Cathie Wood just flagged the sleeper trade inside the AI boom that most people are completely missing.
Everyone has been chasing GPUs. Nvidia, the data center buildout, the chip arms race. That trade has been obvious for two years.
But OpenAI's CFO Sarah Fryer said something quite different: people are going to be really shocked by how agentic AI activates CPUs.
Right now, for every CPU in an AI workload, there are 4 to 5 GPUs. That's the current ratio. Wood thinks that ratio is going to 1 to 1.
Think about what that means. AI inference at scale, agents running autonomously, pipelines executing tasks across systems. The compute mix shifts dramatically away from pure GPU dominance. CPUs become a first-class citizen in the AI stack.
Cathie called it going "back to the future." Intel has taken off. Flex (formerly Flextronics) is booming. Stocks that were giants in the dot-com bubble are resurging because the underlying demand for their products is real again.
The GPU trade made sense at the training stage. You need massive parallel compute to train frontier models.
But agentic AI runs differently. Agents are constantly orchestrating, reasoning, calling APIs, executing workflows. That workload looks a lot more like traditional computing. And traditional computing runs on CPUs.
If Cathie Wood is right about the ratio collapsing to 1:1, the CPU demand signal embedded in the AI buildout is orders of magnitude larger than the market is currently pricing.
$HIMX Q1’26 EARNINGS HIGHLIGHTS
🔹 Revenue: $199.0M (Est. $195M) 🟢
🔹 EPS Per Diluted ADS: $0.046 (Est. $0.03) 🟢
🔹 Gross Margin: 30.4%, at high end of guide (Est. 30%) 🟢
Q2 2026 Guide:
🔹 Revenue: +10.0% to +13.0% QoQ (Est 5%) 🟢
🔹 Gross Margin: Around 32% (Est. 30.8%) 🟢
🔹 EPS Per Diluted ADS: $0.086-$0.103
Segment Performance:
🔹 Large Display Driver Revenue: $24.2M; +11.7% QoQ
🔹 Large Display Driver Revenue Mix: 12.2% of total sales
🔹 Small & Medium Display Driver Revenue: $135.8M; -2.4% QoQ
🔹 Small & Medium Display Driver Revenue Mix: 68.2% of total sales
🔹 Non-Driver Revenue: $39.0M; -7.7% QoQ
🔹 Non-Driver Revenue Mix: 19.6% of total sales
Other Metrics:
🔹 Automotive Driver Sales: Declined double digits QoQ in Q1
🔹 Smartphone IC Sales: Increased QoQ, driven by new OLED solutions entering mass production for a leading smartphone brand’s mainstream model
🔹 Tablet IC Sales: Increased QoQ, driven by renewed mainstream demand and shipments for a new premium OLED tablet
🔹 Automotive Tcon: Hundreds of secured design wins across a broad customer base
🔹 WiseEye: Adopted by a leading brand for smart glasses, with mass production expected later this year
🔹 CPO Gen 1: Small quantity shipments expected in 2H26
🔹 CPO Gen 2: Nearing completion of customer product validation for AI data center applications
🔹 FOCI Stake: 5.36%, valued at NT$4.96B / $156M as of May 7 close
🔹 Patents: 2,564 granted, 331 pending as of March 31, 2026
Financials:
🔹 Operating Profit: $10.2M
🔹 After-Tax Profit: $8.0M
🔹 Operating Expenses: $50.3M; -8.4% QoQ, +9.9% YoY
🔹 Operating Margin: 5.1%
🔹 Cash, Cash Equivalents & Other Financial Assets: $287.6M
🔹 Long-Term Unsecured Loans: $27.0M, including $6.0M current portion
🔹 Inventory: $151.7M
🔹 Accounts Receivable: $190.9M
🔹 DSO: 86 days
🔹 CapEx: $2.9M
Capital Return:
🔹 Annual Cash Dividend: $0.252 per ADS
🔹 Total Dividend Payout: $44M
🔹 Dividend Payout Ratio: 100% of previous year’s profit
🔹 Dividend Payable Date: July 10, 2026
Commentary:
🔸 “We expect upward momentum through the remainder of 2026, supported by a meaningful number of new automotive projects scheduled to enter mass production in the second half.”
🔸 “The positive outlook is also supported by the anticipated growth in our non-driver IC businesses, particularly Tcon and WiseEye AI.”
🔸 “Despite ongoing macro uncertainty, Himax continues to expand beyond its traditional display IC business, focusing on key growth areas including smart glasses, ultralow power AI and CPO.”
🔸 “These emerging technologies present significant growth opportunities that help diversify our revenue base into areas with attractive gross margin profiles and profitability while also strengthening our overall competitiveness.”
Stage 80.
$1,000 worth of $E in Stage 0 is now $23,000.
The returns for early $E buyers keep increasing as we knock down more Stages.
It only gets better from here.