Brandon Tseng cofounded Shield AI with his older brother, Ryan, after serving seven years in the military. Today Shield AI is one of the most valuable defense tech unicorns in the nation, worth $12.7 billion after its most recent fundraising in March. Check out more veterans taking on the. tech boom: Photo: Aaron Kotowski for Forbes

Resonac (TSE: 4004) and Intel ($INTC) are building a panel the same size. Not a similar size. The same number. Resonac's APLIC line in Ibaraki runs 510x515mm and makes organic interposers of 8 to 12 reticles. Intel presented a glass core panel at ECTC this year. 510x515mm, 24 layers. Same rectangle, different material. So the material is not settling first. The format is. Why a panel at all. Resonac's own February deck answers it, and the answer is a size problem. Its estimate has package interposers growing more than 80% by 2030, from 70x80mm today toward 100x100mm. And 8 to 12 reticles works out to roughly 83x83mm up to 101x101mm. The equipment slide and the market slide are describing the same object. Meanwhile the wafer does not grow. It has been 300mm for over two decades. That is the argument. A 510x515mm panel is 262,650 mm2 against 70,686 for a 300mm wafer. About 3.7 times the area in one pass. A Resonac fellow put the reason in a physics journal last year, and it is not a performance argument. A wafer leaves the front end worth 300,000 to 500,000 yen. Then it gets diced, and back end materials are applied to chips worth 300 to 500 yen each. The back end lost the batch and has been shaving cost ever since. One more number lines up. The same deck has substrate layer count rising 15 to 20% from 20 to 22 layers, which lands between 23 and 26. Intel's glass panel has 24. So glass is not the story. Glass is one of two answers to a story about batch size, and Intel is building to a range a Japanese materials company published in February. Being fair: those growth figures are Resonac's own estimates and the slide says so. The fellow works for the company building the organic line. His margin figures are 2021 to 2023 peaks. What would change my read: if the two panels stop converging. If Intel's glass moves to 600mm square, the format is not settled and the material fight has not started. Sources, in order: Resonac Holdings, Phase 2 strategy presentation, 13 February 2026, pages 13, 18 and 19. Intel, ECTC 2026. Seiichi Kondo, Resonac fellow, Oyo Buturi volume 94 number 6, 2025. My read, not advice. The area ratio and the reticle arithmetic are mine.

Furukawa Electric (TSE: 5801) reported 25.5 billion yen of operating profit for the June quarter. Its entire first half last year was 19.4 billion. Full year guidance went from 95 billion in May to 123 billion in August. Up 92.6 percent on last year's 63.9 billion. This is a cable maker, and the guidance is doing what a semiconductor name usually does. Source: Furukawa Electric, Q1 FY March 2027 results, 6 August 2026.

Fuji Electric (TSE: 6504) A company can raise guidance and mean very little by it. What it cannot soften is when it has scheduled the money to go out. Fuji Electric (TSE: 6504) reported the June quarter with its data center power line down 3 percent in revenue. Same day, in the supplementary data file, that line is planned up 25 percent for the half and up 23 for the year. The capex schedule in the same file says how. Segment capital spending, June quarter actual and first half plan: Energy: 1.7bn yen actual, 10.5bn planned for the half Semiconductors: 2.8bn actual, 7.3bn planned Subtract the quarter from the half and you have the plan for the September quarter. Energy 8.8bn against 1.4bn a year ago, six times. Semiconductors 4.5bn against 13.7bn, one third. Company total 19.1bn against 18.2bn. The quarter as a whole barely moves. What is inside it moves six times one way and down two thirds the other. Context that cuts against the excitement. Company capex peaked at 85.2bn yen in the year to March 2025, came in at 56.7bn last year, and is planned at 56.0bn this year. This is not a spending cycle. It is a reallocation inside a shrinking one, and that is a different thing to own. Energy money buys new buildings at three sites, Malaysia, Kobe and Tsukuba, and moves switchgear production from Chiba to Kawasaki. The stated reason is demand for substation equipment, and the order book names data centers and overseas semiconductor plants among its drivers. One number for scale on the other side. Semiconductor depreciation and lease cost was 8.9bn in the quarter against 2.8bn of new spending. That segment is still paying for the last cycle while this one gets funded. The US and Korean names in this layer are well covered. Eaton ($ETN), GE Vernova ($GEV), HD Hyundai Electric (KRX: 267260), Hyosung Heavy Industries (KRX: 298040). This is the Japanese one I had never written about until today. What would change my read: the September quarter closes in six weeks. If energy capex lands near 1.4bn again instead of 8.8bn, the reallocation was a schedule and not a decision. Guidance is what a company says. A capex schedule is when it has to write the cheque. Sources, in order: Fuji Electric, Q1 FY2026 supplementary data file, pages P1, P3 and P9. Fuji Electric, Q1 results presentation, 30 July 2026. Fuji Electric, FY2026 management plan, 28 April 2026. My read, not advice. The September quarter figures are the half year plan minus the reported quarter.

Earnings Takeaways- Tower Semiconductor (TSEM) • 2Q26 revenue $460mn (+24% YoY), GP +72%, OP +125%; EPS $0.79 a beat, driven by higher utilization, better mix & accelerating silicon photonics demand
• 3Q26 guide: record $520mn (+31% YoY, +13% QoQ) suggests a strong growth 
• The co targets sequential revenue & profit improvement through 2026
• Raised 2026/27 EPS to $4.5 / $10; Maintain Buy, TP $260 (26x 2027E)
• $1.3bn contract SiPho revenue locked for 2027 from hyperscalers
• 2028 wafer order commitments expected to exceed 2027 levels
• Additional new SiPho customer qualifications underway
• Leading specialty foundry for NPO (near-package optics); CPO longer-term
• Capacity ramp focused on Japan Fab 7; NPO volume ramp expected 2H27 #TSEM# #Towersemi#