Mizuho is carving out a lucrative niche in Japan’s equity capital market by bridging the ravenous US demand for artificial intelligence fundraising and its home country’s deep pool of retail savings

Mizuho says AI agents could become a “marked risk” for Circle ($CRCL), cutting its price target to $43. The firm estimates agents could shrink USDC’s ($USDC) market cap by $4B-$9B by steering users toward higher-yielding alternatives.

Mizuho on $CRDO: "very positive $MU / CRDO": "Our checks indicate GB300 ramps could continue, significantly stronger than previously expected, into 2H26E and into 2027E - Very Positive MU-CRDO. With GB300 at ~$4M/rack and 145KW, tight memory and land/power/shell (LPS) we see a fat BW tail driving higher rack shipments into 2027E vs VR at ~$8M/rack and ~200KW/800V-400V dual-rail racks. We believe this is consistent with $NVDA recent comments "August Blackwell shipments up 27% m/m" and 2027E GPU shipments up 2x y/y.The upside for connector suppliers comes from increased number of racks/cables, offsetting the downside of lower ASP at 100G/lane vs 200G/lane. For NVDA, we est. ~10% of OctQ units (20% of revenue) on VR/1.6T."

Mizuho on opticals: We see CW laser capacity ramping sharply from ~83M units in 2025 to ~427M by 2029E (Ex-7), driven by SiPho pluggables at 1.6T/3.2T and the initial NPO/CPO transition into 2027-2029E as we see yields improving. We see $COHR profitability lagging as we believe it relies on external lasers for it's leading-edge products (also sourced from LITE) and its business model remains more transceiver-heavy which is lower-margin vs LITE, which we see as more laser-oriented. On margins, LITE continues to ramp GMs sharply from low-30% in early 2024 to the low-50% range in 2026-2028E, while COHR rises more gradually to only the low-40s%, resulting in a 10-11ppt gap. We believe ELS pluggable modules housing a laser source could start to ramp as well. ELS as the back plate pluggable component retains serviceability in case of a component failure, while enabling laser light to transmit the converted optical signal and advance more efficient optical architectures. $LITE has noted orders for ELS have begun, with we believe potentially 2x content opportunity compared to laser chips alone. Ex-China, we believe COHR is the largest transceiver assembler with ~17% market share, differentiated via deep InP vertical integration and high in-house component supply. We note some tailwinds with $NVDA, incl. $2B investment and multi-year CPO/CW supply agreement through YE-2030E. We estimate LITE's Cloudlight business (acquired Nov 2023) is ramping strongly toward ~$900M C26E revenues and ~$1.2B by C27E, but remains smaller at >6% market share. Similar to COHR, LITE is leveraging CW/EML in house manufacturing, but we believe it is entirely reliant on in-house laser chip supply, with a path to mid-30% GM. FN is an important assembler, serving NVDA's designed transceivers alongside merchant OEM contracts. $AAOI (NC) is another key domestic assembler, operating three Taiwan facilities (~795K sq ft) with a new Pearland, Texas facility (800G/1.6T) and an estimated SOP in early 2027E.