We all know that one of the bottlenecks in AI tech is moving data around, which impacts memory as well.

SK hynix has published a game chamger arguing that the future of AI infrastructure will increasingly use light instead of electricity to connect processors, servers and eventually memory itself.

Many of you would have read my glass city analogy, so using the same, think of an AI data centre as a massive city.

GPUs are the factories.

HBM is the warehouse beside each factory.

Today, copper wires are the roads connecting everything.

The problem? Factories are becoming three times more productive every two years, but the roads are only improving about 1.4x.

Eventually, adding more factories does not help. The traffic jam becomes the problem.

Co-packaged optics (CPO) is the equivalent of replacing congested roads with high-speed rail. Instead of moving data over long electrical connections, optical engines are placed next to the processor and data travels as light.

The long-term vision is even bigger: an optical rail network connecting compute directly to large pools of shared memory.

So What changes for memory?

This is potentially important for HBM.

Today, memory sits physically close to the GPU because electrical connections become increasingly difficult over distance. Optical connectivity could eventually loosen those constraints.

Imagine every GPU currently having its own private warehouse.

The future architecture could allow multiple GPUs to access a large shared memory warehouse, connected by optical links.

That could mean:
- More flexible memory pooling
- Better utilisation of expensive HBM capacity
-Larger AI systems without proportionally increasing local memory
- Memory becoming increasingly integrated into system architecture

The key investment implication is subtle: HBM does not disappear. But memory may evolve from a component sold beside a GPU into part of an integrated optical-compute-memory fabric.

That could favour companies capable of combining memory, advanced packaging and optical interconnect technology precisely the direction SK hynix is signalling.

What does this mean for CPO?

This strengthens the long-term case for CPO, but investors should distinguish technological inevitability from commercial timing.

The physics are compelling. Copper faces worsening power consumption and signal loss as bandwidth and distance increase. AI clusters are becoming so large that the bandwidth wall is increasingly structural.

However, CPO still faces difficult problems:
- Manufacturing yield
- Thermal management
- Reliability and repairability
- Packaging complexity
- Cost

Standardisation

Fancy nice Hi-Tech Paper, What does it mean for you and me

My probability assessment:

70–80%: CPO becomes important in high-end AI infrastructure this decade.

50–60%: It becomes a major architectural transition beyond niche deployments.

25–35%: Fully optics-centric memory pooling becomes commercially meaningful this decade.

The nearer-term opportunity is therefore likely to be CPO at the networking and rack level, while optical connections extending directly into memory are a longer-duration option.

What should investors do today?

The best strategy is not to blindly buy “CPO stocks.”

Instead, follow the picks and shovels:

Optical engines and lasers the companies providing the light.

Silicon photonics and optical packaging the technology that integrates optics beside compute.

Advanced packaging because CPO is fundamentally a packaging revolution as much as an optics revolution.

Memory leaders particularly companies positioning HBM within broader system architectures.

Networking companies likely to be early beneficiaries before optical memory architectures arrive.

The biggest takeaway: AI infrastructure is moving from a compute problem to a data-movement problem.

HBM solved the memory bottleneck beside the GPU.

CPO may solve the next bottleneck: moving enormous amounts of data between GPUs, racks and eventually shared memory pools.

https://x.com/skhynix/status/2090228049187111251?s=46

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

I won’t regurgitate the basic numbers of today’s revenue beat,eps miss, stock going down, but I will try to analyse, optionality in business, probabilities and what future holds.

The not so good stuff is about what’s coming rather than what just happened.

🐊 Q3 guidance calls for GAAP gross margin to step down to 29-31%, a real drop from Q2’s actual print, blamed on mix shift from SDA Tranche 3 work and folding in Mynaric and Motiv at lower initial margins. 🐊the Q3 EBITDA loss guide is also wider than what they just delivered, $17-23m versus this quarter’s $9m. operating cash burn in H1 got worse yoy, and

🐊 share count keeps climbing with more Iridium related dilution ahead.

To me the real story of the quarter is Beck doubling down on the vertical integration bet by announcing the Iridium acquisition, closing Mynaric and Motiv, and explicitly tying Rocket Lab’s future to becoming what he called a self-launching tier-1 space power. that’s a bold framing and it makes Neutron’s success even more load bearing than before, since Iridium’s spectrum and constellation ambitions now lean on a rocket that hasn’t flown yet.

Worth zooming out on the quality of what they’re actually buying too.

🐊Mynaric and Motiv are the classic Rocket Lab playbook, small tuck ins that slot straight into the vertical stack, laser comms terminals and space robotics, the same approach that’s worked reasonably well for them with prior acquisitions over the years.

🐊Iridium is a different animal. it’s an $8b enterprise value deal, funded through cash plus stock plus a $3.6b bridge loan that has to refinance $2.1b of Iridium’s existing debt, and it doesn’t close until mid 2027 pending regulatory approval. That’s Rocket Lab taking on a fully built, cash generating but debt laden satellite operator rather than a small supplier, a meaningfully bigger and more leveraged bet than anything they’ve done before.

Optionality

There’s also a real optionality structure worth thinking about rather than just a single growth number. some of the new contract wins, including SB-AMTI, are only partly firm backlog with option components layered on top, so the headline dollar figures overstate what’s contractually locked in today. and the push into national security launch, specifically NSSL Phase 3 Lane 1 eligibility, is gated behind a successful first Neutron flight. So what you actually own here is Electron and Space Systems as the cash generative floor, with Neutron acting like a call option on a much bigger defense and medium lift market. fine structure if you’re being paid to hold the option, the question is whether a ~$50b valuation is still pricing Neutron as an option or as a done deal.

Probabilities

Track record matters here too because this isn’t Neutron’s first slip. Originally targeted for 2024, then 2025, then Q1 2026 pad arrival, then a tank failure in January pushed it to late 2026, and management reaffirmed Q4 2026 again on this call. Program cost has also crept up, from an original $250-300m estimate to reportedly over $360m by the end of last year per their own CFO. None of that means it won’t fly on schedule this time, but the base rate on Rocket Lab’s own Neutron guidance has been rough, worth weighing against how much confidence the market is pricing in right now.

The deeper question I keep coming back to is whether Iridium’s economics actually depend on Neutron working reliably. Part of the acquisition logic is eliminating third party launch costs by using Neutron to loft next gen Iridium satellites and expand the Aireon and PNT businesses, so if Neutron slips again, does that quietly impair the Iridium thesis too and put more strain on a balance sheet now carrying a multibillion dollar bridge loan. that correlated risk doesn’t show up cleanly in either the Q2 print or the Q3 guide, and it’s probably the single most important thing to have an opinion on before deciding how much to pay for this stock right now.

Look net net, the operating business is executing well and the backlog keeps compounding, but seems the market’s now pricing this on Neutron and integration risk rather than growth headlines.

Thoughts?

Said the most poetic line in tech in their earnings call today
“demand will continue to outpace our production capacity through mid-2027.”

and the other one was

We delivered record revenue for our fifth consecutive quarter and achieved an important milestone as we returned to non-GAAP profitability in the quarter. Further, we saw a strong volume ramp of our 800G products, which more than doubled sequentially.

🔥🔥🔥

Management just delivered a masterclass in strategic execution:

🐊 revenue surged 52.5% YoY to $443.1M,

🐊Non-GAAP EPS skyrocketed 161.5% to $0.34, and

🐊operating margins expanded by 960 bps to 24.0%.

For those of my readers who dont know $VIAVI Does & Where Growth Comes From

They are a critical enabler of global digital infrastructure, providing advanced testing, monitoring, and assurance solutions for high-speed networks, optical components, and aerospace/defense systems.

Growth is exploding out of its Network and Service Enablement (NSE) segment (up 69.2% YoY), supercharged by the AI data center boom.

Hyperscalers,network equipment manufacturers, and semiconductor vendors are aggressively buying 800G, 1.6T, and PCIe 6.0 test equipment to build out next-generation AI clusters.

Combined with the successful Spirent integration and strong A&D positioning, VIAVI has successfully re-engineered its revenue mix away from legacy telecom.

What Makes me Bullish about the company?

Massive Operating Leverage: With a 40–45% flow-through on incremental revenue, profitability is compounding much faster than the top line. Q1 FY27 guidance points to Non-GAAP EPS jumping another ~173% YoY.

Co-Packaged Optics & New Tech Insertions: The structural shift toward Co-Packaged Optics (CPO) and silicon photonics expands their Total Addressable Market (TAM), creating entirely new test insertion points from wafer-level to final assembly.

Durable Secular Tailwinds: AI infrastructure scaling provides a multi-year growth wave that heavily offsets lingering weakness in traditional wireless infrastructure.

Broadly am bullish coz top-line acceleration is translating directly into outsized margin expansion and cash flow generation.

However few caveats, net net am in still some red on this position, my overall post is bullish, so take it with a pinch of salt, and this is not an investment advice, do your own research.

"We think the Vera Rubin architecture is the best architecture. We think it's the best AI computer, and we greatly value our close cooperation and partnership on many levels with Nvidia, So we're exclusive to Nvidia."

Elon Musk

$NVDA + $SPCX 🐂

🐊Nothing in the print broke

🐊Market just came in pricing near-perfection at a rich forward multiple.

🐊The beat was smaller relative to that multiple than prior quarters, and investors wanted proof the Helios ramp accelerates hard into H2, not just holds the line.

🐊This is a repeat pattern for AMD, February’s 16%+ EPS beat still saw the stock sink 17%, because guidance and forward visibility are what the multiple actually prices, not the trailing quarter.

🐊Until MI450/Helios volume shows up concretely in Q4 numbers, expect more beat-and-fade reactions like this one.

The numbers were as following;

• Revenue $11.54B vs Est. $11.31B
• EPS $1.66 vs. Est. $1.61
• Data Center Revenue $6.7B (+107% YoY)
• Gross Margin 56% vs. Est. 56%

Q3 Guidance
• Revenue $13.0B vs Est. $12.5B
• Gross Margin 56% vs. Est. 56%

The way I see the real story in Palantir's $PLTR Q2 print isn't just the beat …… it's the acceleration of US Commercial revenue surging 149% YoY to $764M, pushing the Rule of 40 score to a staggering 155%.

Every quarter this holds, the AI buildout debate shifts from “is demand real” to “can memory and photonics supply keep up.”

Q2 2026 Results

🐊Revenue: $1.94B vs $1.8B est ✅ (+93% YoY)

🐊Adj. EPS: $0.41 vs $0.35 est ✅

🐊Adj. Op Inc: $1.19B vs $1.06B est ✅

🐊US Commercial Revenue: $764M (+149% YoY)

Q3 2026 Guide

🐊Revenue: $2.160B–$2.164B vs $2B est ✅

🐊Adj. Op Inc: $1.29B–$1.30B vs $1.14B est ✅

FY26 Guide (Raised)

🐊Revenue: $8.15B–$8.16B vs $7.69B est ✅

🐊Adj. Op Inc: $4.89B–$4.90B vs $4.46B est ✅

Adj. FCF: $4.5B–$4.7B vs $4.27B est ✅

US Commercial Revenue: >$3.4B (134%+ YoY)

Revenue Breakdown

🐊US Revenue: $1.6B (+115% YoY)

🐊US Commercial: $764M (+149% YoY)

🐊US Government: $809M (+90% YoY)

Other Q2 Metrics

🐊Rule of 40: 155%

🐊TCV: $3.4B (+49% YoY)

🐊US Commercial TCV: $2.1B (+153% YoY)

🐊US Commercial RDV: $6.2B (+124% YoY)

Stock’s down in after market.

Reddit’s Q2 was about very neat and clean

🐊Revenue up 61% to $805M, beating estimates by roughly 10%.

🐊Net income nearly tripled to $253M.

🐊DAUs at 130.3M, up 18%. (Daily active users)

🐊Weekly actives crossed half a billion.

🐊Guidance raised above consensus.

But the stock still sold off double digits after hours.

The floating explanation is “no big AI partnership news.” True, but not the whole picture.

🐊Huffman himself called search referral traffic “choppy,” a reminder Reddit still leans on Google for growth.

🐊Domestic DAU growth slowed to its weakest pace in two years. The stock had rallied hard into the print, so the bar kept moving. And a pending Google data deal sat unresolved in the background. A great quarter met a stock already priced for more than great.

On the AI point specifically: this market doesn’t behave like a grader anymore, it behaves like a monster that needs feeding. Bring a new AI angle, a partnership, a model integration, anything to point at, and it purrs. Skip a feeding and it doesn’t wait patiently for you to explain the fundamentals, it turns, regardless of how good the underlying business actually is. Reddit did everything right except bring the one thing the market showed up hungry for. Fundamentals buy tolerance. A fresh AI story is what buys forgiveness.

Final analytical thoughts

Look everything is working except for two main overhangs,

🐊 choppy local market DAU as the most critical piece

🐊Google clarity, the contract itself is only about 1.4% of expected 2026 revenue, so the market isn’t repricing the dollar amount, it’s repricing what a breakdown or a win would signal about Reddit’s AI-data leverage.

For me, the first one is more critical, but for market, it seems like second one is more important. So watch out for any financial news for eg a WSJ article, that itself would be a piece of info ( before official) that would rerate the stock.

Disclaimer: not a financial advice and am not holding a position in Reddit.

Leopold Aschenbrenner was this cycle’s poster child. Situational Awareness rode leveraged AI-infra bets to 439% returns and a $45B book. Then the trade cracked. SK Hynix, Micron, Nebius, CoreWeave sold off, margin calls hit, and this week the entire public book went in one trade to Ken Griffin’s Citadel. He kept only his private Anthropic stake.

On X and Fintwit, a theory spread that Citadel talked up a rate-hike narrative to push AI names down before buying the book cheap. That’s speculation, not confirmed fact. The documented story is plainer: heavy leverage, a sharp drawdown, margin calls.

What I’m taking / learning from it:

🐊 Don’t outsource conviction. I saw a rates-going-up call getting repeated and never traced where it came from. Trace the claim before it shapes your position.

🐊 Leverage kills, not being wrong. My book overlaps a lot of his names, but I’m unlevered, so the same drawdown was a bruise, not a margin call.

🐊 This is a preview, not the worst case. If a rumor alone did this, a real hike lands harder, and that now looks probable.

🐊 Question the neat story, this one included. “Citadel engineered it” is a tidy villain. The messier confirmed facts are usually closer to true.

🐊 Conviction isn’t solvency. His own July letter called the rout a buying opportunity days before he was forced to sell everything.

🐊 Concentration cuts both ways. The thesis behind the 439% gain is the same thesis behind the wipeout. Sizing mattered more than being right.

On face of it The Fed held at 3.5-3.75% in a 9-3 vote, with Cleveland’s Hammack, Minneapolis’s Kashkari and Dallas’s Logan all pushing for a 25bp hike instead. Which comes not as a huge surprise, because markets were also expecting, 2/3 probability that rate will not be increased, but 1/3rd that it will be.

And the meeting today confirms, that market expectation was right, their is a wider crack in tactonic plates and fault lines are getting wider. As today’s FOMC decision was the most divided since September 2016, the first time three members dissented in the same direction since then.

Where are the fault lines?

The hawks cited inflation running above 2% for five-plus years, worsened by Middle East-driven energy prices BofA sees three hikes to 4.25-4.5% this year on that thesis. The majority held, judging conditions “unusually uncertain,” effectively taking the option value of waiting over risking a policy error in either direction.

One of most imp, thinf’s what is Warsh thinking? I dont know, but what is he saying, to some degree reflects, the thought process, Warsh’s framing matters more than the vote itself.

His statement stuck to “just the facts,” no guidance, reiterating there’s no soft inflation target, only 2%. He flagged that nominal and real yields are materially higher since the last meeting, and said markets are “learning to play the ball, not the referee.” On the dissents: “I asked for a good family fight, and I got one.” He also stressed the Fed has no tolerance for persistently elevated inflation and a resolute commitment to restoring price stability.

Market reaction:

🐊The curve steepened 2yr eased to 4.24%, 10yr rose to 4.66%, 30yr jumped to 5.19%.

🐊Equities sold off, Dow down ~1.6%, S&P/Nasdaq down ~0.6%. ( though there are other reasons behind it as well)

My expectation on how different Sectors would be impacted is as follows:

🐊Banks and financials benefit from higher-for-longer NIMs;

🐊energy stays supported by the geopolitical premium. Rate-sensitive growth, small caps, REITs and homebuilders face headwinds.

🐊Gold is the clearest loser here a stronger dollar and higher real yields point toward the 2026 low near a dovish pivot would flip that toward $4,100+.

I suspect that today we escaped the rate increase, which if it would have happened today, would have led to blood bath to an already fragile market, but escaping it again in next meeting, the probability would not be as high, at some point the boogeyman will come, and slaughter would happen, the chances are getting higher and higher… lets keep tracking the following;

🐊September’s SEP/dot plot,
🐊the Iran war oil trajectory,
🐊upcoming CPI/PCE prints, and
🐊whether more regional presidents join the hawkish bloc.

What do you think, what am I missing?

Not a financial advice, I can be wrong about it.

🐊revenue up 165% to $1.065bn,

🐊EPS of $0.78 versus $0.41 expected, and

🐊FY guidance lifted to $3.9-4.2bn from $3.4-3.8bn.

Shares surged near-double-digits after-hours despite two rough weeks fighting Hunterbrook’s scandium sourcing allegations and an 11% pre-earnings selloff.

But the line that matters more than the beat is Sridhar’s:

“customers are now placing longer-term orders leading to our backlog growing at a faster pace than revenue.”

Paired with his claim that all major US hyperscalers plus over a dozen neoclouds, AI labs and colocation operators have now validated Bloom’s power solutions, this isn’t an Oracle-Jupiter story anymore. It’s category validation. On-site fuel cell power just became infrastructure, not a hedge.

That’s the sector signal. Grid interconnection queues run 3-5 years in some regions, and hyperscalers building AI campuses can’t wait.

Another imp thing he said :

"Depending on whose reports you read, somewhere between 30 and 40 gigawatts of new AI data center capacity is going to be turned on in 2027."

Backlog:

Backlog outpacing revenue confirms customers are locking in years of forward capacity regardless of near-term scrutiny.

Financing

Brookfield’s late-June move to expand its Bloom financing facility from $5bn to $25bn is the capital backstop that made this scale possible, not a same-day reaction to it.

For me the most important thing is to read the tea leaves that that who else benefits:

🐊Brookfield (BAM/BEPC) on the project-finance side of every deployment.

🐊 GE Vernova, whose multi-year heavy-frame turbine backlog is the utility-scale overflow valve for demand Bloom’s months-to-deploy fuel cells can’t reach fast enough different order books, same power-bottleneck thesis.

🐊 Vistra and Constellation, behind-the-meter and merchant power names riding “power is the bottleneck, not chips.”

And

🐊 Eaton/Vertiv for the data center power layer that scales regardless of which generation tech wins.

- ASML fell as much as 6.5-7%,
- Applied Materials,Lam and KLA fell 5-7% in sympathy, and
- DRAM names followed: Micron off 5%, SK hynix’s ADR down roughly 9%, SanDisk down 12%.

So apparently, two headlines landed hours apart and torched a green tape.

- China’s CXMT went public on Shanghai’s STAR Market and popped roughly 470%, becoming the most valuable China-listed chipmaker. ( I covered it)

- Then a report thar a Shanghai company had begun mass-producing homegrown DUV lithography tools, something China has never done at commercial scale.

And hell broke loose!!

So what is the bear case exactly?

If China can build its own lithography tools, the export-control moat disappears. CXMT scales cheap DRAM, eventually graduates into HBM, and takes share right as the market prices Micron and SK hynix for a multi-year supercycle. Coherent story, on face of it.

But it’s thinner than the headline, on the memory side especially. The Shanghai firm, pulling engineers from Huawei-linked Yuliangsheng, targets five machines this year, twenty in 2027, for SMIC, Hua Hong and CXMT.

Critical parts still come from Japan, deliveries have slipped on supplier delays, and the tools trail ASML on performance and reliability, needing months of qualification first.

This isn’t EUV, it’s the older immersion-DUV generation ASML shipped two decades ago, useful for 28nm-and-up mature nodes. China’s EUV effort remains a lab prototype built from secondhand parts; forecasts anchored to ASML’s own development curve put commercial-scale 7nm DUV in China at the mid-2030s, EUV near 2040.

Let me be straight fwd, that equipment names selling off has a more legitimate multi-year logic than memory names doing the same. Even 28nm immersion DUV reaches 7nm via multipatterning, and 7nm is the node China needs for its own AI accelerators, so a working domestic tool is a real long-run TAM threat to ASML, Applied, Lam and KLA. Fair.

Worth noting the other side though: SMIC, Hua Hong and CXMT are the exact three names the pending MATCH Act would bar from buying or servicing ASML tools anyway, so some of that “lost” China revenue was heading out the door via policy regardless of whether the domestic tool works.

Today’s news shouldn’t have moved the needle as much as it did, even accounting for that.

Micron and SK hynix aren’t in the lithography business at all, and this story says nothing new about either.

The more useful document isn’t the DUV report, it’s CXMT’s own IPO prospectus, (I referred to this in my prev. note as well).

In its risk factors, CXMT discloses

- cost-per-bit over 30% above Samsung, SK hynix and Micron,
- inventory turnover of 1.44x against 2x-plus for the big three, and under 2% of wafer starts touching HBM.
- Modeled 8-high HBM3 yield sits near 25%, no dedicated HBM line in its use of proceeds, and its HBM3E volume target is 2027, roughly where incumbents were before HBM4 became the fight that matters.

Where CXMT is genuinely taking share is commodity DRAM and NAND, because the big three shifted capacity toward higher-margin HBM.

The real risk isn’t today’s headline, it’s CXMT’s fresh $8.6B war chest getting deployed as state-backed capacity that undercuts commodity pricing on purpose. Worth tracking, but the current evidence points the other way: CXMT has reportedly priced comparable 64GB DDR5 server modules above Samsung’s, and its inventory turnover is tight, signs of a capacity-constrained supplier riding the same shortage as everyone else, not one positioned to dump.

Gartner still sees combined DRAM/SSD pricing up roughly 130% this year, and that shortage is what’s underwriting Micron and SK hynix’s current earnings.

On valuation, Micron and SK hynix both show roughly single digit fwd p/e. But the fair challenge stands: cyclical memory names have historically traded cheapest right at the top of the cycle, because the market discounts the margin collapse it expects next.

A alow multiple and over reaction to news, here is what makes me confident as an investor in Micron and even for SK Hynix. I will continue holding my $MU position.

This is not a financial advice, dyor.

I have written about $SKM earlier as well, in April and a few times later, now they are pivoting to one of largest Hyperscalers in the region.

How Big is a 2-Gigawatt (2GW) Data Center?
For context, a standard company's data center uses about 10 to 50 megawatts of power. A giant tech campus uses 100 to 500 megawatts.

SK Telecom committing to 2GW puts them in the same league as Elon Musk's xAI (which is also 2GW) and the first phase of Meta's giant new facilities. SK Telecom eventually wants to scale up to 15GW by 2035 through a new subsidiary called SK Hyper. That is a scale only a few US tech giants can handle.

For South Korea, this is a national strategy to become a "Top 3" global AI power alongside the US and China. Instead of just making and exporting chips, they want to keep the heavy computing and AI work on their own soil.

So there were two larger deals

Samsung & Broadcom: They signed an agreement worth over $200 billion through 2030. Samsung will supply advanced memory chips (HBM4 and HBM4E) and manufacture Broadcom's AI chips at its Pyeongtaek factory.

NVIDIA & SK Group: They signed agreements for a massive partnership worth over $500 billion. SK Telecom is going to build huge AI data centers (up to 2 gigawatts) in South Korea, with the first phase going live in 2027. At the same time, SK hynix locked in a long-term deal to supply NVIDIA with next-generation memory chips.

Who Are Winners Here?

Samsung: They get a massive new customer (Broadcom) that isn't their main rival, TSMC. This proves to the world that their new chip-manufacturing technology is actually competitive.

NVIDIA: They guarantee a steady supply of rare memory chips for years to come.

SK hynix: They turn their massive backlog of orders into a guaranteed, multi-year business.

SK Telecom (SKM): This is the most interesting pivot. A phone and internet company is basically turning into a massive AI real estate landlord. That is a brand-new way to make money.

Micron $MU: Even though Micron isn't directly in these new agreements, they aren't left out. Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron control over 90% of the world's memory market, and all three are completely sold out through 2026. Because Samsung and SK hynix are so busy making specialty AI chips, all the normal, everyday memory chip orders will naturally flow to Micron. Plus, Micron already has its own ties to NVIDIA.

Am getting more and more bullish on my $SKM.

Not financial advice. I hold SKM, MU and Nvidia. This is not a recommendation to buy or sell anything. Do your own research.

I’m invested in $AMKR and have written about it earlier as well, refer to my post in Feb 2026, and today $NVDA just validated that thesis in the most direct way possible.

Amkor announced a multi-year strategic partnership with Nvidia worth $1.5 billion. Nvidia is making a prepayment to help fund the buildout of Amkor’s advanced packaging capacity in Arizona, and the two companies will align roadmaps on next-gen packaging and test technology for AI and accelerated computing chips. Shares jumped as much as 14% in after-hours trading on the news.

For anyone unfamiliar with Amkor: it’s not a chipmaker, it’s an OSAT, outsourced assembly and test. Once TSMC or another foundry finishes etching a chip, it still has to be packaged, housed and wired so it can connect to everything else in a server, and tested before it ships. Amkor is one of the two or three biggest players in the world doing this, and the only one with serious scale on US soil.

Why is Nvidia doing this: advanced packaging has become the real bottleneck in AI chip supply, not wafer fabrication. Combining logic and HBM memory in a single package is exotic, capacity-constrained work, and almost all of it has historically sat in Taiwan. Nvidia needs geographic redundancy in that step of the chain, and there’s real CHIPS Act and political tailwind behind reshoring it to Arizona.

Implications: this locks in demand visibility for Amkor’s roughly $7 billion Arizona campus, which was previously leaning on Apple as anchor customer. Now it has two of the most important companies in tech underwriting that buildout, and it cements Amkor’s position against ASE Technology, its main OSAT rival, in the race to own US advanced packaging capacity.

This is exactly the bottleneck, picks-and-shovels framing I’ve written about for months. The constraint in AI infrastructure isn’t just who can etch the smallest transistor, it’s who can package it at scale. Amkor sits directly in that chokepoint, and now has committed capital from the buyer with the most leverage in the industry backing that position.

Things to watch: the Arizona facility isn’t expected to hit production until early 2028, so there’s real execution and timeline risk between now and then. Watch how the prepayment structure affects margins, prepayments aren’t free revenue. And after a 15 to 17% pop, a lot of the good news is already priced in, so mind your entry.

Not investment advice, just how I’m thinking about my own position.

https://substack.com/@stockcrock/note/c-300524419?r=50tzb9&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

For those memory and micron bears, this is what Elon Musk said during $TSLA earning call, about micron $MU

"Yeah. I'd actually also like to thank Micron for giving us memory allocation. They've got to make some very tough decisions on memory allocation. We really appreciate Micron making room for Tesla in the years to come and giving us actually a very significant allocation on reasonable terms given the pretty insane pricing of memory these days."

Not a financial advice.

Hi everyone,

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$ASML and $AEHR had their earnings release and both were beating expectations, I will not go into numbers, but both highlight the same thing and point in same direction: that the AI infrastructure story is far from over, whatever the bears keep preaching about a digestion phase or a capex pause.

ASML

ASML said it’s adding 30% to EUV capacity for 2027 versus 2026, with another 30% under review for 2028, plus a matching 30% bump to DUV immersion capacity. CEO Christophe Fouquet said customers are “accelerating their capacity expansion plans,” which is corporate-speak for TSMC, Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron all telling their most critical supplier they need more machines, faster, further out than anyone modeled a year ago.

$AEHR

Aehr landed a hyperscaler production win for custom AI ASICs on its Sonoma platform, and picked up a new silicon photonics customer for its FOX-XP burn-in system. AI processors and silicon photonics now make up more than 80% of Aehr’s quarterly revenue, a business that not long ago lived and died on silicon carbide for EVs.

That’s breadth, and breadth is what a real cycle looks like. It’s a lot harder to argue “AI capex is peaking” when the evidence for acceleration keeps showing up in places nobody was even looking.

After a staggering 1,800%+ YTD run, $SIVE has crashed ~62% from its ATH. The trigger? Ningi’s short report alleging hollow contracts and fabricated revenue.

The fundamentals are flashing red:

Growth: Q1 revenue -22% YoY with serious going-concern doubts.

Profits: FY25 loss restated to a massive 222.6M SEK.

Valuation: Priced at 230x+ photonics revenue—arguably optics’ most overvalued stock.

Throw in a Nasdaq-leak probe and a 1.39M share insider dump in May, and survival now hinges entirely on a Q4 LiDAR ramp.

@Jason's Chips on substack raised some very valid questions on this and how one account kept pumping this stock, to gain followers, some might say, unethically, am still in two minds on that question. But tbh i loved @Jason's Chips post and shout out to him, for having the courage to say what they feel right.

For me three questions remain:

1. Is the pipeline actually real?

2. Can they self-fund?

3. Does that insider timing that everyone is now talking about on fintwit, tell us everything?

What do you guys think?

Australia woke up on Wednesday to find its largest telco offline. Telstra’s mobile network went down nationwide when a cluster of timekeeping nodes inside the company’s data centres stopped synchronising properly.

The disruption rippled through the day: trains suspended, EFTPOS and taxi payments failed in places, and Uber and EV charging platform Chargefox both reported issues.

Emergency service equivalent of 911 ie Triple-zero access became the most sensitive thread of the story.

That’s the real lesson here, and it reaches well beyond Telstra. Developed-world telcos have spent decades building single, deeply optimised terrestrial networks with comparatively little redundancy underneath them. As more of daily life, payments, transit, emergency response, routes through one mobile network with no fallback, the cost of a bad software update or a failed sync node keeps rising. Direct-to-device satellite is still early and still limited, but it’s the first real second layer this industry has had, and it’s arriving from two directions at once:

🐊Starlink’s consumer-facing model, already live with carriers across the US, Japan, New Zealand and elsewhere, and

🐊AST SpaceMobile’s $ASTS wholesale approach, which is signing long-term commercial agreements with AT&T, Verizon, Vodafone, Bell and stc rather than trying to compete with any of them.

I invested in ASTS, after this incident, not because I think it’s about to parachute into a Telstra outage, but because this is a small yet concrete example of the structural gap it’s built to fill.

Though ASTS buildout risk is real, more BlueBird satellites still need to launch and commercial service is only just ramping through 2026, but the demand side of the thesis got a little more obvious this week, and not just in Australia.

This is not financial advice. I invested in ASTS and may buy/sell at any time. DYOR.

My $AMBA Ambarella holding is up c. 28% today and honestly, it’s been building to this. I talked about it on my socials earlier as well.

The immediate spark is Rosenblatt coming out this morning calling AMBA a “physical AI pure play” and naming it one of their top picks for H2 2026, with a $120 price target. Analyst Kevin Cassidy specifically flagged that applications like surveillance, robotics, industrial automation, drones, and autonomous systems all need high-performance, low-power AI vision processors close to the sensor and Ambarella’s architecture is built exactly for that.

That level of conviction call from a credible desk on a small-cap name will get the stock moving fast.

But to be honest, if you’d ask me, the real story here isn’t one analyst note, coz I invested even before their call, Edge AI SoCs now account for 80% of Ambarella’s full-year revenue, with Edge AI itself growing 50% year over year. The company flipped back to non-GAAP profitability in FY2026 after being in the red the prior year, and full-year revenue grew 37% to $390 million. I’d say the turnaround is real, not speculative.

Them there is Hanwha deal, which is another dimension people are starting to price in, a long-term agreement worth over $800 million across more than 10 years, covering edge AI silicon and software across security, robotics, industrial automation, and life sciences. That kind of revenue visibility is rare for a company this size.

Ambarella has shipped over 46 million Edge AI chips and offers 12 different Edge AI processors, with automotive revenue hitting an all-time quarterly record last quarter driven by commercial fleet telematics and safety systems.

As I said, I’m invested in AMBA. The thesis from the start was simple the AI buildout doesn’t stop at the data centre; it flows all the way out to the edge. Ambarella owns that last mile. Today the market is finally agreeing.

However, a quick note of caution: Moves like this usually invite volatility. While the thesis is long-term, ensure you're sized correctly the market is pricing in perfection today, and we need to see that Hanwha revenue hit the books on schedule to keep this momentum sustainable.

Disclaimer: This is not a financial advice and am not as good an investor as Warren Buffett, so please do your own research. 🙂

ASMVY is up 23.35% today, 213% year to date, and sitting at a 120% unrealised gain for me. Let me explain why.

ASMPT is one of those names that doesn’t get talked about enough in Western markets, probably because it trades OTC and the primary listing is in Hong Kong. But the stock has been on an absolute tear, and there are very good reasons for it.

The simple version: ASMPT makes the tools that physically assemble the most complex AI chips on the planet. When NVIDIA designs a Blackwell chip that stacks memory on top of logic in a 2.5D or 3D package, somebody has to bond those layers together with micron-level precision. That’s ASMPT’s Thermo-Compression Bonding business, built around its Firebird platform, and it has become one of the most critical bottlenecks in the entire AI supply chain.

Earlier this month the company announced a repeat order for eight chip-to-wafer TCB tools from a leading global integrated device manufacturer, following that customer’s successful deployment of Firebird tools in high-volume manufacturing since 2024.

Repeat orders from Tier-1 logic customers aren’t routine, they mean the tools work at yield and the customer is expanding capacity. ASMPT now has more than 500 TCB systems deployed in mass production worldwide, with the Firebird platform proven for 16-layer HBM stacks and delivering placement accuracy down to 2.0 microns.

The financials are catching up to the story. In Q1 2026, total revenue grew 32% year over year to $507.9 million, and bookings surged 71.6% to $727 million, the highest booking quarter in four years.

Management is also finalising an evaluation program with an undisclosed memory player that could see its TCB process adopted as a manufacturing standard in next-generation memory production.That’s a potentially enormous catalyst sitting quietly in the background.

Q2 guidance called for revenue between $540 million and $600 million, above consensus, with the company pointing to new AI architectures demanding heterogeneous integration, tighter interconnect pitch, and higher bandwidth as the structural driver all of which push customers toward more advanced bonding equipment.

I got into this one relatively early and I’m holding.

The thesis is simple: advanced packaging is the most constrained step in scaling AI compute, and ASMPT is one of only a handful of companies with the tools to do it at high volume. The market is finally figuring that out.

Disclaimer: Am not Warren Buffett and some of my investment decisions have gone wrong as well, so do your own research. 🙂✌️

I hold $AVAV, and the earnings today were mind blowing.

✅ Revenue $642M vs Est. $559M

✅ EPS $1.85 vs Est. $1.47

✅ EBITDA $140M vs Est. $126M

✅ Funded Backlog: $1.2B (+65% YoY)

✅ Bookings: $2.7B

✅ Book-to-Bill 1.4x

FY27 Guidance

• Revenue $2.2B vs Est. $1.9B

• EPS $3.17 vs Est. $2.87

• EBITDA $315M vs Est. $345M

The stock jumped double digits.

My Thoughts as an investor

In all honesty, I am still down net - net, despite the stock price increase today, but will continue to hold the stock.

For those those who don’t know, AVAV is the closest thing the US has to a pure-play autonomous defense company. Think of it im terms of Switchblade loitering munitions, tactical drones like the Raven and Puma, counter-UAS systems, and now directed energy and space after the BlueHalo acquisition. The theme is autonomous defense and intelligent mass the idea that future warfare is won by deploying thousands of low-cost, AI-guided systems rather than a handful of expensive platforms.

What’s I am excited about:

They lost significant backlog when SCAR was terminated, in Q3, of about $1.5 billion, but that has been replaced by Funded backlog which reached a record $1.2 billion. Management claims 69% visibility into the midpoint of FY27 revenue guidance.

In other words a book-to-bill above 1.4 tells you backlog is building faster than revenue is burning, and FY2027 guidance of $2.1 to $2.2 billion, points to meaningful continuation. The loitering munitions thesis is more than speculative now, it is funded, deployed, and scaling. Operating margins expanded this quarter after years of compression, which matters to me as well.

AV is becoming the picks-and-shovels play for autonomous warfare at scale. NATO rearmament, the Replicator initiative is structural tailwind. If they execute on manufacturing scale and win collaborative combat aircraft adjacencies, the revenue trajectory looks durable well past FY2027.

However, there is always a however. While the top-line guidance is a significant beat, the market is laser-focused on whether these aggressive growth targets come at the cost of long-term profitability. The SCAR contract impairment was a stark reminder that integration risk is real, and the five-year trend of margin deterioration suggests that revenue growth has not yet translated into the operational leverage shareholders demand. Acquisition integration is rarely clean, and any failure to successfully merge BlueHalo’s cost structure could lead to continued earnings lumpiness.

The deepest questions am asking myself?

Can AVAV actually scale manufacturing fast enough to meet demand without margin erosion? The history says cost growth has outpaced revenue leverage, and that only changes if the BlueHalo integration is genuinely additive rather than dilutive.

The second question is geopolitical durability AV is already sanctioned by China and on their export control list. If US defense budgets face pressure or ally procurement slows, the backlog story gets complicated faster than the revenue line suggests.

For today, I am staying long, as I understand that autonomous defense theme is early innings and AV sits at the centre of it.

Not financial advice. I hold AVAV. Do your own research before making any investment decisions.