01NVIDIA

Two moves shaped the month. On the demand side, NVIDIA entered talks to backstop up to $250B of OpenAI’s lease on the 10 GW SB Energy site in southern Ohio. A full project cost above $500B if it lands, and the largest single data centre programme ever announced. On the deliverability side, the 800 VDC ecosystem crossed 31 named partners (Vertiv, Delta, TI, Schneider, Eaton among them) with second-half shipping commitments. Taken together, NVIDIA is now underwriting both the compute buyer and the power distribution stack that gets electrons to the chip. This is a substantially different business shape than pure GPU supply, and the equity market has not yet repriced it.

02OCP

Mt. Diablo is now the reference implementation for rack-level DC power in the hyperscaler world. The Google-Meta-Microsoft authored specification pushes distribution from 48 VDC to ±400 VDC or 800 VDC, targeting between 100 kW and 1 MW per rack. What matters is that the open hyperscaler-driven standardisation track (OCP) and the proprietary chip-driven track (NVIDIA) have converged on the same voltage, which is unusual and is what makes 800 VDC bankable as 2027 equipment capex rather than a research trajectory. The vendor set that gets this right is the one taking orders in Q4.

03Hyperscalers

Q2 2026 earnings put combined 2026 big-four capex at roughly $725B, up 77 percent from 2025. Alphabet raised guidance to $175-205B and the stock fell seven percent on July 24. AWS is guiding to around $200B, Microsoft to around $190B, Meta raised guidance twice to $125-145B. The pattern in the sell-off is worth reading closely because investors were not pushing back on the demand thesis; they were asking whether the physical infrastructure could absorb the spend on the timeline the guidance implied. That question, not the compute-demand question, is the one that determines whether 2027 revenue actually shows up.

04Power equipment

Vertiv had a substantial Q2. Guidance raised to $13.8-14.2B revenue and EPS $5.82-5.92, the $600M buyback completed, a Bitzero AI/HPC partnership announced, and backlog above $15B. The 800 VDC portfolio ships in H2 aligned to NVIDIA, and the PurgeRite integration produced the NearZero fluid management service, which is commercial with hyperscaler case studies quoting 78 percent water-consumption reduction. Eaton and Schneider ran the same shape of Q2 (backlog compounding, pricing power holding, capacity build the operative constraint), which reads as a group that is short of factory floor space rather than short of orders.

05What the market is getting wrong

Consensus in the AI infrastructure trade prices chips first, then power, then land, in that order. What the July signals are collectively saying is that the sequence should be inverted. Four days after month-end, on August 3, Texas Governor Abbott ordered a full audit of the ERCOT interconnection queue and paused Batch Zero. ERCOT is holding 474 GW of load requests, which is around five times its all-time record peak, and roughly 90 percent of that queue is data centres. This looks like a Texas problem in the reporting but MISO, PJM, and CAISO carry queues of similar structural shape with somewhat different regulatory postures, and any $725B combined big-four capex guidance number assumes interconnection availability that current queue mechanics cannot deliver on 2027 and 2028 timelines. Reading the market by chip supply misses the operative constraint, which is copper on transmission towers plus medium-voltage switchgear on the utility side of the point of common coupling. The Vertiv, Eaton, and Schneider order books are the leading indicator for how much of the guidance actually shows up as revenue; the hyperscaler capex line is a lagging one.

06What to expect in the next six months

• OCP Global Summit (October). 800 VDC gets formal reference-design status. A second wave of vendor commitments follows within 30 days.
• Hyperscaler Q3 earnings (October-November). 2027 capex guidance starts landing. Watch whether the anchor firms extend or hold the 2026 growth rate; extension implies confidence in grid-queue resolution, hold implies acceptance that 2027 is capacity-constrained.
• ERCOT audit outcome (Q4). Signals the template other ISOs adopt. If Texas culls the queue by 30-50 percent, other regions will follow. If it merely reorders it, the queue remains the operative constraint.
• Second thermal services roll-up. Expect a PurgeRite-shape acquisition by end-Q1 2027. Candidates: independent liquid cooling service specialists with hyperscaler exposure.
• Private credit for medium-voltage capex. Utility-side transformer and switchgear capacity will get direct-lender financing packages this window. First deals of this shape close by year-end.
• Grid-queue reform legislation. One serious federal-level proposal by Q1 2027 to standardise large-load interconnection. Its fate signals whether the constraint becomes structural or gets policy relief.