Wow…
$AEHR up 30%+ today on hyperscaler orders.
$ACMR up 29% this week on China memory (cmxt + ymtc)
$AXTI up 42% this week on photonics ramp and Google capex spend
$AMKR up 19% this week w/ advanced packaging bottlenecks.
Maybe the bottlenecks starting with letter A are a good sign?
After seeing $IREN report earnings with no new hyperscaler deals.
And seeing hyperscaler capex exponentially increasing:
-> It looks more and more likely $NBIS has something cooking for earnings through process of elimination.
Few other TLDR tailwinds past few weeks:
- Older GPUs have massively increased in price (see previous). Better for balance sheet
- GPU availability dropped off the roof (increased demand)
- Hyperscaler capex spend blowout (a large portion was cited for DCs)
- $NBIS likely went through the 25M share ATM this quarter so hopefully the end of dilution is in sight.
- Clickhouse raising at $15B valuation (getting close to main company valuation)
- “Uber is not returning to developing its own robotaxis” and relying on partners like Avride (Nebius subsidiary)
Things are looking good.
With the price reset to $92, if Nebius is still on track for $7-9B ARR EOY (700%+ y/y), should be a positive hold through earnings.
Of course I expect most of the ramp to happen H2 2026 to Q1 next year as the $5B in buildout capex spend converts to recognized $8B midpoint revenue + FCF.
With $NBIS, you’re basically holding 5 companies, each growing triple digits Y/Y and waiting for valuation to reflect Sum of Parts + growth.
not many too many retail really knew about the extreme photonics ramp back then. Even $LITE was extremely under the radar.
So going all the way upstream to $AXTI while they were still export control banned + holding through it all would take a lot of conviction.
But yeah sucks to miss out on that 20x
$AXTI - 7N high purity Indium hit over $1K+ USD and has increased parabolically over the last three months.
This is a derivative reflection of price hikes.
There's two nuances:
1. This is local SMM pricing (China controls 70%+ of the supply chain).
Hyperscalers from $GOOGL to META are probably paying large premiums for this (to pass to $LITE or others).
2. This is feedstock to InP substrates.
InP substrates = $AXTI and Sumitomo.
Feedstock = $AXTI and Vital.
Increases in precursor prices hurts the bottom line of Sumitomo -> $LITE / $COHR -> downstream.
But AXT benefits both times as a bottleneck of two different layers, since they are vertically integrated at the feedstock/refinery level.
As seen with $GOOGL's earnings, the buildout for photonics is about to grow parabolically with their $180B+ capex spend. And now.
My thesis with $AXTI is -> price hikes like memory companies (eg. $SNDK, $MU, SK Hynix) and get re-rated as the central chokepoint for photonics buildout.
Instead of the big three, you have 2 (AXT/Sumitomo). Possibly 1 in due time, as Japan faces issues with upstream materials from export controls.
There's less visibility over price hikes compared to memory products.
But we can see this potentially reflected in derviatve like 7N indium on SMM.