Morgan Stanley: AI Infrastructure ROIC Can Reach Up to 46%, Maintains Overweight Rating on Hyperscalers

According to TechFlow Research, Morgan Stanley released a research report on July 27, quantifying for the first time the Incremental Return on Invested Capital (ROIC) of Generative AI investments. The report constructed three estimation frameworks: the ROIC for hyperscale cloud service providers' GPU leasing business is approximately 31%, the ROIC for proprietary infrastructure model API business is approximately 46%, and the ROIC for third-party compute API business is approximately 25%. Under base case assumptions, a single 1 gigawatt (GW) data center is configured with approximately 410,000 NVIDIA GB300 GPUs, with a utilization rate of 75% and an hourly leasing price of $8.5. The combined capital expenditure of the three major cloud giants is expected to exceed $1.4 trillion. Morgan Stanley maintains an Overweight rating on Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Google. The report points out that as AI moves from the training phase to the inference phase, demand for GPU compute power will continue to grow. Providers with self-built compute infrastructure will achieve considerable profits by leveraging their pricing power in an ecosystem where compute is scarce. If Morgan Stanley's calculations hold true, the hundreds of billions of dollars in AI capital expenditure will shift from being perceived as "costs" to "growth assets".