I owned Intel back in 2010 when they bought McAfee for 7.8 billion. They said the future of CPU's and chip tech was embedding security on the chip. the real answer was mobile and gpus.
Not only did I immediately know this was a horrendous deal, it clearly showed that the CEO and management had no clue on their own market's desires and direction. At the time, I was hoping they were going to buy Nvidia, it would have been a larger target to digest at 10 bil, but doable by Intel at the time.
The MacAfee purchase turned out to be one of the worst large cooperate purchases in history. Had they invested the 7.8 billion $ blindly into an sp500 index fund, their investment would be worth ~19-20 billion.
Add on top of that the fact that a lot cloud customers over provision (there's good scientific papers on how much spare CPU capacity there is). Cloud service providers that sell things on a per request / real CPU usage model (vs reserved capacity) prob benefit more.
Also, you can't just separate trading in AWS or GCE from the rest of the core business.
Potentially business units of DELL, HP, IBM, ... should do better as people use this as a justification to upgrade overdue hardware they should cover 5% to 10% lower performance (needing more units to cover that).
Intel has already dropped and AMD is up. Maybe there's more to move, but first-order effects are at least partially priced in already.
But what about second-order effects? Seems like virtualization should be vulnerable (VMWare and Citrix), but maybe they actually benefit as customers add more capacity.
Software-defined networking and cloud databases should also suffer though it's unclear how to trade these.
AWS, Google Cloud and Azure might benefit as customers add capacity but there's no way to trade the business units. So what about cloud customers where compute costs are already a large percentage of total revenue?
Netflix should be OK but Snap and Twilio could get squeezed hard. Akamai and Cloudflare might have higher costs they can't pass through to customers.
And where's the upside? Who benefits? If the performance hit causes companies to add capacity, maybe semiconductor and DRAM suppliers like Micron would benefit.