From Chips to the Cloud, Follow the Money
If you want to understand this shift, just look at a company like NVIDIA. Their data centre revenues have exploded because they make the very chips that everyone, now including Meta, is desperate to get their hands on. It’s the classic gold rush scenario. Whilst everyone is digging for AI gold, NVIDIA is selling the shovels, and doing very nicely out of it.
But the opportunity doesn't stop there. Who manufactures these advanced chips? Companies like Taiwan Semiconductor. Who else makes high-performance hardware? The likes of Advanced Micro Devices. Then you have the cloud giants, like Microsoft with its Azure platform, providing the raw computing power and storage on a rental basis. Meta's increased spending provides a powerful tailwind for this entire ecosystem, from the silicon designers to the companies that assemble the servers and lay the fibre optic cables. It’s a far cry from the speculative demand for headsets that might, one day, find a use.