Serenity @aleabitoreddit

$NBIS signs $1B+ compute agreement with Reflection AI, for GB300 access through 2029. Reflection also signed a multi-billion dollar agreement with $SPCX earlier. Interesting to say the least, seeing Nebius drop -5% off the news today. Also... counterparty to get this done kinda reminds me of OpenAI, where they might not have the funds to actually execute on these LTAs yet compared to $META or $MSFT. But generally positive long term developments, customer diversification was one of the core strengths of Nebius.

Feels like algos often miss $SIVE, after slight $LITE / optical sector recovery after CPI print. Especially bc it's trading on some random Swedish exchange, but catches up on random days. That being said it's definitely on institutional radar, especially since MS put it next to $LITE and $COHR as the three leading CPO laser companies yesterday. Just waiting for things to play out, stocks don't move in a straight line up every day.

@cragents Don't really have any strong opinion on $IBM since don't know enough about all their revenue streams. Was surprising to say the least seeing it drop 24.3% in a day tho after ER.

Two different capacity expansion announcements today across $TSEM and $AAOI. Tower Semi, supported by the Japanese government, announced expansion of its 300mm Silicon Photonics (SiPho), Silicon Germanium (SiGe), and advanced packaging capabilities. Targeting $1.2B net profit, and $3.6B revenue in 2028 (with a ~$28B MC, that's ~23.3 2028 forward p/e). AAOI announced the commencement of its buildout, roughly 400,000 square feet of manufacturing to make 800g/1.6T production go brrr. The overall expansion is also supported by the local city government in Texas. (they also $20.85M worth of subsidies from the State earlier). This one isn't exactly as materially new as Tower, since AAOI originally announced these plans before. Just commencement of it. Regardless, glad to see both of these companies in their Anime training arc phase as they power up.

So Jensen himself went out to do damage control with $NVDA delays reports apparently: 1. Jensen Huang said no delays: - 800V and rack-to-rack optical interconnects is progressing fully in line with the original plan with no material delay. - Debunked the rumor that the next-generation flagship, Rubin Ultra, would be delayed until 2028 and said it would be on track to ship next year - Rack system optimizations, like replacing Kyber with a new design are architectural optimizations, not impacting delivery timelines. 2. On ASIC competition: no loss of market share. - Talked about how a leading frontier lab that previously relied heavily on internal ASICs has shifted nearly 50% of its compute load to Nvidia 3. On over-reliance on hyperscalers. - AI frontier labs currently contributing to ~20% of demand. - Traditional cloud providers, Nvidia provides Vera CPUs and high-speed networking - Sovereign AI

TLDR of Innolight investor relations takeaways: 1. "Overall, 1.6T market demand has not contracted; instead, 800G demand has increased significantly compared with previous expectations" Prob most important takeaway as a whole was 800G demand revision (also longer tail demand). Which is a bullish read through on US transceiver makers like $AAOI, $COHR, $LITE. Lot of new customers like neoclouds, AI model companies, contributing to overall demand rather than just hyperscalers, diversification always a bonus. 2. Innolight said the shortage covers the module supply chain broadly including: - Optical chips. - Electrical chips. - PCBs. - Other module materials From last ER, I think they singled out EMLs and CW optical chips as the most constrained. So Innolight's bottleneck list mention broadened since then. They expect some of the component availability to improve gradually from the second half of 2026 through the first half of 2027. Think a lot of this is already known from earlier though. But just some confirmation + easing timelines (EML is extremely bottlenecked, same with CW, this is probably talking about other components). 3. Innolight said module-production equipment is not the constraint. Equipment lead times remain relatively short. So this isn't really a bottleneck compared to others. 4. The overall proportion of silicon photonics continues to trend upward. Last year it was mainly 800G. This year, some 800G customers are further increasing their silicon-photonics proportion. 1.6T also added some new customers Positive for SiPH penetration eg. $SIVE / $JBL, since this shifts away from EML toward CW. Basically: main surprising takeaway is just 800g demand go brrr. Apart from that just reaffirming bottlenecks/timelines/market speculation.

@bottleneckceo 10 years from now, the flying spaghetti monster will descend from the heavens and bless every $INTC holder with a meatball. Can someone prove me wrong?

$AAOI mainly gets revenue from pluggable, they’re developing/sampling related lasers but have no CPO design wins. Others like $MTSI look like they fell off the map for some reason with cpo lasers. CEO says “TBD” with commercial timing and it’s in reliability work right now. And fits the OSINT research done with Ayar removing Macom from their website. So would agree with MS that $SIVE, $LITE, $COHR imo are the three leaders to focus on for lasers.

Morgan Stanley note on CPO today. Key participants include: - $SIVE, $COHR, and $LITE in laser supply - Broadcom and Nvidia in switch platforms - Lightmatter, Ayar Labs, Marvell/Celestial, and POET in optical engines and photonics, - $TSM, $GFS, and $TSEM in silicon photonics foundry capacity I’ve covered all of these before, like Tower Semi. But I’m especially happy that Morgan Stanley validated my research that $SIVE is one of the critical global players in CPO. A small $1.5B laser company next to your two leading $60B+ companies… If you also synthesize Rosenblatt Securities recent note that China laser suppliers were quite far from having CPO lasers. This kinda magnifies importance of the three Western leaders of that laser chokepoint.

Just a semi recap TLDR: - $GLW glass bridge per Morgan Stanley has potential, but hard to displace FAU (like FOCI) in short term - $SPCX Starlink Gen 3 is scaling to 100,000 units (10x prev gen) creating possible capacity constraints for suppliers of switches to CCL. - PCB supply shortages are projected to persist until 2028, and component shortages/price hikes are already forcing ODMs like Inventec to issue conservative H2 shipment - DeepSeek and Zhipu are developing custom ASICs to bypass $NVDA (kinda expected by now). - Anthropic has achieved a $30B ARR and is projected to hit >$1B in Q3 profit. Turns out these frontier labs are more profitable than people think. - US admin pressured $AAPL to source from $INTC, in exchange for tariff exception. Kinda pressuring alignment away from TSM. - $TSM plans a 30x expansion of its Photonic Integrated Circuit (PIC) capacity by 2028, growing from 500 to 25,000 wafers per month - Hanmi Semiconductor is entering the CoWoS packaging equipment market - $NVDA and NTT hosting a conference July 24th to discuss CPO strategies. - 5x general NAND flash price hike this year, market size $489B by next year triggered by RAG/inference. Samsung and SK Hynix make emergency fab investments, NAND equipment suppliers go brrrr. - Gas turbine bottleneck, 40% supply gap accompanied by staggering 5-year delivery cycles (mega-fabs need them for mass production). - AI probe card assembly has hit a severe bottleneck apparently. Which is attempted to by solved with things like Innovation Service's machines. - Nanya, 79.5% gross margins reported, memory go brr. 4x capex for capacity/advanced packaging. - CXMT's STAR Market IPO on July 16, so should bring a lot of attention to memory players in that supply chain. - KYEC $1.4B investment into US for $TSM Arizona output test facilities. Lot of these players like $AMKR and others should go brr in 2028. - $INTC CEO warned last month that helium could hinder the manufacturing costs and delivery times of AI chips - 3D NAND word lines are shifting from Tungsten to Molybdenum starting at the 375-layer node - SambaNova secured JPM for AI inference and raised $1B at an $11B valuation. - HBM prices projections to double in 2027 as $NVDA Rubin platform drives demand. - $MU provides $500 million in funding to support GlobalWafers' US manufacturing capacity - $META 'Iris' will enter mass production in September via $AVGO and TSMC and Meta aims to double computing power to 14GW by 2027. - Largan Precision has secured its first CPO FAU order, mass production slated for middle of next year (kinda indication around Foci and others). - Samsung and SK Hynix have delayed the implementation of hybrid bonding packaging technology for HBM4 apparently - Memory costs (DRAM/NAND) have reached 60% of the BOM for sub-$400 smartphones, causing a severe volume contraction. - SK Hynix successfully rasied $26.5 billion through a Nasdaq ADR - $TSLA issued procurement guidelines requiring suppliers to reach weekly production of 1,000 units by September and double to 2,000-2,500 by year end for its 3rd gen Optimus robot. Apparently Alliance Technology and A-Link may be in this supply chain harmonic reducers and vision lenses? Kinda go through all this stuff every day, but don't wanna be a news reporter so just consolidated stuff I found interesting.

@softmaxedx My friend at $AMD tripped on a rock and had to spend a few hours at home. So we’ll likely see a major delay at AMD’s entire GPU program.

So this was cost of the final sale price, not BOM cost. They were also using $134K at ASP, not the volume ramped <$20k costs. As seen with $VPG that $750/sensor goes down to $150 at mass production. So lot of math changes, I didn’t find the cost structure particularly helpful here.

Apparently there’s a new popular trend to bearpost trillion dollar companies. Like $NVDA or $TSM. By finding isolating technical details, then blowing it out of proportions by claiming their whole program is delayed. -> if the company doesn’t respond, stock prices/sentiment are damaged. -> if the company issues a response, they can’t go into detail since supply chains are confidential… but people still doubt them -> Poster gain more impressions, then does it again with more views the next time. Don’t quite think this is very healthy, with more folks copying that playbook. Especially around incentive structures.

So there's a IBK Research report on Boston Dynamics value chains from last month. Just a summary: IBK maps these companies to Atlas as suppliers: - Hwashin (010690) / body, arms, legs - LG Energy (373220) / battery - Hyundai Autoever (307950) / integration - Hyundai Mobis (012330) / actuators As for humanoid volume ramps: They're modeling for, 11.29K in 2028, 20k 2029, 30k in 2030... 40k in 2031, and 50k in 2032. Not quite sure why IBK and other institutions are a fan of linearly modeling S-curve volume ramps... Like adding +10K per year, don't quite think it's volume ramp is going to work like that... if I had to guess it would look more like: - 15-20k 2028 - 40k-70k 2029 - 90k-140k for 2030 Since Boston Dynamics is projecting 30k capacity by 2028 (I'm sure they'd aim to get more online by 2029-2030), as China collectively is already doing 100k EOY in 2026. In terms of competitive landscape they name: - $TSLA, Figure, Apptronik, $CCXI (Agility), as US players. Then Boston Dynamics (Korea parent owned now) - Unitree, Fourier, AGibot, UBtech, $XPEV as the Chinese leaders. - Neura, Pal Robotics, Wandercraft, Oversonic, as the EU leaders. They also did quite a lot of valuation modeling around Hyundai Mobis/Hyundai Autoever/Glovis. Regarding the BD economic ownership from 27.9% from Hyundai Motor, 11.3% from Mobis, and 11.3% from Glovis. So at least institution are valuing humanoid segments inside companies lot more now. Then from report assumptions: - 31 actuators per Atlas - $1K per actuator in 2028 - $134K Atlas ASP, Which implies actuator cost of final selling price is roughly 23–28%. Probably the more interesting statement was IBK stated that actuator capacity is biggest signal for volume ramp. eg. every 310,000 units of actuator capacity supports 10,000 more robots. So tracking actuator outputs, yields, ASP is a cleaner read on 2028-2030 ramp. I didn't have much personal takeaways, but hopefully others find it interesting, maybe around Hwashin as a core supplier or around actuator capacity as an indicator.

@ANMcapital APR might be priced in. But maybe salmon DNA processing might be a new bottleneck from the amount women use for face lotion...

Apparently, Korean Beauty was where all the alpha is. APR (278470.KS) is up 529% over the past 2Y, wildly outperforming both $NVDA and $INTC. Every female I know talks about their "Medicube" stick, then buying products... where you put a whole salmon's family tree on your face for better skin. The world's female population creates a bigger structural demand than hyperscalers for memory or lasers? Should have known...

He wouldn't have build a $1T company without pulling off all those moves. - Gets funding from Elon -> Pisses off $TSLA going independent - Gets funding from $MSFT -> Pisses of Microsoft by diluting them with other hyperscaler funding - Gets funding from $NVDA -> Builds their competing chip and funds Cerebras competitors for inference - Works with $AAPL on Apple Intelligence? -> Create their competing devices. - Potential lack of funding? -> Sign a lot of LTAs so the entire industry lives or dies off OpenAI succeeding. Whatever he's doing is working lol.

Contrarian take, but Sam Altman / OpenAI is doing something right if he's pissing off every Mag7 like $AAPL. By building their own ecosystem instead of being sucked into another. It's been awhile since $GOOGL, Apple, Microsoft, and others had some genuine disruptors.

@siflower It’s architecture neutral. UHP output can be achieved with a single cw laser or multi emitter cw dfb array which is what $SIVE is doing for CPO. Since the latter aggregate output is comparable.

Regarding $AMZN RNG + OpenAI’s MRC and VCSELs. In what appears to be an indirect response on B. Riley's $AAOI sell report regarding optimizations that "flattens networks and cuts transceiver TAM 40-50%". Rosenblatt TLDR: They've already modeled for this, even though each XPU may use fewer transceivers. The number of XPUs is growing so quickly that total optical demand should still rise. On lasers architectures for CPO: VCSELs are useful as a credible bridge for NPO/short reach. Ideal architecture though for CPO is UHP CW over other lasers, and cites Broadcom for that statements. Which happens to supports my core $SIVE thesis. I feel like Rosenblatt and I share the same views on a lot of things, I like the way they roll.

Rosenblatt on recent optical sector weakness from $AAOI to $LITE: "Stocks in the Optical sector have traded poorly for the last 1-2 months" due to CPO delay reports and China capacity scares. "We think short sellers... do not actually strongly believe in the thesis." Multiple short sellers told them they will likely close their positions... late July and early August. Further, they say they plan to buy Optical stocks in 2027 for the scale up CPO opportunity. Hilarious report on laser weakness, read is very positive for $SIVEF, $COHR, and others moving forward. I've been long on CPO sector, but seems like institutions want entry points, just a bit later on.

@yuntungshieh Hmm, maybe the influx of US buying pressure might have have a structural impact though? But I'm sure that's probably the case with a premium as seen with $TSM.

@2147gp Yep I'm very excited for the $SIVE US listing. Majority of people can't access it on small Swedish exchanges.

Sk Hynix is now trading under $SKHYV! It's now up an insane 16%. I wonder how Sk Hynix over in Korea is going to react on Monday. https://t.co/Mmqdu0poVY https://t.co/6i8x9JafGy

Why do I have this weird feeling the main reason retail is excited SK Hynix NASDAQ listing. Is because they can do degen option calls instead of individual stock purchases.