The AI Buildout Rolls On: Chips, Cyber, Cloud — and Introducing TECY 

Technology has been one of the standout stories of the year so far. After years of hype, investors are only now seeing hard evidence that the AI and digital infrastructure buildout is real, and that it has begun to pay off. 

That payoff is showing up across four intertwined themes: the capital spending plans of the largest technology companies, the record chip sales that spending is driving, the cybersecurity demand that comes with a larger digital footprint and advanced threats, and the cloud platforms where the investment is turning into revenue growth. 

The AI Buildout Keeps Getting Bigger 

The hyperscalers, ultra-large-scale cloud and technology infrastructure providers such as Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta, and Oracle, have moved from planning to building at scale. Goldman Sachs projects roughly US$765 billion in total AI infrastructure investment in 2026 alone, growing to US$7.6 trillion in cumulative capex across compute, data centres and power between 2026 and 2031.1 

That capital does not stay inside the companies spending it. It flows outward, into the land beneath the data centres, the power and cooling needed to run them, the networking equipment that connects them, and above all into the chips that do the work. The result is a widening circle of beneficiaries, with the chipmakers at the centre of it. 

Chip Sales Are Setting Records 

The Semiconductor Industry Association reported global chip sales of US$120.6 billion in May, more than double the same month a year earlier.2 It was the highest monthly total ever recorded, and the fifteenth consecutive month in which sales grew over the month prior.2 Demand sustained over that stretch points to a structural shift rather than a cyclical one, indicating the world is running on more computing infrastructure than ever before. 

What stands out is how broad the demand has become. The headline growth belongs to the AI accelerators, but training and inference workloads also consume high-bandwidth memory, networking silicon, power management chips and advanced packaging capacity, and that has pulled the entire semiconductor supply chain into the cycle. Order books stretching out several quarters give chipmakers something they rarely have: visibility. For investors, that is the difference between a sales figure that spikes and one that compounds. 

Cybersecurity: The Other Side of the AI Coin 

More data centres and more AI also mean more to protect. AI is making attacks faster and more sophisticated, and 94% of leaders surveyed by the World Economic Forum expect it to be the biggest driver of change in cybersecurity this year.3 

Enterprises are responding. The number of organizations vetting the security of their AI tools nearly doubled over the past year.3 The same buildout driving demand for chips and cloud capacity is driving demand for the tools that defend it. 

Putting It Together: Introducing TECY 

These are not separate stories. The spending fuels the chips, the chips power the cloud, and the whole buildout raises the stakes on cybersecurity. Most investors reach for the Nasdaq-100 to get at these themes, but only 46 of its 100 constituents are classified as technology.4 

The Evolve NASDAQ Technology UltraYield ETF (TECY) gives access to that technology sleeve in a single ticker. Evolve now offers three funds built on the same index: QQQT (launched in 2023) tracks the index by investing only in the equities, QQQY (launched in 2023) adds an active covered call program and pays distributions monthly, and TECY combines the same active covered call program with modest leverage of up to 33% and pays distributions twice per month. 

For more information on TECY, visit the fund page at evolveetfs.com/TECY. 

Sources 

1. https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/tracking-trillions-the-assumptions-shaping-scale-of-the-ai-build-out. July 30, 2026
2. https://www.semiconductors.org/global-semiconductor-sales-increase-9-2-month-to-month-in-may/. July 6, 2026
3. https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Global_Cybersecurity_Outlook_2026.pdf. January 2026
4. Bloomberg, as at July 31, 2026.

 

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Published August 13, 2026. 

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