Bank of America names 18 semiconductor stocks to buy as cloud spending accelerates and firms focus on 5G, artificial intelligence, and machine learning Summary List Placement Semiconductor stocks are likely, though not immediately obvious, winners from a forthcoming spending boom in cloud computing infrastructure, according to Bank of America. Capital expenditure on cloud services among the seven largest spenders US tech giants Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook, as well as Chinese powers Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu should rise 20.6% year-over-year in 2021 to $128 billion, a team of BofA analysts led by Vivek Arya wrote in a July 21 note. Excluding Amazon, which is expected to see virtually no cloud spending growth from last year after a phenomenal 138.1% increase in 2020, the increase in cloud spending should be 33%. Cloud capex is projected to jump an additional 4.8% in 2022, according to BofA, though that could be underselling it. The world has a voracious appetite for data consumption as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and 5G upgrades will increasingly lean on cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. "Current consensus views of just 5% YoY capex growth in CY22E could prove conservative given the strong pace of capital-intensive public cloud growth and adoption of advanced (AI, 400G and above) technologies," Arya wrote.