From hyperscalers to hospitals: AI capex, inference, robots

Hyperscalers are allocating roughly $725 billion to AI this year, focusing capital expenditure on data centers, chips and related infrastructure. SoftBank pledged up to €75 billion to build data centers in France and plans a Roze AI unit to deploy robots for faster construction.

The largest cloud operators — including Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Meta — are directing most new spending toward AI infrastructure. Manufacturing activity strengthened in May, with the ISM Manufacturing index at 54%, supporting investment in factories and equipment.

SoftBank’s commitment accompanies its pending acquisition of ABB’s robotics division, majority ownership of Arm Holdings and a stake in OpenAI, creating funding across chips, robots, buildings and power systems. The company plans to deploy robotics in data-center construction through Roze AI.

IBM outlined its own manufacturing plan for emerging compute, committing more than $10 billion to quantum computing over five years and creating a new quantum chip foundry, Anderon, in Albany, New York, in partnership with the U.S. Commerce Department. The company targets a fault-tolerant quantum computer by 2029.

Snowflake reported 34% year-over-year growth in product revenue and raised its full-year forecast. The company secured a fresh $6 billion cloud capacity commitment with Amazon and agreed to acquire Natoma, whose software links autonomous AI agents to corporate data and tools.

Inference is moving closer to end users. Nvidia and Microsoft introduced RTX Spark, a processor co-designed with MediaTek to bring server-grade AI workloads into thin Windows laptops. The first devices are scheduled to ship this fall, enabling lower latency and local data processing.

Robinhood launched an Agentic Trading beta that allows bots built on Anthropic’s Claude or OpenAI’s ChatGPT to place trades inside separate, sandboxed accounts; the feature will expand to options and crypto. The platform serves about 27 million users.

In industrial robotics, Aptiv expanded collaboration with Nvidia on production-ready computing for robots and industrial systems. Mitsubishi Electric partnered with the Chiba Institute of Technology to develop humanoids, walking robots and drones for factories and infrastructure. SoftBank intends to use Roze AI to accelerate data-center builds with robotic systems.

In healthcare, Tempus AI gained expanded FDA approval for its xT cancer genomic test and presented results showing its AI decision-support tool identified lung cancer patients missing key genetic tests and raised testing rates by double digits.

Indexes that track robotics and AI companies reflect activity across capital expenditure, inference and application layers. Market participants continue to monitor hyperscaler capex and factory data for signs of change in demand and supply chains.