2026년 2월 19일 · Unknown · financial · 출처 Yahoo Finance
Listen and subscribe to Stocks In Translation on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find your favorite podcast.
The AI boom is here, but a few hyperscalers are running the show.
In this episode of Stocks in Translation, BNP Paribas Equity Research Equity Analyst David O’Connor joins host Jared Blikre and Yahoo Finance Senior Reporter Brooke DiPalma to discuss the AI trade and the outsized influence of hyperscalers. They break down how a handful of giant buyers, including Amazon (AMZN), Microsoft (MSFT), Alphabet (GOOGL) (GOOG), Meta (META), and Oracle (ORCL), are driving AI infrastructure spending, shaping the semiconductor market, and setting the pace for the next wave of AI growth and innovation.
Twice a week, Stocks In Translation cuts through the market mayhem, noisy numbers and hyperbole to give you the information you need to make the right trade for your portfolio. You can find more episodes here, or watch on your favorite streaming service.
This post was written by Lauren Pokedoff
Video Transcript
0:05 spk_0
Welcome to Stocks and Translation, Yahoo Finance's video podcast that cuts through the market mayhem, the noisy numbers, and the hyperbole to give you the information you need to make the right trade for your portfolio. I'm Jared Blicky, your host, and with me is my co-host, Yahoo Finance senior reporter, Brooke De Palma, who's here to connect the dots and to be that bridge between Wall Street and Main Street.Today we're going straight into the AI arms race, and we've got a former chip designer turned Wall Street analyst to help sort things out. Our word of the day is hyperscaler, because in AI a handful of giant buyers can set the pace for everyone else. We clear the air on exactly what these giants do. And for today's market show and tell, we're looking at Nvidia through a fundamental lens. We're breaking down gross margin to show how it can swing the stock price when the cycle shifts.And this episode is brought to you by the number 53%. Remember smart glasses, they're back, and that's how much demand is expected to grow this year. And today we are welcoming David O'Connor. He is a senior semiconductor research analyst at BMP Paribas and a former chip designer who spent a decade building silicon.With companies like NXP and Texas Instruments from the clean room to the street. David, it's great to have you here.
1:18 spk_1
Yeah, thanks so much for inviting me guys.
1:20 spk_0
So let's begin, uh, with your big picture overview of how you see the AI trade playing out right now. Oh.
1:26 spk_1
Yeah, straight into it. No, no, no, no softball there. Uh, I would say on the, um, on the semiconductor side of things, uh, kind of, uh, sentiment is quite tricky at the moment.A lot of wall of worries, I would say for the, uh, for a lot of investors, you know, worry on the kind of the disruption AI is causing. You know, we've seen that more in the software side or software stocks in the last couple of weeks, but also on the, uh, the hyperscale, you know, concern around the ROI, concern around monetization, also in the capic side of things as well. You know, we've got like 700 billion this year for just hyperscale or capex.Uh, up 70% year over year, but the question is, you know, how much higher that can go. Uh, and there's no, uh, no good answers, I would say. So certainly, uh, right now we need better answers to these questions to kind of get us through this wall of worry and, uh, onto the promised land.
2:20 spk_2
Let's stick with that theme because our word of the day is hyperscalar, and that's a giant cloud operator that runs.Massive data centers and networks at a global scale. In the US, think Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Oracle. And the reason this word matters right now is that in AI, a handful of these giant buyers can set the pace for everyone else. When they speed up spending, it pulls the whole supply chain with it, chips, power, networking, all of it. And when they tap.The brakes, it can hit hardware demand pretty fast. The misunderstanding is that hyperscaler sounds like a cloud buzzword, but it's really a market power word. It's about who has the checkbook, who gets priority, and who can turn AI into a real business. So David, from your seat on the sell side, what's the most important thing that people need to know or get wrong about hyperscalers right now?
3:12 spk_1
Yeah, I, I think the, uh, most important thing for people to understand because they are representing 70% of the AI market. So they are, as you, as you, as you mentioned, writing the checks. Um, I think the uh thing to realize is that they're well funded, uh, so they can afford, and that's what is a bit different now versus if you look back at previous cycles back to the tech bubble in 2000.There, there was, uh, no cash being generated. So the guys who are actually buying all the infrastructure, uh, buying all the chips, as you talk about the connectivity, the power, they were not uh funded. They had no real business model. So, that's very important to understand here that this uh spending can continue and as I mentioned,You know, this year, 2020 calendar 26, probably 90% of, uh, you know, that 700 billion represents 90% of their cash flow. So, quite elevated, but at the same time, you know, they can afford it, uh, they can afford it, uh, you could say. You
4:07 spk_2
mentioned earlier.Or that ROI for these hyper scales that's return of investment. When you think about these names, where are we at now? Because that was really the fear back in the fall. And so has that fear eased at all heading into this year? Yeah,
4:20 spk_1
um, so it's the same concern we had 3 years ago, 2 years ago, last year, uh, in September, as you mentioned. Uh, it hasn't gone away. Still the same questions, uh, but now we need better answers and, uh, those answers aren't really forthcoming.When we look at the hyperscale, you know, they, they are monetizing initially to a certain extent through bet…