If DeepSeek V4 runs well on Huawei's Ascend chips, China's own AI stack wins, and with it Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, SMIC, Samsung and SK hynix. Alibaba and Baidu have placed Ascend 950PR orders, and cheaper inference means more deployments and cloud revenue. Tencent is a confirmed 950PR customer. SMIC is the only Chinese foundry able to make Ascend chips. Teardowns show Samsung and SK hynix HBM in Ascend, which Huawei cannot yet replace. Watch the V4 benchmarks. x.com  x.com 

Semiconductors could capture scarce spot compute's value if its forward curve holds. Compute trades in deep contango, while chip stocks price in little of that value; near-term moves are unpredictable. That makes the sector very bullish. The earlier lab-funding risk looks less acute: Anthropic should hold nearly $200B cash after its IPO and is operating-cash-flow profitable. Even with 2029 capex cuts, chips look cheap if future buyers do not default. x.com  x.com  x.com  x.com  x.com 

Low multiples give AI infrastructure good risk/reward as demand outruns supply and agentic workloads have runway. TSMC at 17x 2027E EPS appears to have all the accelerator and CPU demand it can handle this year and next; Ultra Clean is at 8x, MKS 12x, TTM 13x, Nvidia 14x and Celestica 15x. Kioxia at 3x and Samsung preferreds at 2.5x carry a big discount on pricing and cycle fears. Multiples imply a 2027 capex peak and meaningful drop; 2028 capex growth is expected, but below 2027's rate. x.com  … Show more

Lumentum and Coherent sit at the center of a multiplicative optical bottleneck, where parts, capacity, yield and customer sign-off each limit output. Next-gen AI clusters need optical interconnect, and McKinsey sees 800G transceiver output 40-60% short of demand through 2027 as the market doubles to $26B in 2026. Nvidia invested $2B each in both to lock in laser supply, and the FCC is drafting curbs on Chinese transceiver imports; Chinese suppliers hold ~60% of optical-component revenue. x.com  … Show more

Lumentum and Coherent are investments driven by product iteration, while AXT is a bottleneck trade best treated as speculation. Shortage-driven price hikes on the same parts define a cyclical stock, prices quickly discount shortage expectations, and once profits truly climb it is time to exit. Bottlenecks also push customers to design around them and invite new entrants. Investable companies keep lifting margins through yield gains and new products, driving token deflation while growing revenue. … Show more

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

The Corgi Lithography & Semiconductor Photonics ETF offers broad exposure to the photonics stack as AI infrastructure increasingly depends on moving data efficiently between chips, racks and data centers. The actively managed fund spans lithography, equipment, inspection, photonics and optical networking rather than one niche, with $464M in assets and a 0.35% expense ratio. Top holdings include TSMC at 11.3% and ASML at 9.7%, plus optical names such as Lumentum, Corning and Coherent. x.com 

Unitika is more than a meme stock: its ultra-thin, low-CTE glass fabrics keep large AI dies from warping in advanced package substrates, and supply is short. Leader Nittobo's order books are reportedly full well into 2026, with new capacity not before H2 2027, and Qualcomm has visited Unitika seeking another source. Only a handful of firms can supply NE-glass for AI-server laminates. Now restructured, Unitika nearly doubled Q3 operating profit to ¥9.0B; May 14 results may quantify AI revenue. … Show more

Lumentum is the only volume supplier of EML lasers for 1.6T optics, capacity is sold out, and indium phosphide fabs do not scale overnight. Qualcomm and Corning partnered with it on 1,060nm VCSEL chip-to-chip links targeting about 10 Tb/s. Revenue grew 109% and it trades at 30.6x forward earnings with $1.07B of net cash; a one-time $7.8B non-cash convert charge hid profitable operations. Risks are convert dilution and Coherent and Broadcom adding InP lasers before the shortage eases. x.com 

SMIC should reach an all-time high soon because its gross profit could ramp quickly as foundry capacity everywhere else is sold out. It is one of four foundries able to ship 7nm chips and sits at the core of Huawei's ramp and China's strategic interests, so a levered tier-2 player should get a real utilization and pricing boost. It is not cheap, at 30x+ market cap to gross profit like TSMC, and its sanctions-list status limits offshore buyers. x.com  x.com  x.com