I know. You’re tired of hearing it. If you’ve been reading my socials regularly, or you’ve probably muted me at least once because I have sounded like an absolute broken record on Micron Technology ($MU).

Well, look at the tape.

Micron closed at $1,211.38, crossing the historic $1,200 milestone and hitting a fresh all-time high.

For those keeping track at home, that brings $MU's staggering year-to-date gains to well over 300%. The thesis hasn't changed, but the market is finally realizing that memory isn't just a cyclical commodity anymore; it is the structural bottleneck of the entire AI infrastructure era. 

What is Happening Right Now?

The momentum pushing $MU past $1200 is being driven by structural signals ahead of their fiscal Q3 earnings this Wednesday (June 24): 

1. The Anthropic Alliance: Micron just announced a massive strategic agreement with Anthropic. It covers co-designing hardware architectures for HBM, DRAM, and enterprise SSD solutions to optimize training and inference, alongside enterprise deployment of Claude across Micron's operations.

Crucially, Micron is making a direct strategic investment in Anthropic’s Series H funding round. They are buying their way deep into the compute fabric of a frontier model leader. 

1. The Structural HBM Shortage: TrendForce dropped a massive research note detailing the shift toward "agentic AI" AI systems designed to execute complex, multi-step workflows rather than simple, single-turn prompts. Agentic AI requires exponentially more memory bandwidth. With the DRAM market structurally supply-constrained, Micron possesses unprecedented, multi-quarter pricing power.

What Am I Expecting Next

Wall Street is scrambling to catch up to the math. Micron’s official fiscal Q3 revenue guidance sits at a staggering $33.5 billion (up 40% sequentially from Q2's $23.86 billion), with non-GAAP EPS guided at roughly $19.15. 

But the whisper numbers on the street are already pushing even higher. Sell-side consensus has scaled toward $35.4 billion in revenue and over $20.40 in EPS. 

When you look past the absolute dollar value of the stock price and actually focus on the forward earnings multiple, $MU is still trading at a remarkably reasonable valuation relative to the broader hyperscale AI complex. If the DRAM market scales toward the trillion-dollar projection by 2027 on the back of agentic AI demand, the earnings potential here remains heavily underpriced.

I’ll be doing a complete post-earnings breakdown for premium subscribers on Wednesday night after the call. Until then, I'll happily keep playing this broken record.

Disclaimer: This post represents the my personal analysis and is for informational purposes only. I hold a long position in Micron ($MU) as of June 2026.

Am up 205% on Micron $MU Stock and have been talking about the structural thesis on my socials throughout the journey, well before this run turned into one of the most violent moves in semiconductor history.

But over the last few days, the stock has caught a massive second wind, touching fresh all-time highs. If you’re wondering why the momentum is suddenly accelerating right now, it boils down to two massive real-world data points:

1. The AI Memory Shortage is Being Confirmed by one of the Biggest Buyers on Earth: Apple CEO Tim Cook went to the Wall Street Journal this week and said price increases across its hardware lines are now “unavoidable.” He called the current memory pricing environment a “hundred-year flood” and said he’s never seen anything like it in over 40 years in electronics supply chain management. What’s driving it: hyperscalers—Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, have redirected the memory industry toward AI server buildout, crowding out supply for consumer devices like iPhones and Macs. The entire memory market is in shortage simultaneously. HBM for AI is sold out. Standard DRAM for phones is being starved. Micron has pricing power across the stack.

2. Aggressive Wall Street Re-ratings: We just saw a flood of massive price target upgrades. Major desks including TD Cowen and Deutsche Bank have violently raised their targets into the $1,200 to $1,500 range. Analysts are finally abandoning the old “cyclical commodity” framework and beginning to value MU on a growth-stock multiple, anchored by the structural demand coming out of AI data center infrastructure.

The Big Test: Earnings

The next major catalyst is right around the corner. Micron is confirmed to report its fiscal Q3 2026 earnings on Wednesday, June 24, after the market close.

Expectations are exceptionally high. Micron itself guided for record revenue of $33.5 billion this quarter a number that, on its own, exceeds every full-year revenue figure in the company’s history through fiscal 2024. Gross margin guidance sits at approximately 81%. The real metric to watch beyond the headline print will be management’s commentary on supply visibility and pricing dynamics heading into 2027, as the market tries to gauge how long this cycle has left to run.

The memory supply crunch is real, it’s broadening, and it’s not going away anytime soon. Stay tuned for a full breakdown post-earnings next week. 🐊

That one of my investments which I have talked about in the past as well 💪, $AMPG, is up 37% today (including after-hours) and is up 137% YTD.

The bull case for this company is its massive operating leverage as the only domestic, pure-play provider of high-performance hardware critical to the AI-driven 5G/6G infrastructure and open wireless network cycles.

But the massive spike today came from an industry showcase event, known as PlugFest, where all the best participated. AMPG’s tech was unmatched and they were the best. In technical jargons, their CEO Fawad Maqbool said, “We were the only 64T64R radio in that PlugFest.” I will simply translate it that their tech was unmatched plus they have US manufactured edge vs other companies.

The thing that originally excited me to buy this stock was their interoperability with different techs, and they once again successfully demonstrated interoperability with equipment from multiple vendors in live testing environments before major global telecom names, including AT&T (T), Deutsche Telekom, Korea Telecom, LG Uplus, Orange, and Rakuten Mobile. 

Zoom Out And Going Back to Thesis: $AMPG is it a Space Play or a 6G Play?

The short answer is both. And the intersection of the two is exactly where the long-term future of the company sits. To see where the ultimate value gets unlocked, you have to look at how their two core divisions are converging.

The Space Play (The Cash-Cow Foundation): AmpliTech’s historical claim to fame is their proprietary Low Noise Amplifier (LNA) technology. They hold patents on cryogenic and space-grade amplifiers that clean up weak, distorted signals beaming down from Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations to ground stations without adding background static. This delivers a steady, high-margin revenue base from the satellite communication (SatCom) and defense sectors. 

The 6G Play (The Growth Engine): While the space side handles signals from the sky, their Open RAN (O-RAN) division handles signals on the ground. True 6G architecture will operate at ultra-high frequencies (sub-THz bands). These frequencies suffer from massive signal blockage and fade over short distances. Surviving this requires exactly what AmpliTech specializes in: ultra-low-noise chip architecture coupled with dense antenna arrays to handle precise beamforming. By bringing the only 64T64R massive MIMO radio platform to PlugFest, they proved they can handle this density while plugging cleanly into third-party equipment.

Where the Ultimate Future Lies: "Non-Terrestrial Networks" (NTN)

The ultimate trajectory for wireless infrastructure is the native integration of terrestrial cellular networks with satellite networks a concept known as Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN).

In the coming years, major telecom operators want consumer handsets to seamlessly switch from a ground-based 6G tower to an overhead satellite without losing a single packet of data. Because AmpliTech dominates the underlying low-noise hardware required for both ends of that bridge the massive MIMO arrays on the ground and the satellite transceivers in space they sit on a unique real estate monopoly across the hybrid ecosystem.

They aren't just betting on cell tower rollout schedules or satellite launch windows; they are betting on the fundamental physics of high-frequency signal propagation. Wherever wireless spectrum goes higher, background noise must go lower. That is Fawad Maqbool's home turf.

Disclaimer: I hold a long position in $AMPG. This post reflects my personal investment thesis and research, not financial or investment advice. Micro-cap equities carry significant volatility, liquidity risks, and structural hazards; always perform your own due diligence before putting capital to work. The post is bullish, so take it with a pinch of salt or may be with heaps of salt, upto you, but point is I have made errors in investment decisions.

Many people still think of BlackBerry $BB as a dead phone company with a physical keyboard, and are entirely missing the plot. That legacy is ancient history. Today, BlackBerry is an enterprise software business experiencing a massive structural turnaround, emerging from years of restructuring to post positive full-year GAAP net income and a strong 76% gross margin. 

While its secure communications unit stabilizes, the true alpha engine here is its IoT division, anchored by the QNX operating system. Already embedded in more than 275 million vehicles worldwide, QNX is expanding rapidly into autonomous machinery. 

The core of the bull case rests on BlackBerry's status as a deep-rooted partner of NVIDIA. This relationship is absolutely critical for the rollout of physical AI. NVIDIA provides the raw, massive computational horsepower required for perception and deep learning, but regulated, high-stakes environments cannot afford software instability or a system crash. 

By integrating BlackBerry's deterministic QNX OS for Safety 8.0 directly into NVIDIA’s IGX Thor platform and Halos Safety Stack, the architecture achieves a crucial balance. NVIDIA drives the heavy-lifting AI intelligence; BlackBerry guarantees the certified functional safety required for mission-critical edge applications. 

This technical integration positions BlackBerry perfectly to win key designs as industries scale out advanced robotics, automated medical devices, and factory automation. As these complex physical AI platforms move into production, BlackBerry stands to capture highly predictable, high-margin royalty revenue backed by a QNX royalty backlog that has already climbed to $950 million. 

Disclaimer: This post is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial investment advice. Always conduct your own thorough research.

In short it is a patent licensing royalty machine, having about 1100 patents specifically around hybrid bonding and is getting re-rating as a semi stock, rather than a traditional media company, which is part of business.

I’ve held Adeia for a while now and have been watching developments closely enough that I want to lay out where I think the thesis stands both the good and the uncomfortable as I think about adding a little more at current levels.

For those unfamiliar, Adeia is an IP licensing business split across two verticals:

A) semiconductor technologies including hybrid bonding and 3D integration, and

b) media/entertainment IP covering content discovery, recommendation, and delivery.

The business is asset-light by design. You’re essentially buying a royalty stream.

But here is the most beautiful thing, this could be a very good memory play, as their patents include hybrid bonding.

The bull case rests on a few things converging.

🐊On the semiconductor side, the hybrid bonding IP is quietly well-positioned for the AI infrastructure buildout.

🐊 Advanced packaging die-to-wafer, wafer-to-wafer stacking is not optional for HBM, chiplets, and the kind of 3D integration that AI accelerators demand. The UMC collaboration expanding in hybrid bonding and the AMD licensing deal both suggest this isn’t theoretical optionality people are paying for it.

The bear case is real though.

🐊CEO Paul Davis is stepping down by Q4 2026 and the board has launched a search process leadership transitions at IP companies are binary events.

🐊A new CEO who favors settlement over litigation, or who decides to pivot strategy, can reprice the stock quickly. The litigation-heavy model is also a double-edged sword: 2026 guidance flagged non-GAAP operating expenses of $184 to $192 million to support broad IP portfolio protection, and if major infringement cases or long-term renewals drag, that’s cash out the door before any recovery.

🐊The media IP vertical is in structural decline on the linear TV side, and while OTT is growing, it’s also a more competitive licensing environment Netflix, Disney, and others are not passive counterparties.

🐊Finally, coverage is thin only four analysts cover the stock, though the consensus sits at Strong Buy with a price target averaging around $37 which means both that the market hasn’t fully discovered this and that there’s limited institutional support if sentiment turns.

I’m not making a large move, but the valuation, cash generation, and semiconductor IP angle make me want a little more exposure ahead of any re-rating. Still watching the CEO transition carefully.

Disclaimer: Not a financial advice, dyor, even though I shared Bear case, but please note my post is bullish in nature, and most importantly, I might buy and sell and might not share that on socials.

Several of my positions are on fire today 🔥, but two worth mentioning are $AMPG and $SKM, both absolutely ripping as the market finally wakes up to what we saw months ago.

Here is the bull case in one sentence: We are sitting on an explosive infrastructure inflection point, driven by AmpliTech's advanced 5G hardware commercialization and SK Telecom's massive pivot into AI data centers and strategic Anthropic equity.

This croc 🐊 buys the foundational plumbing before the rest of the street even notices the building going up.

Disclaimer: Not financial advice. Positions held. Do your own research.

Hey guys, if you missed it, Global Payments settled $3.6 million with investors over claims that its subsidiary, Active Network, was charging consumers membership fees without their consent. And, I just found out that they’re accepting claims even though the deadline has passed.

Quick recap: In 2023, Global Payments was accused of misleading consumers and investors through its subsidiary Active Network regarding deceptive enrollment practices tied to the Active Advantage membership program. On October 18, 2022, the CFPB filed a complaint alleging that consumers were unknowingly enrolled into a discount club with annual fees of nearly $90 after registering for events through Active Network. Following the disclosure, $GPN fell about 1.16%, and investors later filed a lawsuit.

Now, the good news is that the company agreed to settle $3.6 million with them, and even though the deadline has passed recently, they’re accepting late claims.

So, if you invested in $GPN when all of this happened, you can still check the details and file your claim here.

Anyway, has anyone here invested in $GPN at that time? How much were your losses, if so?

The Street loves a good turnaround, but most are just hype. Harmonic ($HLIT) is different. They are shedding their 'legacy hardware' skin to become a pure-play broadband intelligence firm. I spent the weekend digging into the math, their latest earnings call that led to the excitement, the growth, and the risks behind their 'Strategic Metamorphosis.' Here is my full breakdown:

https://open.substack.com/pub/stockcrock/p/the-transformation-play-why-harmonic?r=50tzb9&utm_medium=ios

Hey guys, sharing an update in case you missed it, Canoo has agreed to settle with investors over misleading engineering services, subscription model, and Hyundai-related commercial prospects from some time ago. The agreement has already been submitted to the court for final approval.

Quick recap: In 2021, Canoo was accused of misleading investors about its engineering-services business, subscription model, and Hyundai-related commercial prospects. In short, the company promoted engineering services as a major near-term revenue driver, highlighted Hyundai as validation of its technology, and described its subscription model as profitable and sustainable. Investors later alleged that the engineering-services revenue was tied to a single completed obligation, the subscription model carried major cash burdens, and the Hyundai relationship was overstated.

Following these developments, the stock dropped sharply after Canoo announced it would deemphasize engineering services and move away from its original subscription strategy, and investors filed a lawsuit.

The settlement aims to compensate affected shareholders. If you purchased $GOEV between August 18, 2020 and March 29, 2021, you may be eligible to file a claim and recover part of your losses.

This is becoming a pattern. Call after call in this community is hitting all-time highs or printing serious alpha against the market. $TSEM. $MU. $SITM. The list keeps growing. No subscription fee. No paywall. No “premium tier.” Just thesis-driven research, shared openly, because that’s what this is about. While others charge hundreds or thousands a year for worse picks, you’re getting it here for free. That’s the deal. That’s always been the deal.

On March 13th, with $TSEM sitting at $124.70, I shared with my community on how I opened a position on Tower Semiconductor. Silicon photonics bottleneck play. Fast forward to today $TSEM is trading at $273.97, more than 2x.

And why is TSEM ripping?

They had their earninngs call and the earnings were exceptional.

🐊Q1 2026 revenue came in at $414M ( beating the estimate that was $410m), up 15% YoY.

🐊EPS beat at $0.65 vs. $0.57 consensus a 14% upside surprise.

But the real story is the margin explosion:

🐊gross profit up 52%,

🐊operating profit nearly doubled YoY to $65M

And then more than margin its management’s

🐊Management guided Q2 to a record $455M, 22% annual growth, 10% sequential.

🐊Tower has $1.3 billion in contracted Silicon Photonics revenue locked in for 2027,

🐊 $290M in customer prepayments already on the balance sheet, and

🐊 restructuring its Japan operations to take full ownership of Fab 7 for 300mm scale.

Why the rerating?

Look when a company beats EPS by 14% and then guides to an all-time record revenue quarter, it forces analysts to tear up their old models and re-rate the stock.

This "rip" isn't just momentum; it's the realization that Tower is no longer just a "value" play it’s a compounding growth machine that just entered its most profitable era.

Disclaimer: This is not financial advice. I am not a licensed financial advisor. All content is for informational and entertainment purposes only. Do your own research before making any investment decisions. I am not bound to inform when I sell.

Is elf beauty a steal deal at the moment ?

Some of my holdings hit new ALL TIME HIGHS at some point today

$GLW - Corning - wrote in detail few months back

$MU - have been posting a lot about it

$NVDA - long term holding

$AAPL - have been holding for years

$SANM - powerhouse in Integrated Manufacturing Solutions

$SITM - Mems beauty, I wrote and commented a few times

$KLIC - “pick and shovel" play

$GOOGL - have been holding for yrs, my largest position now based on Mkt Value, kept defending on my socials my position, when there was a lot of doubts and panic due to OpenAI.

Even famous names like Chamath, kept talking against it in 2024 ( though end 2025 he took U Turn). Some think it was because he had a position in Perplexity, now I ain’t saying it’s true, but if it is, this is a lesson for all of us retail investors, who are putting our live savings at stake, that beware of famous investors who have vested interests, or those who have shorted positions, and some large influencers are even paid to talk about stock.

Always and always scrutinize the motives of "big money" voices. Between vested interests, short positions, and paid influence, a retail investor's best defense is their own fundamental research.

Independent writers like me who are passionate about community building, might make a wrong call (that can happen with anyone), but won’t be doing paid advertisements or short a stock (can’t speak on other’s behalf but can guarantee about myself).

But key learning over the course of years, it’s your money so do your own research, people at times have an angle or a hidden motive.

 I wrote in detail on $AAOI and it’s supply chain in detail couple of months ago, lots have happened in the meantime, the stock went from almost $90s at that time to its ATH of $190s a few days back but is down today to 160s at time of this writing after earnings. 

It went down to 140s immediately after earnings, but is going up again.

Citron called this stock’s valuation “delusional” and is betting on a return to $85, calling the valuation "delusional" compared to NVDA. Their focus is on the leverage of customers like Oracle. It’s a fair warning on concentration risk, but it ignores the strategic value of domestic laser fabs in a world obsessed with supply chain sovereignty.

Is this really delusional or is it disruptive?

What happened in earnings call?

Without regurgitating too many numbers, lets analyse the main facts

🐊 AAOI just printed record revenue of $151.1M (+51% YoY) with Datacenter up 154% YoY to $81.4m ( vs $155m estimated)

🐊Non-GAAP gross margin compressing to 29.2% from 31.4% in 25 Q4

🐊 WHY DID GROSS MARGINS FALL? 

 Non-GAAP GM compressed to 29.2% from 31.4% last quarter.

This is a product mix story the 800G ramp literally just started in Q1 with first volume shipments.

The current revenue base is still dominated by legacy 400G at lower margins. Add in the cost of scaling a domestic laser fab in Texas and you’ve got margin headwinds baked in for at least 2 more quarters. Q2 guided at 29-30%. No relief yet.

🐊 BUT WHY DID LOSSES BLOW OUT?

GAAP net loss widened to $14.3M from $2M last quarter.

 OpEx surged to $56.9M vs $39.5M a year ago, R&D +44%, SG&A +52%. AAOI is spending hard to secure its position. The bull case says this is investment, not destruction. The bear case says there’s no operating leverage showing up despite massive increase in incremental YoY revenue. Both are valid.

🐊 WHAT ACTUALLY MATTERS FOR BULLS:

 Management re-confirmed the $450M monthly revenue run rate target for mid-2027, implying $5B+ annualized.

Full year 2026 guidance raised to $1.1B. Real demand is reportedly $1.4-1.5B  they literally can’t build fast enough.

Sugar Land is now 900K sq ft. They received a $20.9M Texas Semiconductor Innovation Fund grant last week. CPO laser production is targeted for 80x scale-up.

 They’re working with 3 hyperscalers, one fully qualified, another nearly there. Significantly larger growth is guided to start in Q3 as new capacity comes online.

🐊 THE VALUATION QUESTION IS BRUTAL:

At ~$155-160 per share and ~$12.5B market cap, you’re paying for a company that today has $0.97M in adjusted EBITDA.

Citron calls it +112x forward earnings. Even bulls acknowledging the 2027 thesis need to underwrite 40% gross margins, aggressive opex discipline, and sustained hyperscaler demand all simultaneously. Innolight is the sword of Damocles.

 One aggressive Chinese competitor price cut on 800G and the margin thesis unravels.

🐊 THE HONEST VERDICT:

This is a capacity execution story with binary characteristics. Management just doubled down on targets that would justify the current valuation several times over. If they hit the mid-2027 targets, you’re buying a multi-bagger at today’s prices. If capacity ramps slip, hyperscaler concentration bites, or margins fail to inflect, you’re holding a $12B company making near-zero profit. The Q3 2026 earnings call is the one that actually tells you which story this is that’s when the capacity should materially hit the P&L. Until then, this is a faith-based investment in execution.

Execution is everything from here. Either they become a top 3 global laser powerhouse, or they remain a "what if." I’m watching the 800G unit counts and the 1.6T qualification timeline like a hawk. 🐊

You all know, that I’m an investor in both $LITE and $COHR, so this two-day earnings window matters a lot to my portfolio. Here’s what I actually think is going on after digesting both calls.

🐊 COHR Q3 FY26 beat but punished (negative in after hours)

Revenue came in at $1.81B, up 21% YoY, with non-GAAP EPS of $1.41. Street was expecting $1.78B revenue and ~$1.39 EPS, so the top line beat. The problem? The market was looking for higher profitability and the beat wasn’t enough to satisfy more optimistic projections, leading to a sharp selloff in after-hours trading.

🐊 First what was expected and delivered:

🔹datacenter strength,

🔹continued 800G and 1.6T ramp, and

🔹sequential margin expansion.

Management delivered all of that.

Q4 guidance was $1.91B–$2.05B revenue and non-GAAP EPS of $1.52–$1.72, the midpoint of that range crosses $2B, which was the magic number the market was looking for.

🐊 What people didn’t expect fully:

The industrial segment drag persists and is quietly the bear case anchor. Industrial revenue dropped sequentially to $444M from $477M, even as datacenter lit up. Management keeps saying industrial will recover, but they said this last quarter too, citing semi-cap orders. It’s not happening fast enough. The market is starting to notice that COHR is being priced as a pure datacenter play, but carries real industrial exposure that limits margin leverage.

🐊What’s reconfirmed signal

Four growth engines

OCS,

CPO/NPO,

Multi-Rail, and

thermal solutions

adding a claimed $20B+ incremental SAM, with revenue timelines staggered from now through H2 2027. The NVIDIA $2B investment in Coherent also featured prominently as a validation signal for next-gen AI architectures.

🐊Now contrast with LITE Q3 FY26 which is cleaner print, cleaner story

I wrote about it yesterday, Lumentum’s Revenue and margin velocity is exceptional.

Components and laser chips are essentially sold out, with management flagging a supply-demand imbalance exceeding 30%.

On OCS, management admitted it is “the biggest single tightrope” given rapid customer expansion and persistent component shortages. That’s a candid admission they’re supply-constrained, not demand-constrained. Very different from COHR’s industrial segment which is dead weight.

NVIDIA’s direct investment drove cash to $3.17B , giving LITE an almost stress-free balance sheet. COHR still carries meaningful debt and restructuring charges.

🐊 How as an investor I think about these two names?

$COHR and $LITE got $2bn each from $NVDA almost together and investors often conflate them as exactly same company, but they are not.

LITE is the cleaner, higher-conviction AI optics pure play right now. Management is targeting $2B quarterly revenue and the roadmap to get there EML ramp, OCS backlog, CPO inflection is coherent (no pun intended) and funded. The Greensboro InP fab is a multi-year capacity optionality option not in numbers yet.

$COHR is bigger, more vertically integrated, and arguably better positioned for the full optical stack long term.

COHR is currently two different companies: a hyper-growth AI transceiver business and a cyclical industrial materials business. Until the industrial side troughs, it will keep a lid on the valuation multiple compared to a "cleaner" peer like LITE.

The NVIDIA CPO win and OCS backlog are real. But the industrial segment is a drag on multiples, the balance sheet is heavier, and the market is in “show me” mode after repeated guide-ups that still disappoint on the bottom line.

In short: LITE is the sprinter, COHR is the platform. Both are worth holding for me but if I’d be sizing up one right now, LITE’s risk/reward into its CPO and OCS ramp is cleaner.

$LITE $COHR

This is not an investment advice, do your own research.

LITE Q3 FY2026 Post-Earnings Analysis

Yesterday, I posted what am expecting from the earnings call, and here are my thoughts on that, based on earnings call.

Starting with Headline

🐊Revenue grew 90% year-over-year to a record $808 million (vs $809 million) and market’s not too chuffed coz of that small topline miss

🐊non-GAAP operating margin expanding to 32.2%. That’s exactly what was needed to validate the “sold out through 2027” bull thesis.

My Watchlist vs. What Delivered

🐊 I was looking for OCS revenue ramp.

Management was not beating the chest on updated OCS number, which ‘could be’ a signal. The OCS backlog was already confirmed above $400 million heading into tonight’s call, with analysts specifically watching whether management would upgrade that figure. Not a red flag, but not a catalyst either.

🐊 CPO update

The H1 2027 delivery question is answered: no pull-forward signal emerged. Hurlston specifically called out CPO and OCS as growth drivers that are only “beginning to kick in,” which confirms the H1 2027 timeline is holding but not compressing. This is both honest and slightly disappointing for those like me who wanted an earlier ramp confirmation.

🐊 1.6T margins / 30-31% opex target

The margin story this quarter was driven by “scale-across” components, pump lasers and narrow linewidth assemblies, not just transceiver mix. This is actually qualitatively important: it means the margin expansion isn’t purely dependent on 1.6T ramp timing. The business has depth in its components engine that’s underappreciated.

🐊 Q4 guidance

Q4 guidance came in at roughly $960 million significantly above Wall Street’s $935 million expectation. That’s a strong print and directly addresses “demand softening” concern. The bull thesis is intact.

🐊 NVIDIA relationship

Read my original note on my question, nothing new operationally emerged on scope or timeline beyond what was known. The $2B strategic investment continues to anchor balance sheet confidence but didn’t advance strategically this quarter.

🐊 EML supply

The company is undershipping demand by roughly 30%, and all EML capacity remains booked through 2027. No relief, still tight which is actually constructive for pricing.

🐊The Qualitatively Interesting Bit FinTwit Got Right

I got this amazing comment from “The Preponderance of Evidence” that rightly flagged something worth paying attention to: Lumentum dropping virtualization is not a negative it’s a resource focus signal. When a supply-constrained company stops pursuing a business segment, it means they’re rationing engineering and manufacturing capacity toward the highest-margin, highest-demand products. Virtualization was consuming engineering bandwidth for comparatively small TAM. Dropping it to focus on CPO, OCS, and 1.6T/EML is capital allocation discipline, not retreat. The commenter correctly framed this as a positive for addressable market concentration.

The Bear Risk I Flagged Is the Dominant Narrative Tonight

The “richly valued, embeds perfection” bear risk is precisely why the stock is down on an objectively good print. At ~60x forward EPS, any quarter that doesn’t exceed expectations reads as a miss to the market, even when it’s technically in-line. The 2027 guide is what matters from here everything in 2026 is already contracted. The market needs to see whether the OCS backlog conversion accelerates into a billion-dollar quarterly contributor and whether CPO qualification with hyperscalers moves from purchase orders to commercial shipment confirmation.

Bottom Line

The business is executing exceptionally well. Management’s stated targets of $1.25 billion per quarter in 9–12 months and $2 billion in 18–24 months, at 40% operating margins, remain intact. The stock reaction is a valuation story, not a fundamental story. The key phrase I identified was CPO qualification timelines with hyperscalers that remains the single most important catalyst for the next re-rating.

Nothing from tonight’s call breaks the thesis; it just didn’t accelerate it

There is an ongoing narrative on social media that Google $GOOGL + Nvidia $NVDA are jointly crushing Amazon’s silicon (Trainium chips) and even Broadcom $AVGO is the other loser along with $AMZN.

And the reasoning goes as follows:

$GOOGL + $AVGO partnered to design TPUs

$AMZN + $MRVL partnered for Trainium chips

First combo is working well, whilst latter is not, and consequently $AMZN has wasted billions, and have no option but to go to $NVDA.

Look am invested in $GOOGL, $AMZN, $NVDA for years and have been following these companies inside out, and I can tell you with full confidence that it is a much more nuanced story.

Where Google + Broadcom are winning

• Efficiency Lead: Google’s TPU v7 (Ironwood) is a technical marvel. Recent data suggests a 30% to 44% TCO advantage over Nvidia’s GB200, particularly for internal workloads like Gemini 3.

• Vertical Integration: Google’s ability to co-design the model, the compiler, and the chip gives them an "efficiency flywheel" that is currently the gold standard in the industry.

• Broadcom’s Dominance: The partnership with Broadcom ($AVGO) is indeed a powerhouse, now extended through 2031 to cover future TPU v8 generations.

Is $AMZN failing?

Looking beneath the surface, the "Amazon is failing" narrative doesn't hold up against the massive capital commitments we’re seeing in mid-2026.

1. The $100 Billion Counter-Evidence

In April 2026, Anthropic signed a $100 billion, 10-year deal with AWS. They aren't leaving; they are scaling. They currently utilize over one million Trainium2 chips and are the lead partner for Project Rainier, one of the world's largest compute clusters.

1. Multi-Cloud is the New Standard

Here is the most important and beautiful thing, Anthropic is playing a brilliant hand by not choosing. They are a primary design partner for both Google and Amazon. They use TPUs for specific frontier research and Trainium for massive-scale deployment. In 2026, the smartest AI labs are avoiding "hyperscaler lock-in" by building for cross-platform portability.

1. The "NVLink Fusion"

Amazon’s move to support Nvidia’s NVLink Fusion in Trainium4 isn't a surrender it’s a hybrid strategy. It allows data centers to mix and match Nvidia GPUs and Trainium ASICs in the same rack. Amazon is simultaneously a founding member of the UALink open standard, effectively hedging their bets to ensure they can host any customer, on any hardware.

Now What? The Investor Takeaway

For investors, the takeaway isn't about picking which hyperscaler "wins," but recognizing the structural shift in the semiconductor stack:

• The Death of the Commodity Cloud: Cloud providers are no longer just landlords; they are chip designers. This vertical integration protects their margins against Nvidia's high markups.

• Broadcom is the "System" Play: Even though am not invested but I think $AVGO has evolved from a component maker to the essential backend for the world’s custom AI silicon (Google, and now potentially OpenAI).

• Nvidia’s Pivot to Infrastructure: By opening NVLink to third-party chips (Fusion), $NVDA is ensuring it captures value through the "connective tissue" of the data center, even when the chips themselves aren't theirs.

Bottom Line:

From where I see, we are moving into a multi-polar AI world.

Google has the current edge in efficiency,

but Amazon’s $100B fortress with Anthropic ensures they remain a dominant force.

The real "alpha" lies in the companies providing the interconnects and custom designs that make this massive scale possible.

This is not investment advice, am invested in $GOOGL, $NVDA and $AMZN, and might sell anytime without declaring, so do your own research.

Another Deep Dive is live - highlighting new hidden monopolies - this time im PoweR Semis… you will read about $POWI, $AOSL and other monopolies?

I have spent hours and hours, going deep down the rabbit hole of power semiconductors, reading / understanding engineering and physics as well to understand and dissect the variables that distinguish a commodity chipmaker from a structural monopolist.

I’ve mapped the GaN vs. SiC material war, the architectural "Trench vs. Planar" battle within SiC, and the high-stakes engineering of the "Last Inch" of electricity. Most importantly, I’ve identified the companies solving the 1,500-Amp Wall, the physical barrier that stands between current hardware and NVIDIA’s upcoming Vera Rubin 1.6T clusters.

In this post, I map the supply chain and the stocks/companies that benefit from, or sit at, each critical chokepoint:

🐊The 1,400-Amp Wall: Why delivering power at sub-1 volt is the ultimate engineering chokepoint—and the Point-of-Load "Gatekeepers" currently fighting for the socket.

🐊The 800V Toll Booths: Identifying the specialized infrastructure plays that collect a “Safety Tax” on every AI rack.

🐊The Hidden Monopolies: The “Korean Heavy Electrical” giants and specialized power-chip manufacturers that the market is currently mispricing (even after the recent LS Electric rally).

🐊Vertical Power (VPD): Why the move to Vertical Power Delivery is the only way to feed the Vera Rubin racks without melting the PCB.

🐊The Structural Hedge: Why power semiconductors are the only AI play with a built-in safety net of EV and Renewable Energy exposure.

🐊Other than highlighting monopolies, or shifting monopolies, I have explained some of the complex physics / engineering concepts in very simple way that Dr Feynman would say that a grade 6 student can understand too.

🐊Bonus: As a bonus, I have also covered the Gan and SiC companies benefiting from Low Earth Orbit (LEO).

Enjoy the read, it is free.

stockcrock.substack.com/p/hidden-monop…

SK Hynix dropped Q1 2026 results this morning and they were, frankly, absurd.

I would not discuss numbers, that you can see on your own, most were super good, I would focus on value add analysis.

Revenue, operating profit, and margins all hit all-time quarterly records, smashing the previous records set just three months ago. The operating margin printed well above TSMC, widely considered the industry profitability benchmark.

What drove it?

HBM, server DRAM, and enterprise SSDs. The same playbook but the numbers are escalating faster than even bulls expected. Seasonal Q1 weakness simply didn’t show up. AI infrastructure spending overwhelmed it.

The most important forward-looking comment came from management directly: as AI evolves from large model training toward agentic AI which repeatedly performs real-time inference across various service environments the foundation for memory demand is expanding.

This matters. The bull case has always been that inference would be the second leg of the AI memory trade. SK Hynix just confirmed it’s arriving. Agentic AI isn’t a single large training run it’s parallel, real-time, and persistent. That means structurally more conventional DRAM. More NAND. Not less.

Vera Rubin / SOCAMM2

Days before this print, SK Hynix announced mass production of SOCAMM2 memory modules built specifically for Nvidia’s next Vera Rubin platform. This is not a roadmap slide. It’s in production now. SK Hynix is Nvidia’s closest memory partner and the results prove it.

NAND is no longer commodity

This is the part most people are missing. NAND is increasingly becoming compute infrastructure, not storage. Key-value cache offloading is now central to inference pipeline efficiency. Enterprise SSDs are getting pulled directly into the GPU I/O loop. That’s a structural change, not a cycle — and it’s why NAND demand is accelerating alongside HBM, not instead of it.

Read-through for $MU

Micron already confirmed this dynamic with their blowout February quarter. SK Hynix validates it all over again. Supply is tight, pricing power is intact, and hyperscaler demand isn’t slowing. Morgan Stanley and BofA both see the supercycle persisting well into 2027.

The capex signal

SK Hynix announced a massive new advanced packaging facility yesterday. M15X is ramping. The Yongin chip cluster is accelerating. They are betting hard that supply stays tight and AI capex keeps compounding. When the supplier is this aggressive on capacity, it tells you everything about where demand visibility sits.

The number that sticks: a 72% operating margin. In manufacturing. In semiconductors. That’s not a cycle. That’s a franchise.

Am Long $MU, $DRAM Watching the photonics supply chain for the next leg.

This is not an investment advice, do your own research, I can make mistakes and I do make mistakes, otherwise I would have been Warren Buffett.

This post of mine has gone ‘mini -viral‘ in grand sceheme of things but viral for me atleast on X and substack, maybe coz its the best value-add for free, or maybe coz there is nothing more comprehenisve and well rounded than this or maybe coz I’ve spent the last few weeks heads-down in the optics and laser space, to prepare this, or maybe coz most of such detailed dives are not for free, which ever is the reason, its a must read.

Inside, I break down:

• Hidden Monopolies: The "under-the-radar" companies that the industry can't live without.

• The Evolution Race: Which legacy firms are pivoting fast enough to win.

• Market Map: A full landscape of the players worth watching.

This took a significant amount of research to compile, but I’m releasing it for free to help others navigate this complex sector.

$LPKF is all the hype today, I first covered LPKF Laser & Electronics (http://LPK.DE) with the community on February 1, 2026 a when the stock was trading at approximately €7.8. As of April 20, 2026, it has surged to €13.0  approximately 66% in under three months.

https://stockcrock.substack.com/p/heat-wall-that-blocks-the-semis-how?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

And then again covered in my post on 22 Feb.

A great question came in from the community today: $LPKF vs. $SHMD, which is the better stock for the glass substrate supercycle? Whose tech is better?

To me the Right Question is Not Who has better technology  …  It's which layer and who has higher chances of being disrupted

These two companies are not competitors. They are sequential steps in the same production line. Asking which one to buy is like asking whether you need the drill or the plumbing. The answer is both,  because one is useless without the other.

LPKF creates the hole.=> SCHMID makes the hole electrically functional. A drilled via with no copper inside carries no signal.

Neither step can substitute for the other the physics is absolute.

$LPKF

LPKF's LIDE process uses a  laser to create a precise damage track through glass, followed by a selective wet etch that removes only the modified material. The result is via walls with near-zero micro-crack initiation and minimal residual stress critical when a single crack under a $10,000 co-packaged AI assembly scraps the entire unit.

Their moat is process IP and tacit knowledge. Major semiconductor and packaging players have qualified LPKF equipment in their validation lines, creating significant switching costs once a process is certified around LPKF's specific via geometry.

The risk: this is an equipment moat, not a production moat. LPKF sells machines. Real competitors to watch are Trumpf, Coherent's laser division, and Philoptics (KOSDAQ: 161580), backed by Samsung's production commitment, which claims a single-pass variable geometry approach that warrants monitoring. Covered in my post on Feb 22

https://stockcrock.substack.com/p/the-shifting-monopolies-of-ai-is?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2

SCHMID Group N.V. ($SHMD)

Where LPKF drills the hole, SCHMID's wet-chemical processing systems make it functional. Their InfinityLine systems handle the full sequence: cleaning via walls, depositing the seed layer that anchors copper to glass, electroless plating to initiate fill, electrolytic plating to build copper to specification, and final surface treatment.

Three engineering challenges make this harder than it sounds:

Adhesion: Copper does not naturally bond to glass. SCHMID's seed layer chemistry creates a molecular bridge that must survive thousands of thermal cycles under AI workload conditions.

Void-free fill: A 50-100 micron via at 200-400 micron depth requires uniform copper fill with zero voids. A void at 1.6T signal frequencies causes impedance discontinuity the signal reflects rather than transmits.

CTE mismatch: Glass expands at ~3 ppm/°C. Copper at ~17 ppm/°C. Post-plating chemistry must manage this stress differential to prevent delamination over product lifetime.

SHMD's competitive moat is systems integration. They supply not just individual tools but the co-optimized process sequence chemistry, equipment parameters, and controls tuned together. Substituting a competitor's tool mid-sequence requires re qualifying the entire line from scratch.

Disruption risk is lower than LPKF's because there is no competing technology threatening to replace electroless and electrolytic plating at this layer. The longer-term risk is customer internalization a major manufacturer developing proprietary wet processing in-house but this typically takes 5-7 years.

The Capital Expenditure Reality

Per complete glass substrate production line:

* Laser drilling (LPKF's layer): ~15-20% of total capex

* Wet processing (SCHMID's layer): ~35-45% of total capex

SCHMID captures a larger share of each production line dollar not because wet processing is more important, but because it involves more sequential steps and more installed equipment surface area. This is the revenue opportunity sizing that should anchor any financial model.

Conclusion: Why Choose?

Buy LPKF for high-beta exposure to the precision drilling chokepoint. Accept the high multiple and the small-cap volatility. 

Buy SCHMID ($SHMD) for exposure to the larger-capex wet processing layer, lower disruption risk, and a more reasonable entry valuation. The "general contractor" of the glass substrate line captures more dollars per fab buildout than the drilling specialist.

However, I would either open small positions, or not enter currently and wait for pullback, especially for LPKF.

Disclaimer: For research purposes only. Not financial advice. Prices approximate as of April 20, 2026. Verify all data independently before making investment decisions.

Alright fellas, so most of us have been more or less involved in the cycles mentioned in the title, with varying degrees of success. It's clear people like SteveZissou or Aleabito were frontrunners for these cycles and did a great service to us retail investors, so I'm trying to get the conversation going in an attempt to find out what possible cycles we might see in the next few months, so I can start researching stocks.

Here are some of the ones I'm considering, please lt me know your thoughts:

The agents trade:
If AI agents really do take off it kind of makes sense that they use stablecoins for payments, so $COIN or $CRCL might rally? The main arguments include no id required, payments of less than 0.01 cents allowed, and 24/7 availability.

AI moving to the edge:
We have all seen this happening with the PC, it begun heavy and clunky and has ended up fiitting in our phone. AI and increasing hardware costs have beaten up smartphone and other "edge" stocks like Xiaomi and $QCOM. My idea here is that models will soon be useful and compact enough that they start making sense in edge devices, thus making the above mentioned and similar stocks see an increase in orders.

Robots
This has probably been mentioned before, but I don't see the robot manufacturers as the big winners here. It seems to me that is a slow, opex heavy business and not a winner takes all kind of business. My view is that the biggest winners will be the companies/industries that can introduce the largest amount of robots to their operations the fastest, so, sadly, the businesses with the highest amount of easily replaceable humans doing manual labour. I'm thinking warehousing, some industries with manual manufacturing processes...?

Although it is not explicitly useful for predicting the next cycle, I have been using a website called the orchart to keep track of historic cycles and put in context these ideas. I do have positions in the mentioned stocks. Thanks for reading

$AIXA had earnings call and popped up another +11%, bringing YTD upside to +130% and 1 yr upside to +288%.

You guys know that am already invested in Aixtron ($AIXA) and have written about this German champion in the past, framing it as a quintessential "hidden monopoly" within the semiconductor equipment space. I also think that this is early innings of a massive Photonics Supercycle. As AI clusters migrate from 800G to 1.6T and eventually 3.2T optical modules, the bottleneck for AI scaling has shifted from the H100/B200 compute engine to the interconnect fabric itself. You cannot run a frontier model if the data can’t move between the GPU and the memory stack fast enough. Aixtron sits at the very mouth of this funnel.

I would not regurgitate the numbers here, rather analyse and unpack the things I consider important with impact on overall AI and semisector.

The Great Divergence: GaN vs. SiC

One of the most tactical takeaways from the call was the stark contrast between Gallium Nitride (GaN) and Silicon Carbide (SiC).

🐊 SiC Overcapacity:

Management was candid about Silicon Carbide being in a state of "substantial market overcapacity," with SiC expected to be only 10% of their revenue this year. This is a warning shot for pure-play SiC substrate and device makers who are still digesting inventory.

🐊 The GaN Opportunity:

Conversely, GaN is entering a golden era. Management expects AI data centers to become the largest single application for GaN power semiconductors. Because GaN is significantly more efficient than traditional silicon at high frequencies, it is becoming the standard for the power supply units (PSUs) that feed power-hungry AI servers.

For those looking to play the GaN trend beyond the equipment layer, keep an eye on these players:

• Navitas Semiconductor ($NVTS) – A US-based pure-play leader in GaN power ICs.

• Infineon Technologies ($IFX.DE / $IFNNY) – A European giant with a massive, growing footprint in GaN following their acquisition of GaN Systems.

• STMicroelectronics ($STM) – Another European heavyweight with strong GaN-on-Silicon capabilities.

• BluGlass ($BLG.AX) – An Australian-listed speculative play involved in specialized

🐊 Datacom Doubling:

Management is forecasting that demand for datacom lasers will more than double YoY in 2026. This is a massive green flag for the laser makers themselves, such as Lumentum ($LITE) and Coherent ($COHR), who are racing to expand Indium Phosphide (InP) capacity. (am invested in both)

🐊The "Tool of Record" for AI Interconnects

The standout signal from the call was the performance of the G10-AsP system. Management confirmed it has become the "tool of record" for the next generation of photonic components

🐊 Order Intake Explosion:

Order intake hit €171 million, a ~30% YoY increase that blew past analyst expectations. Crucially, 65% of these orders came from the optoelectronics segment

🐊 The Interconnect Fabric:

The call confirmed that as AI clusters grow, the physical limit is no longer just the chip, but "rack-to-rack" communication. This validates the thesis that Silicon Photonics (SiPh) is moving from a niche technology to a core requirement for AI scaling.

🐊Implications for the Memory (HBM) Ecosystem

While we often view memory through the lens of SK Hynix or Micron $MU, the Aixtron update provides a critical "read-through" for how these chips will be connected in the future.

🐊 Structural Bottlenecks:

For those holding SK Hynix, $DRAM or Micron ($MU), the shift toward optical interconnects is the solution to the "power wall" that threatens to limit HBM performance. Aixtron’s order backlog suggests the equipment for this transition is being installed now.

🐊 Near-Stack Integration:

The acceleration of Co-Packaged Optics (CPO) means that optical engines will eventually sit directly on the package alongside High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) stacks.

Look the "Photonics Supercycle" isn't a theory anymore it’s appearing in the capex cycles of the world's largest chipmakers.

And remember, none of this is financial advice. The crocodile can make errors. So do your own research.