Palantir claims its tech is winning the war in Ukraine, so why is $PLTR stock cratering? Down -38% from ATH. Because CEO Alex Karp is terrified. His latest rant on AI pricing completely exposes the legacy software trap. Here’s my thesis.
1. Karp says if software makes you $1B, the vendor deserves a 30% cut. Really? Then why doesn't Microsoft tax every dollar made on Excel? Flat fees are infrastructure. Tech doesn't get a silent tax on your alpha.
2. He calls pay-per-token models a "wealth tax." Total lie. Token pricing is utility pricing—like an electric bill, you only pay for what you use.
3. You know what a real wealth tax looks like? Palantir trapping enterprises in multi-million dollar contracts upfront before proving a single dollar of ROI.
Karp isn't mad that tokens "don't add value." He’s panicked because pay-as-you-go AI lets businesses start small, scale fast, and completely bypass predatory enterprise traps.
$SNDK +10.9%, $MU +0.8%. Laggard? Starting to think the market still favors fabless (like $AMD). But personally, I think the market doesn't realize that owning fab output right now is like owning a gold mine. Paradigm shift. It’s the ultimate moat for the next 5-7 years.
Based on SemiLLM’s estimates, $MU Micron’s projected operating income of approximately $42B would surpass the quarterly earnings of traditional M7 heavyweights such as $AAPL ($27.0B), $AMZN ($22.0B), and $META (~$22.0B), while approaching the profitability of cloud hyperscalers like $MSFT and $GOOG.
This earnings inflection is driving a structural re-rating. With HBM supply remaining extremely tight and pricing largely locked in, Micron has already crossed the $1 trillion market cap milestone. @SemiLLM projects that the stock still has more than 100% upside, as the market increasingly values Micron as a critical, high-margin AI infrastructure company rather than a traditional cyclical memory maker.
Will the AI/Storage hype last until the end of this year?As of June 2026, AI-driven storage demand (including data centers, AI-powered storage, and High Bandwidth Memory/NAND flash) remains on a strong upward trajectory. Forecasts from SemiLLM indicate that this growth will continue until the end of the year and beyond, rather than suffering a short-term bubble burst.
Specifically, looking at the global data storage market:
2026 Market Size: ~ $298.5 billion
2034 Market Size: Nearly $1 trillion
Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR): 16.1%
"Humanoid robots require 10 times the memory capacity of a standard L2+ autonomous vehicle; the storage industry is entering a demand cycle that will last for decades."
— Sanjay Mehrotra, CEO of Micron