Jason's Chips
Buy-Side AI & Semiconductor Investor
SoftBank stands to benefit as OpenAI's comeback plays out, with the general discourse already shifting this week. Codex revenue doubled in seven days, while Anthropic still needs to solve its compute situation, consistent with the call that GPT-5.5 and new Codex features would recapture share and OpenAI's earlier compute spending would sustain its lead. x.com
SoftBank looks attractive as OpenAI's GPT-5.5 and new Codex features should drive a market share recapture and narrative shift, with Arm adding to the case. OpenAI's private valuation should overtake Anthropic's again, and its once-criticized compute spending from six months ago now gives it a capacity advantage that should keep it ahead. x.com
OpenAI is winning, making SoftBank stock worth seriously considering as an investment. The view is still at the consideration stage. x.com
Elon Musk's loss in his case against Sam Altman over OpenAI's future is bullish for OpenAI's supply chain, including Cerebras, CoreWeave, Oracle and SoftBank. x.com
SoftBank's $64.6 billion OpenAI commitment leaves it exposed to a loss-making company that needs more funding, while junk-rated borrowing costs around 10% and credit spreads have climbed. An OpenAI IPO matters greatly; despite SoftBank's good assets, a price roughly another 50% lower could look like value. x.com x.com
SoftBank Group may be due to catch up as its key holdings rally while its stock stays flat. Arm is up 23% since Friday, OpenAI is now set to go public in September, and SoftBank-backed SB Energy has filed to go public. Masayoshi Son could be on the mend, and it may be time to buy. x.com
SoftBank's OpenAI stake would be worth $156 billion at a $1.2T valuation, against SoftBank's entire current market cap of $228 billion. Per @kimmonismus citing the WSJ, OpenAI is in early talks to raise at $1.2T+, up about 41% from March's $852B, with an IPO expected in 2027; it reports over 1B active users and 18% Q2 revenue growth to $6.7B, though operating margins declined. x.com
Andrej Karpathy joining Anthropic will be very bad for the OpenAI complex, especially Oracle and SoftBank, and to a lesser extent semiconductors. Karpathy said he is joining Anthropic because the next few years at the LLM frontier will be especially formative. x.com
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.com
Anthropic's $63B custom-chip deal bolsters Broadcom's case for growth from custom AI silicon. OpenAI's Jalapeño chip is seen as next, and the AI chip supercycle is just getting started. x.com
SoftBank's 9% drop after Moonshot released Kimi K3 was warranted, because K3 erodes the pricing power behind the valuation of OpenAI, which SoftBank's stock tracks. K3 is slightly better than Opus 4.8 at roughly half the cost, leaving Moonshot only months behind the frontier, so the tier where most commercial workloads run may soon be served at commodity prices. Labs' defensible ground shrinks to the true frontier, enterprise trust and distribution, and revenue can grow while pricing erodes. … Show more
AI-exposed semiconductors face near-term demand risk as Anthropic's revenue growth slows. Monthly additions fell from $10B to ~$2-3B, though October may improve and one-off headwinds contributed. The AI selloff is not irrational amid rates, debt, politics and supply-chain risks. Despite long-term optimism, a short-term bull case needs an Anthropic IPO or OpenAI fundraise, calmer rates and debt funding, blowout cloud earnings with EPS upgrades, and new applications reviving token monetization. … Show more
