ZERO ALPHA Research Preview | Reframing NVDA NVIDIA’s latest earnings report is the trigger event for a new round of deep research. A company already among the largest in the world just delivered 106% year-over-year revenue growth, with Data Center revenue up 117%. What is striking is not simply that NVIDIA beat expectations again, but that its core business has returned to a doubling growth rate from an already enormous base, even as AMD GPUs, hyperscaler-designed chips, and custom AI accelerators continue to enter the market. That prompted us to go back and re-examine NVIDIA’s full growth trajectory since 2023. When revenue growth, earnings growth, stock-price appreciation, and P/E are viewed together, a very different pattern begins to emerge. The first NVIDIA spring was largely top-down. The market recognized the potential of generative AI first, the stock price moved ahead, and earnings later caught up. The second spring now looks increasingly bottom-up. Revenue growth re-accelerated from: 56% → 62% → 73% → 85% → 106% while valuation multiples moved lower rather than higher. In simple terms: First Spring: P led E. Second Spring: E is beginning to lead P. This earnings report therefore may represent more than another earnings beat. It may be a signal that NVDA itself needs to be reframed. It also raises a broader question: What actually defines a true mega-cap growth stock? A high P/E alone does not define growth. The rarest structure may be a company that is already enormous, still grows its core business near 100%, generates earnings faster than its stock price rises, avoids excessive valuation expansion, and continues to create new TAM. Applying this framework to AMD, MU, SNDK, LITE, ALAB, DELL, and the hyperscalers makes the leadership hierarchy increasingly clear. Many of them have strong growth, but each still carries a weakness in valuation, cyclicality, pricing dependence, platform control, or growth durability. NVDA currently presents a more unusual combination. More importantly, at least four additional growth engines are still developing: Pricing Power Supply Efficiency Open Models Inference Specialization If these continue to develop, today’s NVIDIA may not yet represent the peak of this second growth cycle. And NVIDIA’s second spring may not belong to NVIDIA alone. Memory and storage, optical networking, and AI data-center operators could all benefit if another AI infrastructure expansion cycle is now beginning. ZERO ALPHA will therefore use this earnings report — a mega-cap company returning to 100%+ core growth — as the starting point for a six-part NVDA Research Note series: 1/6. NVDA: The Second Spring — From P Leading E to E Leading P 2/6. NVDA: What Defines a True Mega-Cap Growth Stock? 3/6. NVDA: Why It Is Still in Its Prime, Not Near the Peak 4/6. NVDA: Four New Growth Engines — How Far Can the Second Spring Go? 5/6. NVDA: Why Leaders Lose Leadership — Lessons from Intel, Tesla, and AMD 6/6. NVDA: Will the Second Spring Reignite the Entire AI Infrastructure Chain? Each note will focus on one independent question and can be read on its own. ZERO Insight The most important message from this earnings report may not be that NVIDIA beat expectations again. It may be this: When a company already this large returns to 100%+ core growth while trading at a much lower P/E than during its first AI explosion, what needs to be revalued may not be just NVDA’s stock price — but our entire understanding of mega-cap growth.

ZERO Market Flash August 13, 2026 Eight Days. Why Did the Same NBM Go From Negative to Positive? On August 6, after Sandisk sold off following earnings, we published: “Sandisk Is Giving Up Short-Term Profit Maximization to Secure a Ticket Through the Cycle — NBM.” Our core argument was simple: the market was trading slower quarterly growth, while the more important question was whether Sandisk’s New Business Model could convert NAND cyclicality into long-term earnings visibility. Original post: Eight days later, NBM is still NBM. The business itself did not fundamentally change in eight days. Yet the market reaction was the opposite. After the August 5 earnings report, SNDK sold off sharply. At the August 13 Investor Day, SNDK surged roughly 15% intraday, while MU, WDC, STX and SK hynix all moved higher. What changed? Not the strategy. The communication changed. At earnings, investors already knew the scale of NBM: eight strategic customers, ten long-term agreements, $93.9 billion of minimum contracted revenue, more than 50% of FY2027 bit capacity covered by NBM, and roughly two-thirds expected by FY2028. That told investors one thing clearly: Demand visibility was improving. But one critical question remained: How much cash can this model actually generate for shareholders? Investor Day answered it. For FY2028 through FY2030, Sandisk laid out a remarkably simple long-term financial model: ~80% Non-GAAP Gross Margin ~75% Operating Margin ~50% Adjusted Free Cash Flow Margin And after funding the business: 100% of excess cash returned to shareholders. A complex strategic framework suddenly became simple math. For every $100 of revenue: roughly $80 becomes gross profit, and roughly $50 becomes adjusted free cash flow. That is the key difference. On August 5, Sandisk told the market: What NBM is. On August 13, Sandisk told the market: What NBM is worth. This is very similar to Amazon’s recent communication breakthrough around AI infrastructure spending. Investors had been worried that massive AI CapEx would destroy free cash flow. Amazon reduced the argument to simple economics: servers and network equipment can pay back in under three years, while data centers last far longer and can support multiple generations of server upgrades. Once investors can calculate the payback period and the cash generation that follows, the same CapEx story can be valued very differently. Sandisk has now done something similar. “Long-term customer relationships,” “cycle mitigation,” “AI storage” and “NBM” are strategic concepts that require interpretation. But: 80% Gross Margin 50% Free Cash Flow Margin 100% Excess Cash Return require very little interpretation. Markets do not always lack information. Often, they lack information that can be priced. ZERO Insight On August 5, investors saw NBM but continued to trade the slope of next-quarter growth. On August 13, Sandisk translated NBM directly into margins, free cash flow and shareholder returns through FY2030. The business may not have changed much in eight days. What changed was the market’s ability to calculate its value. Strategy needs to be understood. Cash flow just needs to be calculated. Search Tags: #SNDK# #Sandisk# #NBM# #NAND# #AIStorage# #Memory# #FreeCashFlow# #InvestorDay# #ZEROAlpha#

ZERO Market Flash #003# China's Second AI Shockwave: Is the Market Misreading It Again? Why Cheaper AI May Mean More Infrastructure—Not Less In January 2025, DeepSeek triggered one of the biggest debates in AI investing. The market quickly concluded that if powerful models could be trained with fewer GPUs, future demand for AI infrastructure must decline. NVIDIA lost nearly 17% in a single day, and AI-related stocks sold off across the board. More than a year later, history appears to be repeating itself. Kimi K3 has once again demonstrated that Chinese companies can build highly competitive large language models at significantly lower cost. The market immediately returned to the same question: If AI keeps getting cheaper, will we need fewer GPUs? Ironically, Kimi itself may have provided the opposite answer. Shortly after launch, the company suspended new subscriptions—not because the model had reached its limits, but because user demand had pushed GPU capacity close to its deployment limit. That may be the most important signal from Kimi's release. The first bottleneck wasn't model capability. It was deployment capacity. For the past several years, AI competition has largely been defined by training. Whoever trained larger models with more GPUs was assumed to have the strongest competitive advantage. Under that framework, lower training costs naturally imply lower infrastructure demand. But that assumption depends on one premise: that AI's value is created primarily during training. The more important question is: What happens if cheaper AI leads to dramatically more adoption? A foundation model may be trained once. It may perform billions of inference requests afterward. Over the long run, infrastructure consumption is driven less by training than by continuous deployment. Lower cost reduces the price of each interaction. Growing adoption increases the number of interactions. If usage grows faster than cost declines, total infrastructure demand can continue to expand. That is why Kimi's GPU capacity announcement may matter more than the model itself. The market focused on lower training costs. Reality exposed growing deployment demand. This also gives new context to SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won's observation that the memory industry may gradually shift from a Price-driven cycle to a Volume-driven one. If AI deployment continues to expand, future industry growth may depend less on rising prices and more on rising deployment volumes. Kimi's capacity constraints do not prove that transition has already happened. They do suggest that AI competition is beginning to extend beyond training and into deployment. One year ago, DeepSeek forced investors to rethink training costs. Today, Kimi may be forcing investors to rethink deployment demand. Training creates models. Deployment creates industries. — This article reflects personal research and opinions only and should not be considered investment advice. Please conduct your own research before making investment decisions. ZERO Good is not good enough for conviction.
Only the best deserves concentration. Scientist · Doctor · A9 Investor Search Tags #AI# #ArtificialIntelligence# #GenerativeAI# #LLM# #KimiK3# #MoonshotAI# #DeepSeek# #Inference# #Deployment# #Training# #AIAgents# #GPU# #NVIDIA# #Memory# #HBM# #Semiconductors# #AIInfrastructure# #SKHynix# #Micron# #SNDK# #TechInvesting# #ZERO#

ZERO Market Flash July 16, 2026 Why Korea’s Rate Hike Hit AI Memory First The Bank of Korea raised its benchmark rate by 25 basis points to 2.75% today, its first increase in three and a half years. The decision was not aimed specifically at AI. The central bank cited stronger-than-expected growth, persistent inflation, pressure on the won, and broader financial-stability concerns. South Korea’s semiconductor export and investment boom gave policymakers enough economic strength to tighten. Yet AI memory stocks absorbed the greatest damage. The reason is straightforward: SK hynix and Samsung had become two of the most crowded and leveraged trades in Korea. Single-stock leveraged products tied to those companies expanded rapidly in Korea and Hong Kong, and on some recent trading days accounted for as much as 35% of KOSPI turnover. When rates rose and risk appetite weakened, the most leveraged winners became the first source of liquidity. The KOSPI fell roughly 6.2%–6.4%, while SK hynix dropped about 12% and Samsung nearly 9%. This was not the central bank deliberately “popping the AI bubble.” It was monetary tightening triggering a deleveraging process in a market that had already become structurally fragile. The shock quickly crossed into the United States. SK hynix ADRs, Micron, SanDisk, and Western Digital all came under heavy pressure before the opening bell. The global memory and storage trade is tightly connected through supply chains, capital flows, and investor positioning; forced selling in Seoul was immediately interpreted as a broader warning for AI hardware. Volatility is likely to remain elevated. In the near term, the key question is whether deleveraging has run its course. Over the next several weeks, the more important test will be whether late-July and August earnings confirm that AI data-center demand, memory pricing, and profit growth remain intact. The rate hike was the trigger. Leverage was the amplifier. Fundamentals determine direction. Liquidity determines speed. ⸻ This is not investment advice. Do your own research. ZERO Truth before conclusions. Test Hundreds. Commit to One. Scientist · Doctor · A9 Investor #Korea# #BankOfKorea# #AI# #Semiconductors# #Memory# #SNDK# #MU# #WDC# #STX# #SKHY# #Samsung#