Written by: Rita
The governors of Texas and Pennsylvania signed executive orders in August tightening regulations, energy, and environmental thresholds for data center development. Goldman Sachs utilities analysts believe this has minimal impact on high-quality, large-scale projects, and primarily affects speculative, undercapitalized ventures. SMCI reported its F4Q26 earnings on August 11, providing an FY27 revenue guidance of $65 to $72 billion, with F4Q quarterly orders exceeding $60 billion, approximately 70% of which relate to pure AI deployments.
Demand for AI infrastructure has not slowed due to tighter regulations. In August, global AI project announcements remained robust, ranging from IBM’s $240 million partnership with Together AI, to the launch of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign AI platform, and multi-billion-dollar agreements between CoreWeave and quantitative trading giant Hudson River Trading. In its monthly AI project tracker released on August 31, Goldman Sachs outlined key developments in global AI infrastructure during the month. AI computing power is increasingly concentrating among leading players, and sovereign nations are accelerating their involvement.
Texas and Pennsylvania tighten regulations, with Dell and AMD most affected.
On August 3, the Governor of Texas signed an order tightening energy and environmental requirements for data center development. On August 18, Pennsylvania followed suit. Carly Davenport, a utilities analyst at Goldman Sachs, believes the policy changes will have minimal real impact on high-quality, large-scale projects, primarily affecting speculative and undercapitalized initiatives.
Goldman Sachs' U.S. IT Hardware team noted that Dell and Supermicro have the largest exposure to greenfield projects serving emerging AI data centers. Supermicro's F4Q quarterly orders exceeded $60 billion, with FY27 revenue guidance of $65 to $72 billion, representing a 75% year-over-year increase. Approximately 70% of this is related to GPU servers. Supermicro's performance also signals positive momentum for Dell and HPE: Dell benefits from sustained strong demand for GPU servers, while HPE benefits from the rebound in CPU server demand.
The Sovereign AI project has been implemented in multiple locations worldwide.
In August, sovereign AI infrastructure development advanced simultaneously across multiple regions worldwide, with Saudi Arabia being the most active market that month.
On August 31, HUMAIN, an AI company backed by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund PIF, launched an open large-scale AI platform in Riyadh in collaboration with AMD and Cisco, utilizing AMD Instinct MI355X GPUs and Cisco Silicon One networking solutions. The next phase plans to deploy 250 megawatts, with a target of 1 gigawatt by 2030.
On August 24, the French AI company Mistral signed a multi-hundred-million-euro strategic partnership with HUMAIN to jointly develop sovereign AI infrastructure and build Arabic large language models for regulated industries.
The Indian market is also highly active. On August 26, IntelliDB Enterprise partnered with Yotta Data Services to deliver sovereign AI database infrastructure in India. Yotta previously announced the deployment of 20,736 NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs, with 10,000 allocated to India’s AI Mission. Supermicro is one of Yotta’s AI infrastructure partners.
On August 8, U.S.-based AI cloud infrastructure company Firebird announced the launch of the first phase of Armenia’s sovereign AI infrastructure, with an initial investment of $500 million, planning for over 400 megawatts, utilizing Dell PowerEdge servers and NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs. In the UK, AI infrastructure startup Era4 partnered with HPE to deploy a modular data center network using HPE’s modular AI solution and NVIDIA Blackwell B300 GPUs, starting with an initial GPU inventory of 1,500 units and scaling to over 10,000 units within 12 months.
New projects and cooperation agreements continue to be released.
IBM and Together AI signed a $240 million multi-year agreement on August 11 to deploy a large-scale AI inference cluster on IBM Cloud, utilizing NVIDIA HGX B300 systems and Spectrum-X Ethernet, with an expected launch in the first quarter of 2027.
On August 10, Fermi signed a binding lease agreement with AI cloud provider TensorWave to deliver a 222-megawatt data center solution in Carson County, Texas. The 15-year contract is valued at approximately $6.5 billion, with deliveries expected to begin in the second half of 2027. Fermi has the right to expand to 650 megawatts, utilizing AMD Instinct GPUs and multiple power sources.
On August 25, Cisco entered into a strategic partnership with Supermicro to expand the Secure AI Factory solution, offering both liquid-cooled and air-cooled AI infrastructure capable of supporting trillion-parameter model training. Supermicro’s solutions will be available through Cisco’s channels starting October 2026.
On August 20, quantitative trading firm Hudson River Trading signed a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar agreement with CoreWeave to deploy NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 and HGX B200 GPU systems on CoreWeave’s cloud platform for AI-driven trading research.
On August 1, Indian fintech company ZyBiSys completed its Dell unified infrastructure deployment, achieving 99.99% availability across six data centers in India to support real-time trading for over 50 stock brokers.
Goldman Sachs' assessment is clear: the investment boom in AI infrastructure continues to accelerate, and tighter regulations have not substantially hindered the expansion of leading players. Demand for server hardware remains robust, and sovereign AI initiatives are expanding beyond Saudi Arabia and India to more regions. AI computing resources are increasingly concentrated among large players with capital, technical expertise, and regulatory compliance capabilities, leaving less room for small speculative projects.
Disclaimer
This article is a compilation and interpretation by Chaoxiang Research of a third-party brokerage research report (Goldman Sachs, August 31, 2026), combined with publicly available market information. The ratings, price targets, earnings forecasts, and related judgments cited herein reflect the views of the brokerage's analysts and represent the position of their respective institution, not the views of Chaoxiang Research, nor do they constitute any investment advice.
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