Serenity

"Severe InP Shortage Triggers Largest Price Hike Ever" - $AXTI. Suppliers have bluntly stated that "even if you have the money, you still may not be able to get the material" (lol). - Industry sources revealed that InP substrate prices began rising in Q4 last year and was the fourth consecutive substrate price hike. - The latest Q4 hike is expected to be >10%, - Meanwhile, prices for epitaxial wafers made from those substrates have already been raised two times, and the market is moving toward a 3rd consecutive increase in Q4. (I also wrote a thesis on $IQE, which benefits here too). Article states VPEC, Landmark, IET benefits (Taiwan ce…

Stripe reportedly buys OpenRouter for $7 Billion. I think their orchestration is easy to replicate and switch from. And there's very little moat. But atm, OpenRouter has the userbase, valuable dataset, + momentum. What's your take... Yay or Nay for the payments firm? https://t.co/AqOlKlwCzc

I think @elonmusk said it best: “Robots don’t all need to be humanoid. But a general-purpose robot intended to replace human labor should fit the world humans already built. Roger, roger.” Personally, I expect $TSLA Optimus form factor to converge to the right image. https://t.co/il7tND3n59

I feel like AI investing is simpler than what people expect. Because $NVDA + Jensen literally tells everyone what's coming. But somehow. Almost every. single. time. Markets dismiss it until it actually happens? Be Nvidia in 2025: Buys up EML and laser capacity. Markets dismissing it: "Photonics is a bubble and like quantum! ____ company is a scam with shady management" 1 year later: $LITE +678%, $AAOI +475.12%, $COHR +260.7%, $AXTI +3,843.9%. _ Nvidia in 2026: Buys up CW/EML capacity with LTAs. 800V shift. Extraordinary explicit about CPO shift. States Physical AI as the next theme. Markets now: "CW players are meme stocks! 800v, CPO…

Just some TLDRs of stuff I found interesting: - $SNDK 80% adjusted gross margins projections through 2030, ~75% operating margins and ~50% adjusted FCF margins from investor day. LTAs already 2/3rd of 2028 output. Minimum contracted revenue reaches $93B (MC is currently ~$239B)... Hard to be a cyclical stock when your revenue/targets are expected to continue 4Y later into 2030. - $CRWV signs contracts for 6Y old $NVDA A100 GPUs through 2029. For Neoclouds like Nebius/Iren, this is positive, since it's a counterargument for eg. Burry depreciation short thesis - conventional DRAM gross margins eg. Micron is estimated to reach an unpreceden…

说我归零的传闻未免也太夸张了吧 哈哈 经历了7月份AI板块的崩盘后，我的YTD收益依然还有 +2,411.84% https://t.co/m49XcPRgC3

US Government urges $AAPL not to buy Chinese memory chips. $MU, $SKHY, and Samsung are happy to hear this... Hilariously enough, CXMT/YMTC is price hiking too, so it's not exactly "cheap Chinese memory that floods the market". Apple once upon a time actually had extreme supplier leverage before the AI boom.

The $SHKY, Samsung, $SNDK, $MU memory bottleneck never changed anon https://t.co/6Xyih3pM9D

Donald Trump signs a proclamation to strengthen US supply chains for drones. Benefiting U.S. drone component suppliers like $UMAC to UAS manufacturers like $ONDS + $RCAT. TLDR, 100% tariffs on: - UAS docking stations + certain critical components - certain parts for >25 kg drones - Drones >25 kg 25% tariffs on: - broader components UAS = Unmanned Aircraft System (don't have any positions in any above)

Feels like glass substrate timelines got pushed back at least another quarter. - "Samsung Electro-Mechanics Delays Semiconductor Glass Substrate Investment" due to a bottleneck in customer reliability evaluations of prototypes. At its recent second-quarter earnings presentation, less than a month later, the company revised the start of operations to 2028. - "SKC Reportedly Pushes Glass Substrate Mass Production to 2027, Targets Final Validation by Year-end" (Trendforce), earlier last month. TLDR: - SKC Absolics H2 2026 -> H1 2027 - Samsung H2 2027 -> H1 2028 Not everything is always good news with timeline shifts, but glass core substrat…

In IPO news… Vantage Data Centers is exploring going public at an enormous $100B valuation. If you’re not familiar, $ORCL is their anchor tenant for Stargate (OpenAI end user), and Vantage develops/operates hyperscaler DCs. Anthropic IPO is also expected, with investors expecting $2T valuation, eclipsing $SPCX per FT. Yeah… idk about Anthropic valuations. Jim Cramer defending that valuation is never a good sign. On a side note, Opus 5 is probably the worst consumer LLM I’ve used to date, it’s like a 5 IQ LLM operating off terrible data retrieval. With a Fable-like God complex on top. Enterprise is probably having a better time though. U…

Okay here's my take on $POET, since apparently people are celebrating on the subreddit that I took small positions. - I have 0 idea. ZERO. How they convinced shareholders to allow them dilute SO MUCH to the point: They have an absurd ~$830m cash on hand now. And my guess is that they're close to done, since I would be in disbelief if they needed more. So now... they have ~$830m to grow their business like M&A, and EV actually dropped really low recently (eg. $1.25B MC vs. $830m cash on hand), that I thought it was compelling to take a risk. - Annualized production capacity target is 12M optical engines/year for 2027, which is pretty absu…

Feels like my $IQE thesis Feb this year got validated alongside $AXTI and others. (I still long on both) So I stopped covering them as much. But TLDR on updates: Early this year, IQE was a distressed but critical chokepoint in the optical supply chain with links to $LITE and others when I published my thesis on it. Since then: - $MTSI signed long term epiwafer supply agreements, took a stake in the company, now IQE is bank debt free (Macom has convertibles, but that's positive) - $TSEM signed agreements for InP epiwafers. - Management explicitly said its IQE agreement was signed to secure the "strategic III-V epiwafer supply required for …

$SIVE announces a $3.4M development program with SemiNex! For CPO, DFB laser arrays, and optical amplifiers. Early production is targeted H2 2027 (in line with early scale up CPO timelines) Seemed weird to me at first given product overlap, since SemiNex is a much smaller Series B company... But then I got reminded of a less explicit version of $SPCX + Cursor relationship (derisking by working together first). There's probably something interesting Sivers found in this company.

Is it just me, or is the list of 3 letter optical jargon never ending? We have LPO, LRO, NPO, XPO, CPO, OBO, and others for approaches. Then InP, EML, ELS, OCS, SOI, and others to add to the random terms. Even the industry events with OCP or OFC get their three letter names. People who have followed me on my optical bottleneck scavenger hunt with $SOI or $IQE might know a lot by now. But wouldn’t new followers might be super confused…

My main takeaway was that your merchant CW laser suppliers seem to be EXTREMELY IMPORTANT now. But TLDR of $COHR earnings: "given the demand that we see in our DC business with transceivers, I don’t see any time in the near future where we would be selling indium phosphide lasers externally" - Ton more value placed on companies that sell InP lasers externally if $AAOI can't doesn't enough capacity for first gen-CPO deployments, $COHR not selling externally... I guess that's why $MTSI said a ton of customers are approaching them with urgency for InP CW DFB lasers (and they dont even have meaningful capacity coming online until EOY 2027) $…

$NBIS outlook is pretty insane yet again. $582.3M revenue (+454% Y/Y, +46% Q/Q) off ~50% adjusted EBITDA margin (AI Cloud). $8.04B cash on hand. Reiterates financial guide (2026 revenue: $3.0–$3.4B 2026 EoY ARR: $7–$9B), I was hoping for a raise, but it's already massive growth. Not really about this quarter financials, but these signals: - "We could sell our entire 2027 capacity on these terms today." massive visibility on demand - "4 customer agreements averaging over $1B+ each in contract value" - Around 70% of Q2 deals included customer prepayments - Contracted power guidance was raised again, from more ~4+ GW to 5 GW. (this used to b…

$AEHR receives another $22M follow on order for AI processor wafer level burn in systems. By their lead AI processor company. It’s cool to see this tiny company grow up so fast across so many verticals (memory, silicon photonics, etc). Up +5.39% premarket off the news. https://t.co/YkOtELzkmo

So this is just what I'm seeing with $SIVE and the CW DFB laser chokepoint right now. From optical earnings: 1. $LITE: unexpected demand and imbalance for UHP CW lasers. - Had ability to price up ASP for lasers. - Scale up CPO on track for H2 2027 shipments, called out any CPO scale up delay rumors as noise. Lumentum confirmed timelines (that CPO players like Sivers sold off of misleading reports from), high margins, and extreme demand for qualified CW lasers. 2. $AAOI: doesn’t have enough CW laser capacity because of too much optical transceiver demand. - Not meaningfully participating in first-gen CPO deployments, with $MTSI not looki…

What a legend, Situational Awareness bought 1/6th of the entire company of Taiyo Yuden. Pretty wild to see this unfolding. https://t.co/nBQW5DOZ5f

Bro Charles the $SMCI CEO needs to become a politician. I’ve never seen a guy dodge so many questions on a Q&A earnings transcript before. - “what’s your 2027 gross margins” A: “we look forward to growing them - “do you anticipate margins to improve September?” A: September. Which is September?

$LITE earnings transcript TLDRs: - "Our visibility into the timing of CPO scale-up deployments has also sharpened. We remain confident in a demand ramp for our ultra-high-power laser chips in the second half of calendar 2027" H2 2027 start of CPO scale up ramp confirmed from Lumentum for their lead customer. - "We were recently given our first external light source, or ELS, module purchase for delivery by the second half of calendar 2027" ELS industry ramp timelines - "The NPO opportunity is completely additive for us, significantly increasing the optical TAM." More TAM for laser chokepoint club - "we expect the 1.6T transceiver uptake…

Insane earnings today for the AI theme with $CRWV, $SMCI, and $LITE. Coreweave: Absurd ~$104B+ backlog, which doesn't include $25B+ of new customer agreements added in early Q3. Compute demand read through for Neoclouds is enormous (For Nebius, Iren and others) Supermicro: Absurd $65-72B in revenue guidance, adding $60B+ in new orders... AI DC buildout read through is just enormous. Lumentum: $808M -> $1.01B -> $1.25B revenue ramp, with operating margins growing quarter after quarter. Photonics players just keeps printing. TLDR: Every layer of the AI buildout goes brrrrr, and it's showing up in earnings.

$SMCI 2027 guidance was actually unholy: $65-$72 billion FY 2027 revenue guidance... vs. ~$52.4B expected, a casual +$16.1B above consensus. SMCI logged a massive $60B+ in news order from this earnings. That timeline is also interesting when they announced a plan to co-build $SPCX + xAI DCs "within a year" back in June.. But if SMCI sustain 10-15% gross margins off that ~$70B revenue guidance... I think there's a lot of room for rerating given MC is ~$20B (NFA, I have short term positions in SMCI now from this ER). Most important thing is learning about 2027 margins from call today.

Just putting it out there for people that think AAOI is a one year cycle... $AAOI projects their ELSFP capacity for CPO to be 400K/units a month in 2028. 400k * ~$400 ELS ASP (GS assumptions) = + another ~$1.92B 2028 annualized revenue capacity added as a new distinct (>50% gross margin) product line. On top of their existing 2027 projections (eg. ~$5.6B annualized transceiver revenue off $471m/month entering H2). TAM for 1.6T also goes brrr so I'd expect their end of H2 2027 projections to go up as more capacity comes online... For certain optical names, it's one cycle (eg. 1.6T, CPO scale out/up, NPO etc. ), stacked on top of one anoth…

Holy... We've reached 1,000,000 followers! It's genuinely incredible that so many people care to read about my ideas around AI chokepoints and bottlenecks. From substrates, lasers, actuators, memory, power to some of the most niche parts of upstream supply chains. I've had a lot of fun sharing free thoughts I've come across along the way and tracking whether they get validated over time. A lot worked out, some haven't, and some are still playing out! But honestly, all of this attention has come as a massive surprise to me this year, especially globally, from Sweden, Japan, Korea, to China. Thank you for all your support! I'll be announc…

uhhh... the Unitree IPO is more than 8000 times oversubscribed by retail investors. The demand for pure play humanoid companies is absolutely enormous? I'm personally in the US-based Agility Robotics club (Softbank, $NVDA, $AMZN, Foxconn, etc), at $2.5B premoney via $CCXI. And my take is that Unitree likely opening at $30B+ (from pre-ipo perps), might bring the leading US players some more attention in a week or two. Regardless that's just absurd demand.

Woah, $RIOT announced a $9.1B deal with Anthropic, with a possible contract extending to $16.1B, over 20Y. $AMD also exercised its option to expand its existing deal with Riot. (And they still have another 1 GW campus they have LOI with for a tenant) In terms of timelines, seem like most of the Colo basket have their revenue inflections hit H2 2027? (Eg. Riot Anthropic deal targets Dec 2027 for first 96 MW, AMD full 50 MW - May 2027) It’s cute to see all the former miners like $IREN and co. grow up.

Be Barrons: - Wants to write about optical supply supply chains like $AAOI - Hiring DPT: who needs engineers to write about this something this simple? Let’s find underpaid political philosophy backgrounds. - proceeds to find a new hire from nonprofit communication consulting - first day on job: gets paid to model revenue ramp/margins projections, CW laser bottlenecks, internal capacity - New hire: “I don’t understand this sht”, “looks like a memestock” Barrons: “Memestock? looks like our next article, I don’t understand either”.

Now that markets are hosting a laser party again from $SIVE, OE Solutions, $LITE, Coherent, to $AAOI. There’s a pretty interesting study: Both from Fidelity and a UC Berkeley research paper, that the best investors are the ones who either… - Anecdotally forgot about their account (Fidelity) - Didn’t actively trade/overtrade (18.5% return from infrequent traders vs. 11.4%). Not any advice, but some of these anecdotes might be helpful to retail to read in general… Since I witnessed a lot capitulation off memory, photonics, or thematic volatility, just for retail not have positions on a sharp recovery. Having conviction also usually people…