Cloud computing platforms are speculated to expand significantly as the industry’s largest headliners, including Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:$APPL), Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:$GOOGL) and Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ:$MSFT) look to partner with U.S.-based chip-makers. This means participants within the semiconductor businesses, particularly Intel Corp. (NASDAQ:$INTL), NVIDIA Corp. (NASDAQ:$NVDA) and Broadcom Ltd. (NASDAQ:$AVGO) should see major boosts in the upcoming year.

A team of analysts at RBC Capital, who regularly track estimates and actuals for a  group of 18 of the leading cloud giants, speculated that the cloud capex could reach a total of $60 billion in 2017. Within this prediction, Apple is to be the biggest spender, amounting for 24% of total cloud capex in 2016, while Google ranked second with 19% of total spending.

In 2016, a 17% growth in cloud capex spending amounted to $52.8 billion. This year, the total is predicted to rise an additional 15%, and in 2018 an additional 17%. The consensus estimate for 2017 has risen by approximately $4 billion over the past year.

Additionally, chipmakers’ exposure to cloud and hyperscale spending represent the fastest growing sub segments within the enterprise businesses of hard disk drive manufacturers.

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