews ahead of the prints: another beat-and-raise from TSMC, and higher EUV shipment numbers for ASML as supply bottlenecks ease. Details below.
Starting this issue, the Weekly also includes our Weekly Expert Interviews Summary, a snapshot of the expert calls hosted by our analysts this week across optics, AI servers, cloud infrastructure and more. You will find it below. Please reach out to sales@funda.ai for more details.
