Ramon Sanders

Product mindset | Networking focus. Not financial advice. Views are my own.

[Ramon Sanders @ramonsanders007]

https://t.co/qB16FKO0Us

[Ramon Sanders @ramonsanders007]

@ser_kingslayer_ @RihardJarc I think this is for trainium 3 though? Not sure about the attachment rate in the near term for fusion. Fusion in trainium 4, yes.

[TrendForce @trendforce]

What happens to #memory demand when AI shifts from training to #inference? KV cache offloading and agentic AI are two drivers worth watching. More: https://t.co/0sK7bdd8gb 🔗

#KVcache #AgenticAI

[Ramon Sanders @ramonsanders007]

@equityclimb1 Good catch! $AMKR earnings have some nice gems. I think they are one of the more AI pilled companies.

[Ramon Sanders @ramonsanders007]

$ALAB Scorpio X is the product ramp most investors are focused on right now, especially with Amazon. But I think $ALAB Leo CXL memory controllers could be the next product story that quickly follows in the memory tiering world.

[Ramon Sanders @ramonsanders007]

The $ALAB debate gets stuck in “copper vs optics.”

I think that framing is too simplistic.

Astera is not just a copper retimer story. It is a connectivity-content story as AI racks scale.

Management laid out the key point:

“When you go to optical, you have to have a minimum of two, because one converts electrical to optical near the switch, and another converts optical back to electrical near the XPU. So already you have double the attach. And the ASP of each one of these is an order of magnitude higher than what you would get for a retimer-class device.”

The product implication is optical engines / optical endpoints at both sides of the switch-to-XPU link.

Optics may not reduce Astera’s opportunity.

Optics may expand it.

$ALAB looks positioned well for the transition from copper → NPO → CPO.

[Ramon Sanders @ramonsanders007]

@gjain6ue @chamath He's implying they will be differentiated based on efficiency for each workload. The value will be the control plane/routing. This doesn't sound like a commodity analogy imo.

[Ramon Sanders @ramonsanders007]

@stockedgeN Good take! Thanks for the input. I'll need to read more on the $CRDO product roadmap. 📝

[Ramon Sanders @ramonsanders007]

@stockedgeN On the product level, it feels like $CRDO might need a few quarters to really get going again? Feels like $ALAB can really ride the Scorpio X switch ramp and maybe even Leo controllers next year. What do you think for $CRDO products in the near term?

[Ramon Sanders @ramonsanders007]

@vikramskr @AsteraLabs @iamfabian @jaygoldberg @bookwormengr So cool!

[Vikram Sekar @vikramskr]

Had a great chat at @AsteraLabs booth today! Jignesh explained so much to us. These other co-conspirators were great to hang with!

@iamfabian @jaygoldberg @bookwormengr

Cameraman is he who shall not be named. If you’re on X you know him.

[Ramon Sanders @ramonsanders007]

I don’t think $ALAB and $CRDO remain tightly correlated much longer.

The short-term AI infra narrative looks like large scale-up domains first.

That is what NVIDIA seems to be pushing with NVLink Fusion: rack-scale systems, custom XPUs, memory-semantic interconnect, and bigger accelerator domains.

Both can win, and I really like both companies.

But if the market is about to price “larger scale-up domains” before it prices generic optical bandwidth, $ALAB and $CRDO should not keep trading like the same basket.

[Ramon Sanders @ramonsanders007]

@stevehill1mil I just read a bit here and there. $ALAB was my high conviction play after reading about demands shifting to the fabric. Then I researched products aligned with this shift. That's how I got into buying individual stocks. I take this type of approach for buying singular stocks.

[Ramon Sanders @ramonsanders007]

Scorpio X is the most important part of the $ALAB story this year. So far, the ramp appears to be tracking well.

My view: Scorpio X is not just another switch. It is Astera’s bet that frontier inference moves into larger scale-up domains where compute, memory, and state need to behave like one coordinated system.

Here’s my video overview of the Scorpio X product. The audio kind of sucks, but this is just my first video 😅.

[Ramon Sanders @ramonsanders007]

https://t.co/o1TbXKJG4W

[Ben Pouladian @benitoz]

“CXL is the biggest change in AI serving since NVLink””

Maybe. But that is not why $ALAB crossed $300

I called CXL in January: helps at the margins

The re-rate is Scorpio

One part per accelerator became one fabric per pod

CXL is the headline

The fabric switch is the money

[LaurieWired @lauriewired]

astera is actually getting more into the fabric switching market. latency really starts to kill you for every hop thats added, so you want the most lanes possible in a single pcie switch.

every retimer adds like ~10ns, every switch adds 100-200ns. not super bad for gpus, but really bad for memory

[Semi Doped @semidoped]

Masterclass on IC Lithography

You can spend one hour and catch up on the entire arc of semi lithography.

We cover:

- Economics of modern lithography
- what is takes to build a leading-edge fab
- how we evolved from DUV to EUV
- fun stories from history along the way
- where we are going with xLight and Substrate

Check it out!

Chapters:
(00:00) The 13F panic, and today's topic
(02:23) Why the real story is economics, not physics
(06:18) Austin in the clean room: graphene and bunny suits
(10:06) Rock's Law and the $20 billion fab
(18:08) DUV, the Sharpie, and a history of light
(24:58) Multi-patterning, explained with a football field
(34:45) How EUV makes 13.5nm light from tin droplets
(41:14) High NA, anamorphic optics, and the half-field tax
(46:45) The startups rethinking lithography: xLight and Substrate

@austinsemis @vikramskr

https://t.co/Dd4NmLCR39

[Ramon Sanders @ramonsanders007]

https://t.co/o1TbXKJG4W

[Ramon Sanders @ramonsanders007]

@stevehill1mil Showing on my feed.

[Ramon Sanders @ramonsanders007]

@GavinSBaker Thanks for the value you've added! Always great insights.