Pythia Cap
Equity Investing & Market Satire
TSMC and ASML are good longs because their bottlenecks are the least easily solved, so the excess returns from owning them should prove more durable through a cycle. Bottlenecks elsewhere tend to get solved, which is why a significant improvement in another part of the chain is nice but not revolutionary, and should already be assumed by anyone underwriting semis or AI demand. x.com
AI infrastructure bottlenecks could give eight stocks as much as 18x upside. Nvidia supplies frontier-model GPUs; Broadcom and Marvell supply custom silicon and networking; TSMC makes advanced chips; Micron supplies sold-out HBM; Vertiv provides power and cooling; Palantir monetizes enterprise AI; Alphabet spans TPUs, research, cloud and apps. The list tracks where AI infrastructure spending is flowing. x.com x.com
Semiconductor leaders look better placed than high-beta stocks with poor company models. TSMC, ASML, Nvidia and memory should lead the sector and belong in the buy basket, with Broadcom not far behind. The CPU basket is only a hold: much of its upside was priced in during Intel and AMD's run. x.com
TSMC may lose pricing power as performance gains shift from shrinking transistors to stacking, interconnects and optics, while logic folding could make older processes competitive. Despite strong leading-edge demand, investors may overestimate the profit share its node leadership can retain. Its cautious expansion and past reluctance toward advanced packaging suggest a risk-averse culture that protects returns but could leave it late to disruptive technologies and key customers. x.com
TSMC is irreplaceable as the maker of the world's most advanced chips for Nvidia, Apple and AMD. x.com
The semiconductor sector's bloat makes selectivity important. Nvidia, TSMC and ASML are among the best businesses still worth owning, but not every name will recover from this month's selloff. Chasing unprofitable, highly leveraged small caps should be a lesson from the selloff. x.com
TSMC looks like it has put in a blowoff top, rising even on an announcement that it cannot afford new ASML equipment. x.com
Semiconductor trade faces a capex growth ceiling even if AI delivers what bulls expect. Spending cannot compound at 70-100% a year indefinitely, and compute per dollar roughly doubles every two years, so the same budget buys more capacity later. Today's chip valuations also demand years of 20% AI earnings growth beyond 2028: roughly 10.9 extra years for AMD, 8.9 for ASML, 7 for Marvell and 6.4 for TSMC, versus 1.6 for Broadcom and 0.8 for Nvidia; Micron needs none under the chart's assumptions. … Show more
ASML, TSMC and BE Semiconductor are the safer, easier-to-understand way to own AI because they sit in the industrial part of the chain. The big question in AI is timing, which no one can call, and Nvidia's software moat is impossible to understand or trust with confidence. A quoted post notes that Crésus sold Nvidia, expecting faster AI progress to favor the owners of models and factories over chip designers. x.com
China's entry into chip design and fabrication is a structural change: stop fading China as Western AI chip and cloud leaders get steeply discounted. China dominates nearly every manufacturing category; with multi-patterning its DUV tools perform near newer nodes and could scale massively or reach EUV. Chinese open models co-designed for Chinese chips could pull sovereignty-minded countries onto its tech stack. As Ford fared after China joined the WTO, so may Nvidia, ASML, TSMC and AWS by 2050. … Show more
TSMC wins no matter which chip carries the hype of the moment. Nvidia GPUs, Intel CPUs, Apple Silicon, Marvell, AMD, Broadcom and trendy smaller names such as Credo and Astera Labs all ultimately feed TSMC, making it a long-term hold. x.com
