An underappreciated #ABFsubstrate# name is the Japanese company Toppan ($7911.TYO). The real profitability story here is somewhat masked (pun intended) by the photomask business they recently spun off. And this comment from $AVGO yesterday is definitely a positive sign.

ABF substrate supply is tight, and key suppliers are looking to expand capacity globally. One interesting read through is MEC ($4971.TYO), a Japanese specialty chemicals company with an effective monopoly on the CZ series adhesion promotion chemistry used in ABF substrate manufacturing. The chemistry is critical. It enables copper circuitry to bond to the build up film and is applied at every layer of the substrate. MEC’s latest disclosures show sales to China growing far faster than to any other region. This looks like an important signal that Chinese substrate makers are investing aggressively to build the technical expertise and capacity needed to compete in ABF. Some of the increase may come from non Chinese suppliers manufacturing in China, such as AT&S and Zhen Ding. But it is hard to see that alone explaining the magnitude of the increase. The takeaway: China’s push into ABF substrates looks increasingly real, and MEC’s chemistry sales may be one of the better ways to track it.

▶ Ajinomoto Raises ABF Substrate Film Prices by 30% - Japan’s Ajinomoto has decided to raise prices for its core ABF build-up film by 30%, with the new prices set to take effect from Q3 2026. - Taiwanese package substrate makers said they have officially received notice of the price increase, at a time when cost pressures remain elevated across the IC substrate supply chain. - Specific new pricing is still under negotiation with suppliers, but in the near term, the hike is expected to increase production costs before being gradually passed through to product ASPs. - Despite the ABF price increase, the largest cost burden is still understood to come from repeated price hikes in upstream raw materials, particularly CCL. - With urgent demand from AI chip customers continuing, quarterly price increases for ABF and BT substrates are expected to persist through year-end. The magnitude of price hikes could widen further in the second half. - Ajinomoto holds more than 95% share of the global ABF market, giving it strong pricing power across the supply chain. IC substrate makers noted that the previous price increase took place around early 2025, roughly a year ago, and said the latest 30% increase is also a “reasonable level” given strong customer demand. - Unlike Nittobo, whose conservative capacity expansion stance has deepened the shortage of T-Glass fiberglass for IC substrates, Ajinomoto had already anticipated changes in ABF supply-demand dynamics three years ago and moved ahead with proactive capacity expansion. - As a result, despite its near-monopolistic market position, the supply bottleneck is viewed as relatively limited. Ajinomoto recently announced plans to build a third ABF plant in Gifu Prefecture, Japan, in order to address demand beyond 2030. - The company has secured land for the project with an investment of around JPY 12 billion, or approximately USD 76 million, and plans to begin construction in 2028, with mass production targeted for 2032. The new Gifu plant is expected to be much larger in scale than Ajinomoto’s existing production sites in Kanagawa and Gunma prefectures. - In addition, as AI chip packaging layer counts are expected to expand from the current 3+3 level to 11+11 layers, and potentially to 13+13 layers after 2030, ABF demand is likely to sustain structural growth. - According to the industry, as the AI CPU, GPU, and ASIC upgrade cycle accelerates, demand is rising for larger substrate area and higher layer counts. As a result, ABF substrates are understood to have re-entered a supply shortage phase from 1H 2026. - Shortages are also emerging simultaneously across the upstream value chain, including fiberglass, copper foil, and drill bits. Therefore, the ABF supply-demand imbalance in 2027–2028 is more likely to intensify than ease. - The industry expects the IC substrate sector to enter a so-called “Super Expansion Cycle” over the next two to three years, which should improve order visibility across the sector.

So Samsung and SK hynix are leading the charge to push ABF substrate prices back down… Did memory companies just look around and say, “Wait… why is everyone else making money from AI capex too? Nope. We’re taking that margin back.” Come on… don’t be so greedy lah…

Aletheia dropped some juicy information today: - NVIDIA’s Rubin Ultra is unlikely to use HBM4 and will instead use 8-high and 12-high HBM4E. - Kyber has not been canceled, and the four-die Rubin Ultra remains on the roadmap. - The four-die Rubin Ultra could be used in Kyber. It could also be implemented through an OSAT by stitching together two dual-die packages on an ABF substrate. - The four-die Rubin Ultra could feature up to 768GB of HBM4E. Looks like a good time to buy memory again.

Dell earnings call. Best hand picked excerpts: "Revenue was $47 billion, up 58%, and earnings per share was $7.04, up 203%.” “Over the past 12 months, we have booked more than $130 billion in AI server orders.” “Our AI server momentum continues to accelerate. We booked $60.9 billion of AI orders in this quarter, the most in our history. We are also seeing AI-related tailwinds in traditional servers and networking, along with early signs of increased storage demand as customers prepare, manage, and protect growing volumes of data.” “Demand is broadening across Neoclouds, sovereigns, and enterprise customers, and our customer count has surpassed 6,500.” “We are seeing a growing trend of customers that require meaningful CPU compute capacity to support AI and agentic workflows.” “If I look at the longer-term trends, I know you're a believer of this, but as we see it, agentic demand is reshaping the data center and the underlying infrastructure. Inference is past training and is pure demand on our industry. We think the tokens that inference drives is going to grow 87x to 3,600 quadrillion tokens by 2030. Training demand grows 5x to 850 zettaflops by 2030. Enterprise agentic is expected to be the single largest workload by 2028." "We're expecting AI to be 75% of all data center demand by 2030, adding 200 GW of power over that same timeframe, and half of that, we believe, is right in our sweet spot with our customers, the Neocloud sovereigns and enterprises. If you look at that math, we think the opportunity in front of us is more than a trillion dollars over that time frame.” “If we think about this across agentic workloads as we head towards physical AI and what's going to happen in manufacturing and IoT sensors and robotics, which drive tremendous amounts of multimodal unstructured data, Arthur likes to call it unstructured repositories. There's a lot of structured data in databases. The growth of that is immense, and we actually see it accelerating, not slowing down.” “The constraints remain the same. DRAM, DRAM, DRAM followed by NAND, NAND, NAND. We have spotty CPU shortages. There are shortages with disk drives. If you go further down in the supply chain, just about every product going through a leading node is constrained. Mature nodes that are building MOSFETs, power ICs, microcontrollers, drivers are constrained. There's shortages of ABF substrate, T-glass, all of which we monitor. There's shortages in optical. The AI supply chain is working red line all out to build CDUs, power racks. Welcome to the life of a supply chain person at Dell. This is what we do, chasing parts. We love it.” “But the underlying demand for the technology is significant. I think about the new use cases, that's all new use cases, all new growth, which is being driven by agentic AI, essentially running the harness, if that makes sense. We continue to be optimistic about the prospects. Again, demand outran supply last quarter. Demand outran supply this quarter. The pipeline remains robust.”

ASIC Warp-Up 📈Stock Picks: maintains a positive view on MRVL, MTK, and Intel following recent earnings, supply chain checks and our recent notes. 👊Nvidia vs. ASIC: Nvidia's CoWoS share at TSM will remain stable in 2027; Nvidia Vera Rubin outperforms competitors in performance/TCO/supply chain. * TPU Dynamics: On June 14 report, we lowered Broadcom's Sunfish volume for 2026/27 due to packaging re-design and set 460k CoWoS (ASIC) in 2027; MTK Humufish (which leads in N2 vs Whalefish) potential launch in 4Q27 suggesting the window for Broadcom’s CoWoS back to TPU could be only in 1H26. Expect Humufish tape-out in around Nov-2026 with a not too high passing rate. * Google Custom Silicon: MRVL expects meaningful contributions from Google CXL and DPU (~$3bn each by 2028), with an MPU start on TSMC N2 yielding $3bn+ in CY28 revenue. * AWS Trainium: Reit MRVL T3 of $1bn/$2bn in CY26/27 and likely >$3bn from T4 in CY28 with a much higher ASP and better NPO scale-up. * Intel Backend Packaging: Reit Intel's FY27/FY28 back-end revenue forecast of $1.1bn/$7bn, supported by AWS T3 EMIB-T and Google Humufish/Triggerfish volumes through 2H27-2028. We expect more wins for U.S. fabless including MSFT, QCOM, MRVL, with products across ASIC, CPU and CPO. ABF substrate to greatly benefit from EMIB. #NVDA# #ASIC# #MRVL# #Mediatek# #SMTC# #INTC# #ABF#

Just some TLDRs of stuff I found interesting: - $SNDK 80% adjusted gross margins projections through 2030, ~75% operating margins and ~50% adjusted FCF margins from investor day. LTAs already 2/3rd of 2028 output. Minimum contracted revenue reaches $93B (MC is currently ~$239B)... Hard to be a cyclical stock when your revenue/targets are expected to continue 4Y later into 2030. - $CRWV signs contracts for 6Y old $NVDA A100 GPUs through 2029. For Neoclouds like Nebius/Iren, this is positive, since it's a counterargument for eg. Burry depreciation short thesis - conventional DRAM gross margins eg. Micron is estimated to reach an unprecedented 95% by 2027, surpassing HBM GMs per UBS read through for legacy/standard dram players like Nanya/Winbond should go brrrr if projections are correct. - Anthropic reportedly achieved 14x+ YoY growth and roughly 2.4x sequential revenue growth q2 to >$11.5B,. estimating growth to $190–200B in 2028r evenue numbers. Your frontier labs keep growing at stupidly fast paces, it would be worrisome if they didnt. - $NVDA reportedly in talks to invest $3B in SB Energy (Softbank subsidiary), creates a >$500B compute financing push with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman, and others. $NVDA Feynman reportedly moves to TSMC A16 + SoIC + custom HBM + CPO in H2 2028 Just more nvidia news every day - $MSFT Maia 300 discussed $TSM capacity for >300k units in 2027, with expansion to 1m+. Unveils as soon as September. Likely $MRVL should be more happy from this news. For what's happening right now: - maybe GUC for Microsoft current ASIC ramp. - For the Amazon party, stuff like Alchip (I do own shares), likely is ramping now with $AMZN ASIC program H2 2026... So might be a good idea to look at hyperscaler ASIC ramp timelines + their beneficiaries. - $TSM VP of Advanced Packaging stated "the industry is likely to face not only memory shortages but also tight ABF substrate supply over the next few years"... Emphasis on few years for memory + ABF substrates for bottlenecks. Even upstream abf substrate equipment providers are happy, eg. Eternal Precision which uses vacuum lamination equipment stated orders surged, their plants have been running at full capacity, and 20%+ price hikes. - $AMAT expects advanced packaging revenue to grow >70% in 2026, versus prior >50%, and said customer discussions now extend all the way to 2030 (not too familiar with this company, but found their growth rate from 2025 Q4 $6.8B ->$7.01B -> 7.91B -> $9.12B -> $10.25B Q4 2026 projections pretty interesting) - Google said at OCP APAC said conventional 48V is running out of headroom. $NVDA detailed an 800VDC MGX-compatible rack H2 2026 (timeline, Delta / Lite-On beneficaries) - Aside from $SNDK, Nanya LTAs cover 50% of capacity. CXMT signed multi-year DRAM agreements last month, so entire memory industry seems to be following same playbook as ur big 3. - Probe cards remain a bottleneck, MPI(6223) said their probe card capacity remains fully utilized because demand exceeds supply. Already covered the CW laser bottleneck with $AAOI, $SIVE, and $LITE earlier this week, but that's another fun one. - some MLCC/component lead times have hit 36 weeks per Nichidenbo. Your Samsung Electro-Mechanics, Taiyo Yuden, Murata, players should be very happy to hear this. TLDR: AI supply chains go brrr.