2026年第一季度超大规模云厂商表现：生成式AI浪潮下的 pick & shovels 布局

Cloud in the Quarter: How did the hyperscalers do in 1Q26? The hyperscale market has become a picks & shovels basket to support theGenerative AIwave even though it was predominantly a CPU driven business. Investors remain concernedabout the CAPEX growth and the associated margins / returns of AI infrastructure investmentas AI becomes a more meaningful contributor to revenues. Suddenly, the laggard inhyperscale appears the leader in AI cloud with Google’s vertically integrated solution nowneck-and-neck with Microsoft for incremental cloud dollars added Q/Q. Mark L. Moerdler, Ph.D.+1 917 344 8506mark.moerdler@bernsteinsg.com Mark Shmulik+1 917 344 8508mark.shmulik@bernsteinsg.com Even with CAPEX stepping up, CSPs all point to capacity constraints, before it was GPUavailability, but that seems to have shifted to physical powered up datacenter capacity.All thisushers in a slew of new investor questions: Are Microsoft and Amazon going to see a returnon CAPEX? Is speed and cost to bring capacity online the new basis of competition? Do themodel wars determine winners and losers? What are the economics of Oracle’s AI build-out,and can they rely on their OpenAI commitments? Are NVIDIA and OpenAI losers to Google orkingmakers? When will AI drive increased cloud IT budgets? Bernstein's Cloud in the Quarternote, which focuses on the largest hyperscale Cloud providers, should help investors geta better picture of the secular issues and why results may differ between providers. Thisquarter we added another perspective and neocloud data. Robin Zhu+852 2123 2659robin.zhu@bernsteinsg.com Madison Rezaei+1 917 344 8622madison.rezaei@bernsteinsg.com Firoz Valliji, CFA+1 917 344 8316firoz.valliji@bernsteinsg.com Shelly Tang, CFA+1 917 344 8342shelly.tang@bernsteinsg.com The hyperscale market is the largest tangible market opportunity in Software / Cloud /Internet ($1.3-1.5T — see Diving into the Cloud TAM) and possibly the largest in all oftech. Bernstein's Global Hyperscale Cloud Team (Global Software, U.S. Internet, and ChinaInternet and now US Comm. Infrastructure) supplies this quarterly note to help pull allthe data together in one place for Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba Oracle and now aneocloud - CoreWeave. Deeksha Pandey+1 917 344 8447deeksha.pandey@bernsteinsg.com Wenhuan Chang+1 917 344 8546wenhuan.chang@bernsteinsg.com Updating our data through this quarter, today's note looks at the metrics each of thecompanies supply as well as our estimates through Q1 CY2026. The note also supplies ourupdated thoughts on the different companies' hyperscale businesses, where we are on AI,and how the markets and companies are progressing on what we believe is going to be avery long and valuable journey. This is the 21stnote in our series comparing and contrastingthe hyperscale vendors. This many years of historical perspective should help investorsbetter understand the trends and the opportunities. Charles Gou+852 2123 2618charles.gou@bernsteinsg.com Nancy Wu+1 917 344 8545nancy.wu@bernsteinsg.com To further help understand the long-term opportunities, we've published notes diving intothe historical trends in IaaS and PaaS in the U.S. and globally. We give our thoughts on theprogression of the industry (see Link). We would also call attention to our notes that looksat the capital intensity of IaaS/PaaS based on our proprietary work on capital intensity atAzure and AWS — What does it really cost to offer IaaS / PaaS? as well as the impact of AIdriven CAPEX in Why Azure CAPEX will slow and revenue accelerate, Microsoft Azure AImargins, Oracle: The story is better than we thought On the Generative AI opportunity we have published numerous notes including: Can GPUintensive AI compute be a profitable business for hyperscalers?, Generative AI 101 Primer,Gen AI 201 — Inferencing, Generative AI 301 — Reasoning models, Generative AI 401:Agents, AI Infrastructure: The build-out is huge. Bonanza or bubble?, Shifting from Trainingto Inferencing impact on datacenters and 5 Takeaways on datacenter build-out. BERNSTEIN TICKER TABLE INVESTMENT IMPLICATIONS Microsoft (MSFT, TP $646, Outperform):Microsoft made a big bet on Azure, investing aggressively in a global footprintand technology innovation. Starting in ~CY2019 they doubled down on their existing AI investment as they prepared for andadded Gen AI capabilities, built AI datacenters and invested in their own chips. With AI ARR reaching $37B last quarter, AI hasbecome a meaningful contributor to top line growth and not a headwind. We also believe Microsoft is strongly positioned in thecase of an AI bubble because their first-party usage of capacity is ramping thanks to their diversified app base, along with third-party contracts which comes from not only OpenAI but a diversified large enterprise customer base, and contract duration iswell aligned with useful life of the equipment. While most of software is slowing, Azure is stable and will, we believe, acceleratesupporting