Silicon as a Service Is Emerging as AI’s Next Big Trade

The AI trade used to live in Silicon Valley — now it’s got a Wall Street co-signer. With Big Tech on pace to spend $700B on AI infrastructure in 2026, the “Silicon-as-a-Service” industry is booming. That includes fresh deals like GoogleGOOGL

and Blackstone’sBX

$5B venture, and AMD’sAMD

$10B+ pledge into Taiwan’s AI supply chain.

• The Google-Blackstone venture targets 500 megawatts of data center capacity by 2027 — with total investment potentially reaching $25B, including leverage.
• That comes as AMD’s Venice CPUs ramp on TSMC’sTSM
  2-nanometer process — positioning it as the most credible alternative to Nvidia’sNVDA
  AI hardware stack.

Full stack or bust: For years, the AI buildout ran on GPUs, but agentic AI has changed the math. Systems that reason and act in real time run heavy on CPUs, catching the industry off guard, as even AMD CEO Lisa Su admits, “The CPU market is tight.” To answer that, AmazonAMZN

, MicrosoftMSFT

, and MetaMETA

are all rolling out custom silicon — accelerating a shift away from single-vendor dependency. While Silicon-as-a–Service can help bridge the gap, the real race is owning the infrastructure it runs on.