Lenovo doubles Whitsett server campus
Lenovo executives held a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the company's North Carolina Smart Campus in Whitsett on Friday to mark a $145 million expansion that roughly doubles the facility's footprint. The enlarged 890,000-square-foot operation will carry 35% more manufacturing capacity and is engineered to accommodate the next two generations of high-performance computing equipment, with infrastructure designed to support up to 20 megawatts of power. About 600 people currently work at the site, with employment expected to reach roughly 1,000 as production scales; more than 400 positions have already been filled inside the enlarged facility. The investment includes additional direct liquid cooling capacity, which Lenovo said is increasingly important for servers running AI applications. The latest commitment nearly doubles the $77 million proposal Lenovo presented to Guilford County officials less than a year ago, and follows a 10-year lease signed late last year on a neighbouring 520,583-square-foot industrial building.
MediaTek commits $5 billion to custom AI data-centre chips
MediaTek's board approved a $5 billion discretionary financing framework on July 31 to fund the company's expansion into custom AI accelerators for data centres, the company said on its earnings call. Mobile chip revenue fell 20% year on year in the June quarter, and CEO Rick Tsai told investors he expects global smartphone shipments to decline about 15% in units this year. MediaTek raised its 2027 addressable market estimate for custom AI chips to $80 billion, from a previous range of $70 billion to $80 billion, and lifted its own target share to 15–20%, up from 10–15%. The company expects its data-centre AI chip business to clear $2 billion in revenue this year, with the first custom AI chip entering production in the fourth quarter and a second on track for volume production in 2028. MediaTek doubled its 2026 AI accelerator revenue goal to $2 billion three months earlier.
Meta lifts capex range as AI compute stays tight
Meta raised the low end of its 2026 capital spending forecast by $5 billion on its Q2 earnings call, lifting the range to $130 billion to $145 billion. CFO Susan Li said the industry had "underbuilt historically" for AI demand, leaving existing capacity "extremely valuable" and expected to remain tight "for the foreseeable future." CEO Mark Zuckerberg framed compute as a scarce strategic asset that Meta should keep and build around, while acknowledging offers from businesses that wanted to deploy their own AI plans "at a meaningful premium" over Meta's build-out cost. Free cash flow for the quarter fell to $784 million, down 91% from a year earlier, sending the stock down more than 9% on Thursday. Li ended the call without specifying whether Meta plans to use all of its compute capacity internally through 2027, leaving the question of how aggressively Meta will rent out spare capacity open.
Supply-chain positioning and partnerships
Supply-chain reporting cited alongside the MediaTek earnings places the company as taking a stronger shipment share of Google's TPU v8t generation, expanding into v9 and positioned for dual sourcing against Broadcom through v10; that intelligence should be treated as supply-chain reporting until MediaTek confirms it. A separate first accelerator programme for a major US hyperscaler is credited with the bulk of the $2 billion MediaTek expects to recognise from the fourth quarter, scaling towards several billion dollars across 2027. Nvidia's NVLink Fusion, announced May 19, 2025, lists MediaTek among its custom silicon partners alongside Marvell, Alchip, Astera Labs, Synopsys and Cadence. MediaTek co-designed the GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip that powers Nvidia's DGX Spark desktop machine launched on October 15, 2025. Lenovo, for its part, operates more than 30 manufacturing facilities across 11 markets and said bringing more server manufacturing closer to U.S. customers can reduce delivery times and give the company more flexibility when overseas supply chains are disrupted.
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