$QCOM investor day delivered, and it validated the core of the thesis we laid out in our deep dive. Here is what they actually said.
The headline. Qualcomm raised its fiscal 2029 revenue target from $22 billion to roughly $40 billion. Eighteen months ago they guided FY29 to $22B. Now it is $40B, and the data center is the main driver of that jump.
They also guided to more than $18 in non-GAAP EPS by fiscal 2029, which is even higher than the $15.50 to $16 bridge most bulls were modeling.
The number that moved the stock. A data center revenue target of more than $15 billion by fiscal 2029, built from essentially zero today. The stock jumped over 10% after hours on it.
For context, BofA went into the day arguing that even $10 billion by 2028 was already priced in. Management just guided well above that bar.
The product reveals backed it up. The new Dragonfly C1000 CPU is a 250+ core chiplet design running at 5GHz with PCIe Gen7, CXL, and LPDDR memory.
That last part matters. It confirms the no HBM, LPDDR based architecture Qualcomm has been pitching as its cost and supply edge, sidestepping the expensive memory every other accelerator fights over.
And the marquee moment. Mark Zuckerberg confirmed $META entered a multi generational agreement to use Qualcomm’s CPUs.
A named hyperscaler committing across multiple generations is exactly the win the socket, hold it for years playbook that took Qualcomm into the car.
Here is the one thing they still did not do. They gave revenue and EPS targets, but they did not put a clean gross margin number on the data center business.
That was the single most important number in my deep dive, the quality of those data center dollars, and management still would not disclose it.
So the bull case on revenue got stronger while the one real question, whether the market keeps paying a premium multiple as the mix shifts, is still open.
Net read. The revenue story is now concrete, not a slide. $40 billion FY29, $15 billion of it data center, $18 plus EPS, and a multi generation Meta CPU deal.
The thesis is playing out. The margin question is the only thing left to answer, and that is what decides whether this re-rates or grinds.
Six months ago Qualcomm was a stock everyone had written off. A boring phone chip company you trade around the handset cycle and forget.
Today it is quietly shipping AI racks to a Saudi sovereign and building custom silicon for ByteDance, and almost nobody has repriced it.
$QCOM might be one of the most mispriced large caps in all of semis.
Underneath the phone chip label sits a patent toll booth running over 70% margins that collects a royalty on nearly every 5G device on earth.
The market prices it like it dies the day Apple ships its own modem. The contracts say something very different.
Then stack on a record auto quarter, a Saudi sovereign scaling toward 1.9GW, a $20 billion buyback, and a data center business the market is barely pricing in because six months ago it was just a slide.
I broke the whole thing down in my latest deep dive. Why the toll booth survives Apple, the one number management refuses to put on a slide, and what June 24 actually reveals. $QCOM
Full breakdown on my Substack, link in below and in bio.
Six months ago Qualcomm was a stock everyone had written off. A boring phone chip company you trade around the handset cycle and forget.
Today it is quietly shipping AI racks to a Saudi sovereign and building custom silicon for ByteDance, and almost nobody has repriced it.
$QCOM might be one of the most mispriced large caps in all of semis.
Underneath the phone chip label sits a patent toll booth running over 70% margins that collects a royalty on nearly every 5G device on earth.
The market prices it like it dies the day Apple ships its own modem. The contracts say something very different.
Then stack on a record auto quarter, a Saudi sovereign scaling toward 1.9GW, a $20 billion buyback, and a data center business the market is barely pricing in because six months ago it was just a slide.
I broke the whole thing down in my latest deep dive. Why the toll booth survives Apple, the one number management refuses to put on a slide, and what June 24 actually reveals. $QCOM
Full breakdown on my Substack, link in below and in bio.
$STM
STMicroelectronics is filed under "boring European auto chips."
Here's what's underneath:
The radio silicon inside roughly 9 of every 10 satellite-internet terminals on Earth comes from ST. That business is growing 36% a year, sits on a decade-long $SPCX partnership.
It's also quietly arming the humanoid wave. Every humanoid robot carries dozens of joints, and each one needs a chip to drive the motor, a sensor to position it, and a controller to run it. ST makes all three, and it's building the robotics platform alongside Nvidia. You don't have to guess which robot company wins. ST is inside all of them.
Its microcontrollers are the most-used on the planet, five years running, held in place by software millions of engineers refuse to migrate off. Rich margins, still growing double digits, barely moves with the cycle.
And the kicker, ST ran a 46% gross margin two years ago. It's at 34% today with its fabs half empty. Refill them and earnings don't recover, they multiply.
The AI-photonics story everyone's buying it for?
The weakest piece of the whole thing. The real value is buried in the segments nobody bothers to read.
We broke all of it down, the engines, the math, and where we think it lands, link below!
Almost nobody knows that $STM quietly controls over 90% of the radio chip market for satellite internet along with much more.
It is one of the most underpriced businesses hiding inside a company everyone writes off as a boring European chipmaker.
Here is what the market is missing.
The satellite chip business went from $175 million in 2021 to roughly $600 million in 2025. That is 36% compounded growth that has already happened, not a projection.
Behind it is a ten year co-design partnership with SpaceX that has put 7.5 billion chips into more than 10,000 Starlink satellites and millions of home terminals.
$STM earns tens of thousands of dollars per satellite against a pipeline of tens of thousands more to come.
And that is just one of four engines. STM is also the number one microcontroller maker in the world, the number one sensor maker after the NXP acquisition, and a fast ramping silicon photonics supplier with over $1 billion in data center orders already booked.
Amazon tied its own equity to a multi-year chip deal. NVIDIA is co-designing with them. SpaceX has built alongside them for a decade.
The story management is laying out is a path from roughly $12 billion in revenue at a 2% operating margin today to $20 billion at a 30% margin by the end of the decade. And the margin target is not a moonshot.
They already printed 46% back in 2023 with these exact factories. The idle capacity to do it again is sitting right there waiting to refill.
The market still prices $STM like a boring power chip cyclical. Underneath that label sit two near monopolies the stock pays nothing for. BofA just put the Street high target at $100 and Druckenmiller’s family office grew its stake over 200% last quarter.
The market is pricing the past. The opportunity is in the future, and it has not been paid for yet.
$STM
STMicroelectronics is filed under "boring European auto chips."
Here's what's underneath:
The radio silicon inside roughly 9 of every 10 satellite-internet terminals on Earth comes from ST. That business is growing 36% a year, sits on a decade-long $SPCX partnership.
It's also quietly arming the humanoid wave. Every humanoid robot carries dozens of joints, and each one needs a chip to drive the motor, a sensor to position it, and a controller to run it. ST makes all three, and it's building the robotics platform alongside Nvidia. You don't have to guess which robot company wins. ST is inside all of them.
Its microcontrollers are the most-used on the planet, five years running, held in place by software millions of engineers refuse to migrate off. Rich margins, still growing double digits, barely moves with the cycle.
And the kicker, ST ran a 46% gross margin two years ago. It's at 34% today with its fabs half empty. Refill them and earnings don't recover, they multiply.
The AI-photonics story everyone's buying it for?
The weakest piece of the whole thing. The real value is buried in the segments nobody bothers to read.
We broke all of it down, the engines, the math, and where we think it lands, link below!