The AI boom has turned the standard profit margin model on its head, according to Apollo Chief Economist Torsten Slok—and it’s making the industry’s growth unsustainable.
For a start of who the shovel sellers might be, you can take a look at the list in his post that Torsten Slok used to calculate his margin numbers:
Note: Data as of 2Q 2026 and for OpenAI (1Q 2026 estimate from PitchBook) and Anthropic (2Q 2026 estimate from Financial Times). Averages are equal-weighted bucket averages of Energy & Grid (Constellation Energy, Vistra, NextEra Energy, Vertiv, Eaton, Arista Networks), Silicon & Equipment (Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, Marvell, TSMC, SK Hynix, Samsung Electronics, Micron), Compute & Cloud (Super Micro, Dell Technologies, Foxconn, Equinix, Digital Realty, Amazon/AWS, Microsoft/Azure, Alphabet/Google Cloud, CoreWeave, Nebius) and Models & Applications (OpenAI, Anthropic). Sources: Bloomberg, PitchBook, Apollo Chief Economist
In short according to his research the people currently making a profit or at least positive margins, are the people who build chips and memory, who build energy infrastructure, and who build servers and data canters.
I would like to see the distinction between Servers (Super Micro, Dell Technologies, Foxconn) and Datacenters (Equinix, Digital Realty, Amazon/AWS, Microsoft/Azure, Alphabet/Google Cloud, CoreWeave, Nebius) but he seems to have put them together.
Also I heard from our local news that ABB (which is Swiss, Edit: apparently also Swedish) is profiting too, they belong in the power category.
And I wonder why Arista goes in the Energy category, I’d see them and Cisco, and Juniper, and Extreme, and Nokia in a separate network category.
Not just Nvidia.
For a start of who the shovel sellers might be, you can take a look at the list in his post that Torsten Slok used to calculate his margin numbers:
In short according to his research the people currently making a profit or at least positive margins, are the people who build chips and memory, who build energy infrastructure, and who build servers and data canters.
I would like to see the distinction between Servers (Super Micro, Dell Technologies, Foxconn) and Datacenters (Equinix, Digital Realty, Amazon/AWS, Microsoft/Azure, Alphabet/Google Cloud, CoreWeave, Nebius) but he seems to have put them together.
Also I heard from our local news that ABB (which is Swiss, Edit: apparently also Swedish) is profiting too, they belong in the power category.
And I wonder why Arista goes in the Energy category, I’d see them and Cisco, and Juniper, and Extreme, and Nokia in a separate network category.