The David Lin Report · Monday, September 7, 2026
AI capital expenditure is projected to reach nearly $1 trillion by 2028, according to Doubledine research. John-Clark Levin notes that this spending is driven by the immense inference compute demand anticipated from widespread adoption of humanoid robots and wearable smart glasses, rather than current chatbot usage.
“Hyperscale's CAPX by year. 2026, $760 billion. Next year you're projected to rise to almost a trillion, surpassing a trillion by 2028.”
“So markets are not yet pricing in the enormous inference compute demand that will be unlocked once humanoid robots cross reliability thresholds to actually be widely adopted in the economy. So right now, if you're a Chat GPT power user and you're asking it 50 or 100 queries a day, that is peanuts compared to the always on inference of humanoid robots working across the economy.”