Most people think the AI buildout is just a couple of stocks – Memory, CPU, GPU, NeoClouds, Photonics..
$SNDK, $MU, $ARM $INTC, $AMD, $NBIS, $LITE, $AAOI, $TSEM, $SIVE
The reality is there’s so much more to it.. I built a complete map of the AI buildout – at least the one I’ve been trading around for the last year.. I put that map on my Substack… 12 layers deep.
Since I’ve seen it circulating on here, I’ll just post it myself.
The hard part isn’t knowing the full stack – it’s making sense of it.
Why is photonics down today but memory isn’t? Why is CPO so relevant in the AI buildout?
Bullish AF on AI infrastructure.
Go check out the full article for free on my Substack, and if you’re going to share it – please do, but link back to my article.
Here is the link: https://t.co/AqKTdxnlmJ
Let’s go find the next 1000% stock ⚡️⚡️
CNBC REPORTED THAT WALMART WILL NOW ACCEPT BITCOIN, ETHEREUM, AND OTHER CRYPTO PAYMENTS IN-STORE FOR ITS 1 BILLION MONTHLY CUSTOMERS.
THIS IS ACTUAL ADOPTION.
For people out there citing Bank of America quotes now about selling.
Just remember:
They said $EWY/ KOSPI (SK Hynix/Samsung) was an extreme bubble back in March.
And blamed retail for the cause, then implied they should sell Korean memory equities: comparing it to the 2008 financial crisis, .com bubble, and Silver crash.
Then shortly after retail sold their longs, memory rallied to all time highs.
Institutions are not your friends.
Usually when an unusual flood of negative news, they need liquidity.
holy crap! apple just beat google to the punch -- 3d gaussian splatting is coming to apple maps.
these 3d scenes are made from oblique aerial imagery. but unlike blobby photogrammetry -- no more broccoli trees, no more melted powerlines -- ground level detail that actually holds up.
here's hoping google maps/earth follows suite soon -- they have a significantly larger corpus of sensor data to work with. time to splat the world!
Here's a bunch of random 30 US-available random stocks I like today and why:
1. $INTC - America's hope for foundry, national security
2. $MRVL - scales rev from future maia asics and add ons like cpo, they do everything lost count
3. $TSM - backbone of semis/ai
4. $COHR - They do everything vertically integrated + captures optical cycle
5. $RKLB - the final frontier of space will be around 5 years from now and 20 years from now.
6. $DRAM - memory exposure for samsung/sk hynix
7. $AVGO - hyperscalers dont like nvidia gpu tax
8. $AMZN - nobody can compete against the overnight shipping of toilet paper. robotics will lower opex over time
9. $ARM - AGI CPUs scale revenue quite a bit over the next decade
10. $TSEM - you're going to need a foundry for light based stuff
11. $IBIT - bitcoin, we all know by now
12. $NBIS - i think it's the next AWS. Also they do self-driving cars with uber, own scaling DB companies, data labeling. It's almost like a mini Google.
13. $GOOGL - youtube is not going away, gemini is great. they're vertically integrated with TPUs and fund buildout with operating income so i like it.
14. $AMKR - super facilities coming online in late 2027-2028. benefits from made in america
15. $HOOD - i dont like short term, but long term i'm a fan of Robinhood since they captured retail + have more products like banking, etc that they're scaling up. product innovation is wild.
16. $CRCL - I happen to really like stablecoins and see them as the future for both payments/holding (depends on clarity act)
17. $META - people aren't going to stop using instagram or whatsapp, or others anytime soon.
18. $LITE - $GOOGL TPU exposure decently high part of BOM. As long as Google's AI program keeps running I think $LITE will do well.
19. $LPTH - Germanium and China export controls will always be an issue so US made engineered alternatives will always be important
20. $FN - Someone needs to assemble optical stuff
21. $JBL - same as above, but added with ip from Intel's SiPh acqusition so might end up like innolight?
22. $MP - American rare earths program is extremely important, similar to $INTC national security risks
23. $HIMS - Okay here me out they just acquired a ton of companies, and at $19 they have global DTC channel. short sellers really hate this company, but I think it's actually promising as a contrarian long
24. $SMTC - LRO/LPO transition
25. $POWL - US alternative to hammond for switchgear DC type bottleneck
26. $VPG - Humanoids will be a thing down the road maybe 2027-2028, this makes the sensors.
27. $MOG.A - Feels like i see them everywhere in robotics, to spacex supply chains
28. $MSFT - At $375, one day we'll look back and see this as a buying opportunity.
29. $CVX - oil might crash after war but these oil companies are going to be extremely important, especially when Venezulea is a goldmine.
30. $XLU - i think rate cuts might be back online, we need power/grid for AI so these names will always be improtant from $CEG to $NEE
Just throwing out other thoughts aside from $AAOI and $AEHR.
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.
Where Has All Of The Liquidity Gone?
Everyone keeps asking why crypto feels dead.
I don’t think crypto is dead.
I think crypto is being diluted by the same entities who once called it home.
For years, crypto was one of the only places on earth where you could find 24/7 markets, insane leverage, endless volatility, and a permissionless casino where anyone with enough courage or stupidity could sit down at a table.
That was the product.
Not decentralization, vibes, whitepapers, or "the future of finance"
The product was opportunity.
But now crypto no longer has a monopoly on that feeling.
Prediction markets are exploding because they offer traders something crypto used to offer better than anyone else: the ability to bet on almost anything, instantly.
Politics.
Sports.
Weather.
Economic data.
Elections.
Pop culture.
Geopolitics.
Whatever the internet is arguing about that day.
That liquidity used to rotate into coins.
Now some of it rotates into “Will this happen by Friday?”
And once someone gets addicted to trading probability itself, a random mid-cap crypto chart starts to look a lot less special. Why ape another recycled L1 narrative when you can trade the actual event everyone is talking about?
Then you have the TradFi invasion of crypto-style perps.
This is the part I think people are still underestimating.
Until recently, no person could wake up at 2AM and use 50x leverage to long or short the S&P 500.
Now that world is here.
The same mechanics that made crypto perps so addictive are being applied to the largest, most liquid, most culturally relevant markets on earth.
Stocks. Indices. Commodities.
Maybe eventually everything.
That changes the game.
Right this very second on Hyperliquid alone there's over 2.6 Billion in Open Interest on all things Tradfi.
That is liquidity that could have been chasing BTC, SOL, ETH, privacy coins, AI coins, or whatever other narrative CT wanted to pretend was inevitable this week.
Instead, it is sitting in a leveraged TradFi market using crypto rails.
And it probably is not going away.
That is the unfortunate reality.
Some of this is not cyclical.
Some of this is permanent.
Prediction markets are not a fad.
Tokenized equities are not a fad.
24/7 TradFi perps are not a fad.
The ability to trade everything, everywhere, all the time is not a fad.
It is the natural evolution of markets.
Crypto gave the world the architecture.
Now the world is plugging other assets into it.
That means crypto assets are competing for attention against a much larger universe than they were before.
The total crypto market cap is no longer just competing with itself.
It is competing with the stock market.
And the stock market is enormous.
Once you let people trade pieces of a $ 60T+ U.S. equity market through crypto-style infrastructure, you have massively expanded the surface area for speculation.
That sounds bullish for rails.
It is not bullish for most tokens.
There is a difference.
A perp DEX doing billions in S&P 500 volume may be great for the exchange.
It does not mean your favorite altcoin will attract the liquidity it used to.
This is the liquidity problem.
Crypto used to be the casino.
Now crypto is becoming the casino building, and no longer the game itself.
And the games on that casino floor are multiplying.
So no, crypto is not dead.
But the old model is dying.
The days where liquidity had nowhere else to go except BTC, ETH, SOL, and whatever narrative CT was farming are fading.
The pie is getting bigger, but the number of slices is growing even faster.
That means weaker tokens bleed harder.
It is liquidity dilution.
The casino expanded.
The question is whether your token is still one of the main tables or just another dusty slot machine sitting in the corner.
🫡 From the depths —
The White Whale 🐋