Just some random thoughts, I do think AI is the most disruptive technology in human history.
To the level of agricultural or industrial revolution.
Since Anthropic, OpenAi, XAI, and others are racing to build superintelligence.
The amount of economic impact can't be measured if AI helps find cures for cancer or accelerates discovery for Quantum Computing.
Or if AI end up displacing the workforce, which increases profitability for companies.
The US Gov has every incentive to keep the buildout going too, as the implications from Warfare, Cybersecurity, is also immeasurable if China takes the lead.
So there's likely to be incentives and subsidies to win, even if there's not enough profit derived LLM training/inference.
As for sustainability, when you look upstream, $GOOGL is able to fund it majorly with their own cashflow, same with $AMZN, $MSFT.
More lukewarm on $META. Very iffy about $ORCL.
But I do see some bubbles forming around debt interest like $CRWV.
Maybe circular valuations that's happening with OpenAI backlog agreements or $NVDA / $AMD agreements with Neoclouds to buy their GPUs.
But as seen with $MSFT and having OpenAI be a major part of the backlog, it did correct off the information, so "bubbles" like that do pop despite the overall markets increasing.
Definitely don't see a bubble in upstream semiconductors from $LITE to Sk Hynix though since the amount of profit they get from the buildout would likely be insane to make up for capex decreasing.
OpenAI was actually my biggest fear from contagion, eg. $CRWV, $CBRS and others, but they just raised a lot.
So think it will be fine for another 1 1/2 years of capex, especially if they IPO this year.
I also don't think we'll get massive Fed tightening despite "predictions" since this will trigger a contagion since many of these players rely heavily on debt.
And although the Fed is independent, don't think Trump would have supported someone who is against his administration goals.
As for semiconductor valuations going up every day like $AMD or $MU, there's probably going to be some corrections here and there. Everything going up together is kinda unhealthy.
Can't time the capex peak but just from $AVGO and other projections, it just keeps accelerating exponentially into 2028.
Especially as everyone is starting to sign multi year agreements as well.
OpenAI contagion / hyperscaler capex decreasing / fed tightening was what I'm looking out for, and no blaring signs of any of those yet.
So I think the music will keep playing for this year at the bare minimum.
If you want a TLDR of today:
> be $NVDA, $5T company. Force shift to 800V DC and CPO
> analyst: I don’t think u can do it in time!
> market: “I don’t trust Nvidia, time to sell everything”
> Nvidia and Lumentum executives after: Bullish on CPO, timelines accelerating.
???
Nos amis coréens sont les experts de la mémoire et ils écrivent vraiment des choses fascinantes
50% de mon Feed est actuellement asiatique, c’est la où il y a le plus d’alpha sur les semi actuellement
On top: $NVDA CEO also called out Silicon Photonics (optical networking) with memory.
Stating that Nvidia would require “supply volumes beyond imagination”.
What a bullish read through on the SiPH supply chain from $SIVE (now upstream Nvidia ecosystem) to $SOI
I think my personal style of investing is a bit different, just some reflection:
It's inherently discretionary, based on stuff markets don't know yet. And a culmination of life experiences?
If you look at $AXTI, $RPI, $SIVE, $IQE and others.
Lot of it is guessing on unstructured relationships then seeing if it's right or not down the line.
$RPI is the perfect example:
1. Nobody really thought of Raspberry Pis for AI growth. Mainly people bought one or two just for class + education + hobbyist.
2. After OpenClaw, just noticed all my friends and people just buying Apple Mac Minis / RPIs for AI applications.
3. Found validation of that trend online with lot of people sharing video tutorials on AI orchestration with RPI.
4. AI was their ideal perfect growth vector, did some modeling, and thought it was compelling.
Earnings comes out and I was right.
Everyone in media was calling it a meme stock because there's nothing online that shows revenue growth from AI (was 14% forecasted revenue growth, turned out to be 58%, my projection was around 55%).
So it was a mix of guessing next industry trend (AI using lightweight hardware instead of GPU clusters), real life trends, then revenue forecasting off my guess.
For stuff like $AXTI:
1. Everyone called it a joke when I bought at ~$12. LLMs would hallucinate and say "hyperscalers/govs would have known about this by now and fixed this vulnerability with InP substrates"
2. Or would conflate very nuanced parts of InP substrate stack, where there's multiple different chokepoints in upstream processing.
3. So part of this was just discretionary based on what I've seen over InP substrate breakdowns, industry trends, etc.
4. Then also guessing the major supercycle was photonics (this was before everyone caught onto $LITE, and others). Or before you saw the $141B TAM projections from GS.
5. AXT owned 40% of InP supply chain, without them the supply chain just gets cripped).
6. All the "analysts" were forecasting steady InP substrate growth, few hundred million TAM, etc. or export controls.
7. Everyone kept trying to say $AXTI was overvalued based on TAM estimates. But if it's a few hundred million TAM you just think that's a joke and go into game theory over allocations.
8. Then I just had to guess, how much would this be worth if it were a NAND style bottleneck, what MC could it reach based on control, how much would hyperscalers price it as, etc.
A lot of the current research outputs from Goldman Sachs, or earnings reports from the Epiwafer companies, were confirmed after I published my piece on AXT. If you did research back then, lot of the same material /framing wouldn't have come up.
With stuff like $XFAB as you're seeing now, a lot of it is just pure guessing:
1. Not really any CPO materials, how much their MTP process makes in revenue, etc. Everyone online keeps saying they're not a photonics player.
2. But if you go through ASE docs or Gov websites, they all kinda cite XFAB as a major emerging player here.
3. $NVDA also evaluating them right now (maybe it's successful who knows).
4. No clear revenue around this area because their main silicon photonics process is still precommercial, but if you guess it's trying to create a EU supply chain to compete with $TSEM, once pre-commercial shifts to commercial, maybe similar but less volume contracts?
5. Then just seeing updates over the next few months to see if anything confirms this thesis guess.
_
I think a lot of information discovery still can be done with LLMs I'm seeing online. But it's also really hard to make a bunch of unstructured inferences based on unrelated material or even just trends you're seeing in real life.
So probably better to just do what's standard, eg. do valuation forecasting based on current numbers
Stuff like $AAOI, if they're projecting $471m/M h1 2027 and you see MC at $12B, probably undervalued might be a good idea to go long for next years.
Stuff like Samsung Electronics is easier, see what people are modeling for operating profits for 2027, 2028 then just seeing if it's undervalued or not at current levels.
Maybe something harder is $JBL. I haven't really seen any great volume numbers around 1.6T LRO, but you can just make a guess on how popular that might be then project how that might impact current MCs.
Or picking just good names everyone kinda agrees like $TSM, $INTC, $MRVL is also solid.
So a lot of things is just building up your life skills then applying that to markets. I don't think it's that can be taught with courses and stuff.
Of course, much of what I'm doing is just high conviction inference based on unconnected parts. Could always be wrong.
Oh look… $NVDA CEO warned memory shortage is expected to persist for many years, due to massive scaling demand of AI infrastructure.
With further announcements tomorrow.
$MU and $EWY (Samsung/SK Hynix) operating profit projections aren’t looking too crazy anymore?