My favorite topic: LTA Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are signing 3- to 5-year supply deals. Micron has gone further with take-or-pay “strategic customer agreements.” Nanya already has about half of capacity under contracts of various lengths. Samsung is pushing new deals to at least three years, some to five. It has multi-year pacts with the top five data-center operators and wants about two-thirds of memory output under long contracts, some with price floors and prepayments. SK Hynix has finished LTA talks with about ten core customers. The new deals tie volume to product roadmaps so it can plan DRAM and HBM lines earlier. Micron has 16 SCAs running from 2026 through end-2030. Auto deals are often three years. Take-or-pay means the buyer owes a minimum even if it takes less. Those pacts already cover about 20% of DRAM shipments and about one-third of NAND. It wants at least half of revenue inside SCAs. Nanya’s mix runs from one quarter to several years. SanDisk and Kioxia also set long DRAM supply after taking stakes. The twist: even if makers add capacity in 2027 and 2028, much of the new output may already be spoken for. Spot supply could stay tight longer than an old cycle. $MU $SKHY $SNDK If two-thirds of bits sit under multi-year deals, does the next downturn even show up on the spot tape?

Let's talk about LTA's / pricing for Photonics $LITE $AAOI $GLW $COHR etc. Historically a lot of this business was pretty tactical. Customers bought quarter to quarter, suppliers fought for share, and price-downs were part of the game. This is not the case anymore due to the supply being this scarce. $LITE : Mgmt said they basically never used to have LTAs like this. Now all of their EML capacity is spoken for through 2027, and customers that commit get supply priority. They also said LTAs have helped pricing because they no longer have the same quarterly negotiations for price cuts. “If anything, prices are holding or they’re increasing.” And when customers come back asking for MORE capacity than they originally contracted that opens the door for another pricing discussion. $COHR : Their LTAs can include > multi-year volume commitments > pricing commitments > minimum demand guarantees > take-or-pay structures And many of these agreements extend through the end of the decade. $GLW: Says essentially every major optical capacity expansion is now backed by these kinds of LTA's, and eventually they expect this structure to represent the “lion’s share” of the optical business. So this landscape is increasingly becoming: Customer commits volume → supplier builds capacity → supply gets reserved → pricing gets protected.

Silicon Wafer Price Hikes 2027 LTA hikes (Commercial Times): -Polished wafers (memory): +40%+ -Epi wafers (logic chips): +15 to 25% Inference literally runs on silicon. That's why. $MU $SKHY $NVDA $TSM

BofA’s Simon Woo: Samsung’s LTAs are structured on supplier-friendly terms, with price declines capped while price increases remain broadly uncapped. For example, QoQ price declines are limited to less than 5%, whereas increases of 10–20% or more are allowed.

$INTC and $AMD to sign CPU LTAs with Chinese customers for AI DCs (Reuters). - Prices of some CPU products have risen more than 40% in China since the start of the year from sources. - Month-on-month increases topping 10% for some products CPUs were already a bottleneck, following CPU ratios due to AI inference... But the broader trend of LTAs seems to be appearing from: - Memory, with $MU, Samsung, $SNDK, and SK Hynix signing DRAM/NAND LTAs. - Photonics, with $LITE, $COHR signing EML LTAs. And recent Trendforce reports that $AMD and hyperscalers are now pursuing CW LTAs. And I'm sure there's many more from MLCCs to all the way to substrates. +1 for the bottleneck investors... hard to be a "bubble that pops" if you have take or pay demand spanning multiple years.