Sam Badawi
Stock Analyst, Creator of Origins of Alpha & Quarterly Conviction
Arm gains as Nvidia effectively confirmed a CPU supply constraint by building its own agentic AI CPU on Arm. Nvidia's CFO said Vera, built on custom Arm cores and co-designed with Rubin GPUs and NVLink, will deliver up to 1.5x faster per-core performance, 2x performance per watt and 4x rack density versus x86 alternatives. Arm stock keeps setting new all-time highs. x.comÂ
Intel stands to benefit from a CPU demand theme tied to Meta's Muse AI agents, whose announcement coincided with Intel, AMD and Arm jumping on September 21, 2026. AMD and Arm fit the same theme but still need comfortable chart traction before they earn a position. The thesis is weakly held and must be confirmed by charts and by quarterly earnings and outlooks. x.comÂ
Fresh funding for AI expansion supports a continued bid for AI stocks as compute spending shows no sign of slowing. Meta committed to $95B in shareholder dilution for AI, Anthropic is set to have $200B in cash in a couple of weeks, and SpaceX got a $40B Apollo loan solely to buy more Nvidia GPUs. The Anthropic IPO might even be a positive catalyst rather than the negative one many fear. x.comÂ
Arm is well positioned for the coming CPU boom, but its stock already prices in the next five to six years. It dominates AI ASIC servers, and ASICs' share of servers should grow substantially as AI workloads shift from training to inference. Yet at about 30x 2031 earnings it is optimistically valued and would need a lot of upside surprise to become attractive. x.com x.com x.comÂ
Arm signaled confidence in securing supply allocations: CEO Rene Haas said Arm can secure enough supply to meet $2B of customer demand for its AGI CPU, and real demand is probably larger, with growth supply-constrained as usual. Supply, not demand, is the limiting factor from Nvidia to its upstream suppliers; Ciena also says component availability is what limits its growth. x.comÂ
AI product, networking, compute and power demand could reward patient owners of Meta, Nokia, Oracle, Broadcom, IREN and Vistra. Meta's Muse could unlock massive revenue; free cash flow could recover when AI spending slows. Nokia works with Nvidia on AI-RAN and 6G. Oracle has $664B in obligations and massive potential reward from OpenAI. Broadcom's AI chip revenue rose 221% to $16.7B; IREN has a $9.7B Microsoft contract and 5 GW of power. AI power bottlenecks favor Vistra. x.com x.com x.com x.com … Show more
AI usage outstripping compute supply for the foreseeable future supports semiconductor demand despite cheaper tokens. Token prices fell about 90% in roughly three months, yet usage rose by more than that drop, so compute pricing keeps rising. AI revenue extends beyond LLM providers, including Meta, Google, Salesforce and ServiceNow. On- and off-balance-sheet debt is a risk; an AI bubble is likely eventually, but none is visible now. x.comÂ
Meta's 26% growth and still-unmonetized Muse make the dip buyable. ZeroHedge estimates $250 billion of AI capex next year; Meta would not spend that much unless Muse continues to unlock a massive opportunity in personal AI agents. x.com x.comÂ
Arm is well positioned in the AI CPU stack as agentic AI drives massive CPU demand and x86 loses ground. Its new AGI CPU, its first production silicon, comes with a five-year goal of about $15 billion in chip revenue, $25 billion total and more than $9 in EPS, roughly 38% annual growth, though meaningful revenue is not expected until fiscal 2028. Royalties from third-party CPUs like Nvidia's Vera add another path. That TAM expansion could take out its roughly $185 all-time high within two years. … Show more
AMD is having a breakout year as hyperscalers spend more than $600 billion on infrastructure in 2026, about $450 billion of it on AI. Its CPU market share has climbed to 29.2%, and partnerships with OpenAI and Meta show it is no longer playing second fiddle to Nvidia. Its MI300 series is winning data-center workloads, and it is executing on its roadmap with a consistency that deserves respect. x.comÂ
Arm's fundamentals remain extremely strong, but component shortages could cost it margin as it moves into manufacturing. It confirmed accelerating demand of up to $2B for its new AGI CPU, yet has components for only about 50% of it, so meeting demand may mean paying higher prices. Management expects CPU demand to rise about 4x by 2030, which means about 4x the component needs too. At a valuation priced for perfection, the market may not accept any hit to growth or margins. x.com x.comÂ