Sure... Random train of thoughts on markets now, optics like $LITE / memory + $IREN / Anthropic. On Memory: - Demand visibility on $MU / Samsung / SK Hynix extend into 2030-2031. Samsung has LTAs covering 70% of their capacity into 2031 (likely with SK Hynix type price floors)... and their operating profit is already absurd. There's a consensus that shortage in 2027 will be much more severe than 2026... Even $SNDK expends gross margins to exceed 80% entering 2030. You're going to hear Acer and other CEOs that want memory prices to go down cite bear cases like CXMT/YMTC, and Chinese players. But just looking at supply procurement that $NVDA is doing + hyperscalers, demand visibility is absurd for the next 5 years. And by that time, cumulative FCF coming in from these take/pay + pricing floor contracts might exceed some of their entire marketcaps so it feels like there's some baseline. Near-term is always volatile (IV dropped a ton across $EWY to $DRAM to $MU), so people with call options likely got nuked, along with underlying prices. But if Samsung is 3x 2027E, has 5 year LTAs with 70% of capacity committed from hyperscalers, and price floors, it's kinda hard to see these names suffer a sustained crash... For optics: - $LITE is literally sold out into 2029, starting discussions into 2030. With demand visibility lasting into 2031… with hyperscalers largely funding the capacity buildout. Their 2028 Greensboro fab expansion was ~$5B in UHP laser capacity revenue alone, yet it’s basically allocated toward $NVDA (50%+ with options for more) and co from channel checks. Existing supply chain bottlenecks are extremely severe as optical content/XPU skyrockets entering 2027-2028. So everything from DSPs/TIAs, photodiodes, lasers, InP/SOI substrates, wafers (epi, SOI, etc) are expected to go brrr. And what does that imply to anyone else with enormous amounts of capacity coming online like $AAOI + $SIVE + $MTSI capacity expansion in 2027? Or other players like Sumitomo / Furukawa? But again it's not quite the same situation as memory since the BOM % is extremely low in a cluster... If micron/samsung raised another 2000% hyperscalers would go bankrupt. But doing that for InP substrates seems possible. Or a 100% increase on CW laser content. I actually thought $LITE was overvalued at $100B+ MC, relative to capacity expansion on your smaller optical players to their respective MCs. So I chose to position accordingly (But lumentum does deserve premiums for demand visibility). For the companies leading the charge like $NVDA / $AVGO / $MRVL: - Nvidia has 70% forward revenue growth FY2028 which is supply constrained growth. - Broadcom 100% Y/Y for 2027/2028 which is also supply constrained growth. - Marvell FY2031 upgraded guidance to $70B-$90B from $46B analyst projections... They all seem to be very happy.... and read through on demand for next 2-3 years is enormous (also echoing what $INTC CEO said today on the panel with $AVGO CEO). So you have overwhelming growth on memory + photonics + from the leaders... But the nuance is not everything in the AI supply chain get the same economic benefit. HBM/Laser/CPU/MLCC and other players in the bottlenecks look to be printing money. And seem to be the largest beneficiaries of the current bottlenecks. Test players are also getting price hikes + capacity allocated by players like $NVDA, but economic impact seems a tad lower than other players since forward P/E for many I modeled were still in the 45x+ range even if you hiked prices like 10-30%. As for capex intensive players... there's some like $IREN ($25-30B for 2027) that despite a deal with Anthropic ended up dropping. I don't think markets seem to appreciate players spending a lot of money + ongoing financing (think they're like halfway through their $6B ATM). Just some hopium for $IREN investors, $NBIS also signed a deal with $META at the start of the year (but markets didn't care at all, since Nebius dropped to ~$70-80 at the lowest point?). But did 6 months later, as the time to revenue inflection gets closer and you're past the ATM/capex window, markets would likely care more. I don't think it's irrational but at the same time, the fundamentals have improved from Mirantis acquisition to others. I also think it was known for awhile it was either OpenAI/Anthropic from CEO comments earlier too? But either way to be a more risk-off environment where funds seem to be rotating to larger names as a flight to safety. $CRWD / $PLTR as just two example, but my take is that the valuations of these rotations are reaching clown levels. And that certain AI supply chain beneficiaries in comparison are undervalued now. I was thinking markets would just rotate to names that are extremely profitable like Samsung or names that have <2X P/E, so it was surprising to see $KOSPI and some legacy memory players get sold off today. Since all of this is colliding with uncertainty about sht macro environments and renewed sustainability concern of AI capex/commitments from frontier labs like OpenAI/Anthropic from due to that FT piece recently. I've always been sounding the alarm about the contractual backlog OpenAI has with $CBRS, $MSFT, $ORCL and others earlier in the year. But OpenAI did just raise $122B or so , so I don't quite think they're at risk of going down anytime soon. I also don't think overall capex can just exponentially go up, but even if it stalls / hovers around a certain point or even drops... Capex toward certain areas like optics will still explode as hyperscalers fight over allocations when CPO scale up comes about, but might drop in others where more capacity comes online like test or DRAM. So it's a lot more nuanced than capex down = everything down or vice versa. I also slightly agree with community agreements that open weight models wouldn't lessen demand on AI infrastructure (otherwise $NVDA wouldn't be funneling funds into Reflection), but all the contractual obligations that Anthropic has might get messy if their models/company get cannibalized. Either way, I'd expect some of these frontier lab valuations to likely compress but I do think Jensen knows what he's doing though to avoid contagion. But basically: - Extremely difficult market now, can't just throw money at any AI supply chain company like $GLW and expect it to go up. There's cause for concern of rate hikes mixed with financing per $AVGO CEO but not to the point you just blindly sell off everything. Also I think markets are stupid and ties baskets together so that leads to mispricing + individual buying opportunities with certain chokepoints too. If capacity + demand is visible and forward p/e compresses like $AAOI to single digits off hundreds or thousands of percent growth from hyperscalers off $471m transceiver revenues and hundreds of thousands of monthly ELSFP capacity. Or $SIVE coming online with 100M+ laser capacity + multiple foundries with ASP hikes on lasers. I wouldn't lump them into other AI supply chain names in IP like $RMBS or others. My take is that AI supply chain beneficiaries with closer inflection points, demand visibility, and forward P/E compressing due to economic leverage would likely outperform medium term despite current volatility. TLDR: - Memory strongest risk/adjusted return with LTAs + pricing floors extending to 2030's + buybacks. - My opinion is that optical supercycle for 2027-2028 with CPO/NPO is going to look absurd relative to capacity coming online of smaller suppliers. - Overwhelming fundamentals/growth colliding with sht macro + media scares - Markets are stupid and groups things in baskets and sells them all off together or buys overvalued names, creating short/long opportunities I'd give a prayer to people on short term options given underlying drop + IV decline, but there could be a reversal... who knows. Most valuable thing right now is time.

Citibank TMT: "lasers and optical fibers are being positioned as the "next HBM." I've been talking about lasers like $LITE / $AAOI since 2025... and architectural shifts toward CW, ahead of the current industry consensus. And fully agree with Lightmatter/Citi. Just for reference: For lasers: $LITE / $SIVE / $AAOI / $COHR / $MTSI / Furukawa / Sumitomo are your better known ones. For fiber: $GLW / Furukawa / Fujikura / Sumitomo are your more well-known exposure (obviously a lot more in the supply chain) *disclosure, personal exposure to theme With added commentary that: "Tight supply conditions will support a scarcity premium for these assets." We're already seeing price hikes with lasers as seen with $SIVE channel checks at CIOE 2026 Shenzhen today + $LITE commentary from earnings. So I think the 2027–2028 photonics supercycle will look a lot like memory did in 2025–2026. Especially as optical content/GPU-ASIC goes up significantly per Goldman Sachs revised estimates...

$TSM Vice President of Advanced Packaging: "Foundries can scale up the optical engine, but the real bottlenecks to large scale deployment lie elsewhere... Including lasers, optical fiber, fiber-optic connectors, and test" (UDN) Just some bucket ideas: Lasers: $LITE, $SIVE, $COHR, LandMark (3081), LuxNet, Sumitomo, Furukawa Optical fiber / FAU: Foci, Browave, $GLW, Sumitomo Fiber Optic / CPO Connectors: BizLink, $GLW , Fujikura, Nextronics, COXOC CPO testing: MPI (6223), Advantest, $FORM, Msscorps, $KEYS, Chroma (disclosure: exposure to theme above, individual names not named by TSMC) There are others I like as well, such as ShunSin, which now has explicit TSMC COUPE exposure but probably belongs under a different category like packaging/integration. eg. "Foxconn unit ShunSin confirms TSMC COUPE partnership" I don't think there's anything too new vs. H1, aside from ongoing news (eg. FAU looks like there will have a demand imbalance in 2027, from a report last week). But it's helpful to reiterate overall beneficiaries from time to time...

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.

Always a fun time seeing semi markets crash from Bloomberg report framing once again… UBS analyst on $META report: “this is not new news”. Regardless: $AEHR down -18.3% $AAOI down -17.13% $SIVEF down -15.4% $SNDK down -14.8% $TER down -13.8% $GLW down -11.4% $MRVL down -11.2% $LITE down -10.2% $NBIS down -7.8% Getting PTSD from Bloombert’s previous misleading report on AMD/Nvidia global export controls earlier this year that crashed semi stocks. FYI: Meta doesn’t randomly buy $48B+ worth of neocoud contracts if they overbuilt capacity and can cut capex… Markets are stupid sometimes.

$GLW (June 26, 2026-daily chart update) $GLW broke out of the consolidation box today. If there is a pullback, let's see if $212.40 can hold and flip from previous resistance into future support. https://t.co/O7gJX3avq2

$GLW (June 24, 2026-daily chart update) $212.40 is the breakout level. Let's see if $GLW can close above it today! https://t.co/5y7zb9IFZe

$GLW (June 17, 2026-daily chart update) $GLW is still trading inside the consolidation box on the daily chart, with support in the $166 zone and resistance at the $211 zone. https://t.co/6H0FvaZaJ6

$GLW (May 11, 2026-weekly chart) $GLW surpassed the previous 4 volatility holes and ignited a strong surge. Can it survive the new one? https://t.co/AREWUt6sG3

“Leading” Glass Substrate players that were name dropped if you’re curious: • $LPK — TGV Equipment • $GLW — Glass Materials • $ASGLY (5201 T)— Glass Materials • $NIDGY (5214 T) — Glass Materials • $LRCX — Etching Systems • $DSCSY (6146 T)— Dicing Equipment • $SMHSF — Bonding Systems • $ONTO — Inspection Tools • $KLAC — Inspection Tools Fun to see the stuff I’ve called out early in the year like LPK at ~$150m MC get mentioned as a critical player by Trendforce and others.

$LPK up 80% in the last two weeks. Not too shabby at ~$687M MC? It's probably one of the cleaner ways to play the next Glass Substrate supercycle. 50-100 machines per customer at scale, with "start of 2027 as mass production" across likely $INTC, $GLW, SKC, and others (since they captured ~80% of the major players). Maybe ~€2M average per machine. €400M–€1B+ across just 5 players in 2027 (could be more)? Since they basically supply to everyone as a chokepoint. Off ~67.6% blended gross margins. Seems promising for volume ramp wait time.

$GLW (April 27, 2026-weekly chart) Volatility is the gateway to wealth creation — provided you’re in the right stock and learn to embrace it! https://t.co/1PYUOJOnlE

People nonstop ask me about $LPKK / $LPK for my opinion Yes, I mentioned they're like a chokepoint for glass core substrates for LIDE (laser induced deep etching) way back when. Biggest known partner is $ONTO (LIDE with Onto metrology for glass core mass production). Then as for market share: "more than 80% of customers among major global players have selected LPKF equipment" for process validation. So that probably includes: - Samsung Electronics/Electro-Mechanics - $INTC (Receives a Major Order from a Leading Chip Manufacturer... installed a first LIDE system at the beginning of 2020... now ordered further LIDE systems to start volume production) - SKC (Absolics) - $GLW, AGC, Schott. - Nippon electric glass. Of course this is evaluation, so that 80% could be lower in actual ramp. As for some personal FWD P/E calculations: - 2027: ~11-12.5x and ~7.8x for 2028, which looks very compelling. - Total Cash: ~€10.0M, debt was around ~€3.0M. debt to equity: ~3.8% So very clean-asset light balance sheet, no dilution overhang like $SHMD. ~$362m MC, conclusion: great upside long imo, hard to see institutions not buying this name down the road. Even if the 80% of players managed to design another way, even a fraction would probably be very material to the MC. It was probably a bit early few months ago, but glass core roadmaps have been speeding up like CPO. Disclosure: I do have positions. This are just my thoughts. People on X did their homework.