Storage/memory companies today reminds me of utility companies like $VST a year ago: a sector that was historically assigned low multiples, then reshaped by a “big bang” demand shock. Pre–big bang investors that refuse to adapt to the new reality found it difficult to value these stocks accurately in the new environment. If you were stuck in that pre–big bang mindset, you would have blown up multiple times shorting $VST over the past two years.

Utilities traditionally traded at ~8–10x multiples prior to AI, constrained by capex cycles, low structural growth, and heavy regulation. They were viewed as stable, income-like vehicles. The datacenter buildout fundamentally changed this dynamic, with relentless demand for power and energy resetting investor expectations.

My point is not that multiples will never revert (they likely will once the buildout normalizes), but more that we should be conscious on whether historical frameworks remain fit to evaluate both the present and the future.

And just like that, in the span of 2 short weeks, $RDDT DAU growth concerns are back.

$INTC +7% on news of talks to add AMD as a foundry customer.

What’s a billion $ to AMD? So far we’ve gotten the news order quite right with the exception of $TSMC: NVDA > AAPL > AMD. Let’s have a little fun, I think next one will be $TSLA, or $AVGO for its custom silicon. LBT’s assembling the avengers!

Seems like the market woke up to the storage names at just about the same time as us. Both names, alongside other HDD names, are +6% to 9% yesterday. Likely driven by rise of Sora in the app store. I am a firm believer in "invest then investigate" philosophy, as it is often too late to investigate then invest in today's market. We retail are also at the bottom of the info chain. However will spend the remaining part of this week diving deeper into this sector.

Tbh, while we might not be THAT early in the storage trend anymore — many of these storage cos are already the top yearly performers of S&P500 with YTD being 150%++, will play by ear and evaluate this trade based on how the AI inference trend develops going forward. Besides, I thought I was late to $VST in 2024 buying it at $80+ after it has already ran 120% in 1H24. Today it's $200. So who really knows?

$SDNK $MU $WDC $STX

Asian memory giants are up huge today. $000660.KR & $005930.KR +10% and +4% respectively. $285A.JT, $SNDK JV partner, +14%.

SK Hynix to expand DRAM capacity to 620k wafers in 2026 in response to overwhelming HBM demand.

Also realised that I spelt $SNDK wrongly as $SDNK. Anyway, ticker mentioned above refers to SanDisk.

$INTC price action is interesting.. Spiking on high volume AH yesterday and in the overnight market today, on no news.

Potential front-running? Or could just a degen full-porting in.

Exited $CORZ @ ~$18 for +9% gain

Exited $NBIS @ ~$112 for +10% gain

Back in a fresh $3350.JT long @ $602.2 Yen

Newly elected JP PM seems a massive fiscal dove. Additionally Gold has been breaking ATHs after ATHs, BTC is also starting to as well — a sign of the times we’re in.

Metaplanet is 61% off from where we exited for a ~2x gain; R/R seems decent at these levels.

$AMD +23% on deal with OpenAI

- OpenAI to deploy 6 GW of AMD
- Starts with 1 GW MI450+ from H2 2026
- OpenAI to invest in AMD up to 160m new shares (10% dilution)

6GW is insane scale — eqv to hundreds of thousands of chips. AMD probably hasn’t pre-booked this capacity at $TSM given the current backlog..

Hence, I’m assigning a higher probability to the rumor of AMD fabricating at $INTC being true.

If the 50/50 semiconductor tariff rule is indeed introduced by Trump, napkin maths would mean that 3GW of chips will have to be produced in the U.S. (or face exorbitant tariffs).

Virtually impossible to do this without engaging IFS $INTC.

Scaled into a small/mid-sized long on $AMD @ $219.64; will wait for cash open to decide whether to add or wait for a bigger dip.

This deal is huge and opens up doors in the future by validating AMD’s chips.

Closed $AMD @ $211 for -4%. Decided to be exposed from another angle

Long $MRVL and $ALAB @ $87.4 & $223.08

Think we should not view $AMD news as a standalone, but as a gradual shift towards alternative GPUs/custom silicon.

Custom silicon adoption & disaggregated SoCs, alongside an acceleration in AI inference workloads which require low latency and high throughput, all serve as tailwinds for the connectivity layer (switches, retimers, smart fabrics, protocol controllers etc). Interconnect may become a critical bottleneck as these AI clusters get larger, more heterogeneous and complicated, and further away from each other.

Markets sold off yesterday from The Information’s report that $ORCL has lost $100mn from rental of $NVDA’s Blackwell chips, thus casting doubts on the ROI of AI capex.

My view is it’s not that shocking that GM% is low during the initial ramp period of filling up the data centres and securing customers. One way to explain this is timing gaps in revenue recognition, another part is that DCs have very high fixed costs, and lower utilisation (which will increase as the DC ramps) = lower margins.

Not sure on the intent of the report but it seems to have conveniently omitted crucial aspects of the business model in exchange for a viral headline.

we’re so back

Memory players got a few sell-side upgrades this week; bears being converted slowly.

I think market is still undervaluing how important memory/storage will be, especially when considering how much of a supply glut there is for HBM and NAND (partly because most capacity got diverted to building HBM).

$SNDK $MU

Nice moves from these two companies on the first day of China’s open after Golden Week. $600089 is up 21% since entry, while $600869 is up 3%.

While the idea of gaining exposure to power grid expansion isn’t new (see the 1-year performance of U.S. power stocks), we are specifically choosing to bet on China’s power grid expansion because I believe it’s one of the edges — and potential ways — that China can catch up to the U.S. in terms of compute power. If you notice, there has been a gradual separation of AI supply chains between the Eastern and Western hemispheres. Nvidia’s AI chip exports to China has been subjected to heavy scrutiny from the Trump administration, while China itself has “banned” its corporations from buying Nvidia chips.

Why did China do that, despite knowing that its chips are currently far behind U.S.-designed ones? Obviously, there are national security and strategic reasons at play (some say it’s also for negotiation leverage). But are they really going to willingly fall behind in the AI race just to promote self-reliance? I don’t think so. I believe they’re going to try and brute-force compute power.

China’s industrial power rates are roughly 2–3× cheaper than that in the U.S. That means even if their domestic chips have poorer performance per watt (PPW), considering cheaper power and total cost of ownership (TCO), they may actually not be that far behind the U.S. in terms of compute power. Under this theory, power becomes the key factor until their domestic chips achieve near parity PPW. Power must hence remain abundant, cheap, and widely accessible.

Cut this @ $584 for -3%

Think I’m better off just buying spot $BTC rather than DATs tbh for exposure to loose fiscal policies.

Fully exited $APLD @ $28.03, +87% from entry

Made enough on the name, and want to allocate more to other areas of the portfolio. Also don't want to take the print risk on a small cap after such a rally.

Will see post-earnings reaction to determine if I re-enter.

Somewhere in the recent months, Sama has developed an unwavering conviction in the capabilities of future models and the economic value they’ll create.

Hence, they’re now scaling the infras ahead of time to support that model — the infras decision is not based on today’s model requirements, but that of tomorrow’s model.

All these headlines with mind-blowing numbers being thrown around every few days. Everyone was laughing last year when Sama was trying to raise a trillion dollars. Now, it’s like just a trillion.. really..?

At the scale that OpenAI plans to build at:
1) they’re going to force all of the tech giants into an AI race — if AGI really is the end-all be-all, it probably at best would be a duopoly. Who will be the 2 players?

2) they won’t just use some suppliers within an industry, rather they’ll need WHOLE industries to support their infras buildout. Can you imagine several industries running at full capacity for extended years? You can already see it happening in power, memory, and fabs.

It’s a career-defining move; even if capital allocators think that AI is a bubble that will one day burst, can they really afford to stay sidelined now?

Would highly recommend watching the full video

https://x.com/a16z/status/1975976064464892120?s=46