@Itachidata I've had better days, having constant headaches which is a bit rough. I did have some fun channel checks though recently.
Some guy I met by the bathroom yesterday claimed to be $SPCX Cursor CEO. I'm not good with faces so idk if he was lying or not.
Also had some discussions about beamformer technology with an industry executive, it's apparently more important than I gave it credit for.
Everyone is asking "Where is Serenity" or "Who is Serenity". But nobody is asking...
"How is Serenity"?
I do read things from $AMD $8.2B acquisition of World Labs... but feeling pretty sick right now, so taking a little break.
I remember saying physical AI + world models would major shift way back when, so maybe I should have invested in private companies at the time...
Apart from that... other interesting news:
- Some channel checks from ECOC was that $NVDA apparently secured 50% of $LITE Greensboro UHP laser capacity? And possibly contracts that allow them to secure the remaining capacity per Barclays.
That's $5B in lasers (annual capacity)... so it's hilarious to see Nvidia go out and bottleneck the rest of the industry by doing this. But this just puts more strategic value on other merchant laser suppliers + more visibility for Lumentum.
It's kinda game theory over allocation, since if you secure all the HBM, lasers, and others it inadvertently makes it much harder for competitors to scale their programs.
- Then there's your massive $150B Nvidia authorized buybacks (just look at $AAPL when they did buybacks..) They're printing too much.
- What's also interesting is that Samsung Electro-Mechanics is expanding their FC-BGA substrate capacity today... but customers are the one funding this.
I also remembered $MRVL in SEC filings cited large body substrates as one of the core bottlenecks of their program (alongside $TSM sole source dependencies). So they also went out and did some other expansion agreements with related companies like AT&S recently.
- OpenAI delaying Astra-6.1 October release over safety concerns just now. Nvidia also happened to launch an AI safety platform.
I don't think this is meaningfully bearish that the models are just getting 2 good.
For losers catching up,
Super interested into consumer products, AEO/ANF/ULTA
Also watching KRE/IWM/RKT closely
This requires long end yield to crash first.
Breadth is at extremely level, number of 52 weeks low is more than 52 weeks high. Then two possible scenarios:
1. Breadth greatly recover and losers catch up the upside.
2. Or a sharp selloff of recent winners to catch up the downside.
Anyway I chose to sell into strength today.
People keep asking why I won’t stop pounding the table on $ASX but haven't mentioned $AMKR.
Fair question. My baseline instinct starts with Taiwan’s engineering plumbing.
ASE ($ASX) and TSMC don’t just share geography; they share an engineering gene pool. People swap badges across both campuses, and the packaging handshake stretches back to 2002–03. When $TSM looks around to offload packaging overflow, ASE is always their first call.
To be fair, I’m not deeply familiar with $AMKR yet, but based on a quick look, here are three yellow flags Liwei spotted:
1.The AI exposure comes with a sizeable legacy business.
Communications was 42% of Q2 revenue; computing was 22%, including non-AI applications. And “82% advanced products” does not mean “82% AI.”
2.Why are their contracts taking so long to show up in earnings?
Amkor has a ten-year TSMC agreement and a $1.5 billion multiyear NVIDIA deal. I’m still not seeing a clear earnings contribution from these programs. What’s taking so long, and when does meaningful volume production begin?
3.Advanced lines are busy. Revenue guidance still disappointed.
Q3 revenue guidance came in roughly 5% below consensus despite strong AI packaging demand. Amkor is moving SiP production from Korea to Vietnam to free up capacity, but the transition disrupts output. Smartphone weakness adds to the drag. I want to see how quickly AI packaging growth can outweigh those problems.
Amkor specialists, feel free to correct me. Bring receipts. I’ll read them.
That said, the consensus in Taiwan is that 2027 will be a banner year for packaging. If $ASX takes off and I take profits, while$AMKR is still lying there like a dead fish, I might rotate some of those gains into it.
After all, with a strong enough tailwind, even pigs can fly. 🐷
Our CPU supercycle article, co-written by @Sirin and Liwei, is now live on X.
Think of it as a roadmap for how personal agents could spread, create incremental CPU demand, and turn that demand into revenue for $ARM, $AMD and $INTC through three very different business models.
The roadmap comes first. Trading ideas built on this framework will follow over the next few weeks. The agents may work around the clock; we still need coffee.
Thanks for supporting our work. A read, a share, or a thoughtful disagreement is always appreciated.
For those who need English version, it's live on Liwei’s Substack below:
https://t.co/P0DjW0CQ5T
Like Liwei and @sirin pointed out, the real commercial market isn’t benchmark-chasing models—it’s personal agents. And everyone is scrambling to build them for a reason.
Let’s be real: does talking to an AI with an IQ of 180 instead of 150 actually change your day-to-day life? Not at all. But having a few competent agents handling your daily grind? That’s life-changing.
Normal people aren't waking up trying to unravel the secrets of the universe. They just want their life admin sorted, emails dealt with, and boring chores taken off their plate.
Plus, an AI that runs your tedious errands doesn’t make you panic about "robots taking my job." It just makes daily life suck a little less.
Only tech nerds obsess over maxing out raw IQ.
$TSM’s CoWoS-L could help ease TPU v9’s substrate bottleneck
Commercial Times, citing a US brokerage, reports EMIB-T substrate constraints could limit $2454.TW’s 2028 TPU v9 shipments. Its three-million-chip scenario requires $INTC’s EMIB-T supply to support 2.5 million chips, up from roughly two million estimated, with $TSM’s CoWoS-L adding 500,000.
The CoWoS-L version reportedly requires three additional mask layers and a new tape-out. $GOOGL would reportedly pay the extra cost for dual sourcing. Reaching three million still depends on improved EMIB-T supply and successful CoWoS-L adoption. This remains an analyst scenario, not a confirmed shipment plan.
Sources
https://t.co/CSQjYYP77w
Taiwan small-cap season is warming up. 🇹🇼
Goldman’s Sept. 25 report shows foreigners bought a net $1.7bn of Taiwan cash equities that week, including $1.4bn in tech outside TSMC.
Thanks @ShanghaoJin validating my source!
That said everyone knows TSMC's packaging spillover goes to ASE ($ASX)—are you guys the only ones still out of the loop?
Nano imprint lithography aims to attack the main weakness of e-beam lithography which is low throughput. The required device pattern is written onto a mold using e-beam lithography. Then this mold is used to stamp the feature onto many wafers. This theoretically ensures a similar resolution to e-beam at significantly higher throughput. However, this process has its challenges such as the requirement for a clean surface to ensure no imperfections when stamping, ensuring perfect overlay between the existing wafer features and the mold, and the need for a flat wafer, since any bowing or major surface roughness deteriorates the pattern quality. Additionally, the gradual degradation of the mold pattern also affects the feature pattern that gets inscribed on the wafer across the mold lifetime is also a major concern. (3/3)
Currently, most photonic chip fabrication uses e-beam lithography. In this process, an electron beam manually scans the wafer to inscribe the individual chip features. Electron beam lithography allows high precision and allows for the flexibility to inscribe arbitrary patterns, at the cost of very low throughput since the ebeam needs to manually scan across the wafer unlike optical lithography which uses a mask. Since, PICs did not traditionally require manufacturing at high-volume, there wasn’t an immediate need to switch over to optical lithography (or nanoimprint lithography) since manufacturing a mask for a low volume chip is impractical. (2/3)
In Semicon Taiwan, EVG had described the use of Nano-Imprint Lithography (NIL) in the mass manufacture of Photonic Integrated Circuits and for laser manufacturing. NIL is especially useful to define periodic structures within a photonic chip such as grating couplers or microlens arrays for microemitter arrays and potentially for DFB laser gratings. (1/3)🧵
Apple paid $1B for Intel's modem unit and spent 6+ years building the C1 to cut its dependence on Qualcomm. Last week's agreement is a reminder that Apple still can't escape the $2.5B+ in patent royalties it pays Qualcomm every year just for the iPhone's right to work on cellular networks.
The most basic test SemiAnalysis applies to a GPU cluster health check is whether it could possibly work on paper. Several could not.
"We've been through a few of these clusters where there's no way it could possibly work. These are health checks so bad they're worse than no health checks, because they're actively interfering with jobs."
"On Amazon HyperPod Slurm, the first time we tested, there was a health check that needed the node to be healthy before it could run. It could only run once the node was back in the fleet, and it was needed to bring the node back into the fleet."
"There are probably five or ten examples of this throughout testing where the health check never had a chance. It makes you wonder whether these people are really putting it through the paces before they hand it off to customers."
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