GS Johnstone TMT SPEC SALES Tech Conf previews; Adyen Payment questions; VOD debate; SIA latest data; Advertising expert call back TEF chair talks satellites 7 Sep 2026

GS Johnstone - TMT SPEC SALES Tech Conf previews; Adyen Payment questions; VOD debate; SIA latest data; Advertising expert call back TEF chair talks satellites 7 Sep 2026 Sean Johnstone · Goldman Sachs · Equity Sales / TMT Mon 7 Sep 2026, 2:21am ET

*GS TMT SPEC SALES – Monday 7th September *

Morning — I’m off to San Francisco for the conference. See my Friday preview and Pete’s preview. With 260+ companies and more than 2,000 investors attending, it should be a useful early read on sentiment. Many sessions are webcast and available on GIR. *Event link and agenda:* *

The two key areas to watch at the TMT conference are *AI monetisation* and *the durability of the capex cycle*. Q2 delivered strong fundamental data points — particularly from Nvidia, Broadcom and Dell — but price action has been more mixed. The central question is therefore what companies can say to give investors confidence to revisit the AI trade. The most useful colour will be on compute demand, pricing, capacity constraints, ASICs/XPUs, memory/HBM, semicap, and whether hyperscaler, neocloud and enterprise demand is still accelerating into 2027.

The other important question is whether the infrastructure buildout is translating into real revenue and productivity gains for software, cloud and application-layer companies, rather than staying concentrated in frontier-model and AI supply-chain winners. More broadly, investors will look for where sentiment can inflect across TMT. *Software remains bifurcated*: data infrastructure, security and “inference economy” names are still favoured, while many SaaS/apps names need clearer evidence of AI-driven usage, pricing or revenue reacceleration. Internet and consumer platforms will be tested on whether AI is improving ads, commerce, discovery and engagement. Telecom and cable should provide a useful read on competition, Starlink risk and whether recent telco strength is technical or fundamental. *Across sectors, the best sessions should be the ones that answer: “what changes numbers?”*

*Adyen — in SF with us this week at the tech conf, with AI and payments likely to be topical after The Information article late Friday.* I would expect Adyen to open down. The article suggests Anthropic is assessing how much of its payments and finance infrastructure to build in-house versus outsource, with job posts covering billing, fraud detection, payment-risk scoring, invoicing, tax, order management and treasury. The driver is rapid AI-led growth and more complex token-based pricing, which make payments, usage billing and fraud harder to manage at scale. Bringing more capability in-house could improve approval rates, reduce fraud, lower processing costs and give Anthropic more vendor control. This does *not* imply Stripe is being replaced near term — Anthropic says Stripe remains a key partner, and replacing a full processor would take time — but it does suggest large AI platforms may increasingly multi-source providers or internalise higher-value payments infrastructure, echoing OpenAI’s move to add Adyen.

*Going into the conference, our PB data shows positioning is still relatively friendly.* Gross leverage for US fundamental long/shorts is in the 27th percentile over the past year, while net leverage is only in the 4th percentile. There has been some rebuilding recently, but positioning looks very different from two months ago (link). The same reset is visible in options: tech vols have fallen sharply, especially semis. VXSMH, a proxy for semiconductor implied volatility, has dropped from roughly 65 in July to 36 — almost halving and moving back toward where we started 2026 (thanks Lee CopperSmith).

Source: Goldman Sachs FICC & Equities, Bloomberg, as of Sept 2026. Past performance is not indicative of future results.

* TELCOS *Andrew published a major sector note on Friday, highlighting stronger cash flow and an updated stock-picking framework designed to capture more equity upside from leverage. The key rating changes were Vodafone double-upgraded to Buy and Cellnex downgraded to Sell. The Vodafone upgrade generated the most investor debate. Bears argue Andrew has long been cautious on Germany, trends have not yet improved, and the…