Welcome to the first edition of The Chokepoint. Published every week. We tell you what moved in the AI supply chain, who benefits from the constraint. It’s going to be a ride.

Everything is tight. That's been the read on AI supply chain for two years.

The question that actually pays is sharper. which supply chain constraint is binding this week and where is the rent is migrating next.

Constraints don't clear in isolation. They migrate. Wafers ease, packaging tightens. Silicon ships, electrons get scarce. The week-to-week read is the read of this migration.

That's why we’re tracking the constraint map on a granular level, week by week. The biggest weekly mover tells us where the pressure is loading next.

This week, the biggest mover was in Power.

This week, our constraint tracker showed that Hyperscaler PPA Flow rose +16pp over 7 days, the largest weekly move on the entire board.

Hyperscaler PPA Flow is Tessara's tracker of how aggressively the five hyperscalers (META, MSFT, AMZN, GOOGL, ORCL) are signing long-term power purchase agreements with generators.

The score runs 0-100, calibrated to PPA event volume and gigawatt scale. We're sitting in TIGHT (and rising), climbing toward shortage.

In the past 10 days alone, we logged five new hyperscaler PPAs. The mix is the tell. Wind from EDP Renewables. Battery storage from Noon Energy. Gas from Bloom Energy. Solar from Overview Energy. A nuclear SMR from X-energy. The hyperscalers are not picking generation. They're buying every reliable electron they can find. That's the language of constrained capacity.

A PPA (Power Purchase Agreement) is the 10-to-20-year contract a hyperscaler signs to lock in firm electricity supply for its data center fleet. It's how the megawatts get sourced and how new generation gets financed. When those contracts get scarcer or pricier, the economics of every gigawatt of compute change.

Three of the big five reported earnings last week - META, GOOGL, AMZN. All three flagged rising energy costs as P&L pressure. None named a PPA shortfall on the call. None warned that a capacity target was slipping because of grid access.

The supply chain is making the case the buyers won't.

Yes, HBM is tight. CoWoS is tight. EUV production isn't fast enough. But none of it matters if the data center can't get energized. You can ship a million NVIDIA Blackwells into Cedar Hill, Texas and they're paperweights without a substation, a transformer, and a 20-year PPA.

Electrons are becoming the hard part.

The pressure is structural. Every reliable gigawatt in PJM, ERCOT, and the Pacific Northwest is being fought over by five well-capitalized buyers at once.

The recent Q1 2026 earnings put numbers behind the pressure. Four of the big five hyperscalers grew capex sequentially, and the aggregate hit $148B in a single quarter, +91% YoY.

Yes, yet ANOTHER record breaking capex quarter. (Who could have seen that coming…)

Only META eased, and only off a high base. Guidance is the bigger tell with AMZN and GOOGL guiding $200B and $175-185B respectively. These will be the order book for every counterparty downstream.

And the capex mix is shifting. The marginal dollar won’t be just focused on better and newer GPUs (and of course, the rapidly-inflating memory layer) anymore but it’s also going towards land, substations, transformers, turbines, cooling loops, switchgear, etc.

The supply side is making the case the buyers won't.

Looking one layer deeper into power constraints this week, rising hyperscaler PPA activity is also putting pressure on the surrounding bottlenecks.

The frame that matters here is that there is broad pressure across the contributing layers. Resolving it requires turbines, transformers, interconnection queues, cooling supply, and baseload to give at the same time.

So who exactly will be capturing the upside and who pays the rent on this bottleneck?

Watch the backlogs, not the headlines. GEV's next print, VRT's capacity guidance, and any movement on PJM interconnection queue clearance times. Until those bend, every easing in foundry just gets re-bottled at the substation.

Power got the headline this week, but the rest of the constraint map isn't quiet. Here’s how the constraints moved in the other layers:

Optical networking is tight. And getting tighter. It’s all because of the AI campus buildout: larger clusters need higher-bandwidth links across racks, halls, and campuses, pulling demand for optical transceivers and silicon photonics.

But the important read this week is that optics is not easing the copper layer. Even where optics is taking share as speeds and distances increase, copper remains tight and tightened again this week. That suggests the buildout is broad enough to pressure both layers at once: optics absorbs the scale-out growth across longer links, while copper still gets pulled into short-reach, in-rack, and near-rack connectivity.

Source: Tessara Terminal

A few important earnings this week. Read our pre-call briefs here and stay prepared.

We track Hyperscaler PPA Flow, and every other cell in the constraint map, daily. When the next big move happens, we'll know first.

Want the live data behind The Chokepoint? Tessara terminal tracks 270+ companies across compute, memory, foundry, networking, and power and shows you how the constraint map is shifting. [Apply for early access →]

See you next week,

Teng

This article is for informational and research purposes only. It is not financial advice, investment advice, or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Tessara Research does not publish price targets. The views expressed here reflect our analysis at the time of publication and may change as new evidence arrives. Readers should do their own research and consult a qualified financial adviser before making investment decisions.