Interesting facts I learned today Pluggables actually use much more InP than CPO. The reason the InP trade was always associated with CPO is that the laser quality and stability is so high it’s like a double bottleneck where a small % of them can get qualified for use thus it greatly multiplies the demand for InP more than normal. Thus I see this “shortage” as extremely levered to CPO working despite having less InP content. I’m not bullish on CPO or NPO for scale up at all and even when it comes to switches and I don’t think those will be widespread for another 3 years at best. Even worst CPO is actually WORST than copper for scale up when it comes to power efficiency because of thermal tuning !!! I found this to be really shocking since that was the only real reason to use it for scale up in the first place. VCSELs seem more promising and don’t have any InP content at all. It’s too early to say if they win as there are many drawbacks but much easier to fix than CPO imo. Then we have the added fact that better chip packaging lowers pressure on networking (or at least keeps it the same) and the added fact that for inference architectures you probably can get away with just a simple 25G interconnect since bandwidth isn’t stressed as much as training. With all this being said, why would you be long the InP supply chain directly or indirectly? Seems like a lot of assumptions baked in that are going to need to become reality fast.

Sanrio is up a whopping 50% since I posted about it. Not trying to do a victory lap at all but just pointing this out to everyone to show the value of diversification outside of the semiconductor sector. Although that is where a lot of the hype is right now it’s also where the most leverage is and is increasingly difficult to find alpha. If the AI revolution is real it shouldn’t just benefit the hardware layer but migrate up to cloud companies, services, and eventually even the customers themselves! With the recent drama I implore you all to start to be more creative and think outside of the box 📦 One of the themes I am most excited about in the coming months is the increase in value for high quality unique data. We’ve already seen the start of this with Getty Images but more licensing deals should come that should truly change the outlook on these businesses !!! Happy hunting everyone, and have a great weekend you all deserve some much needed rest !

Anthropic: “We are disrupting thousands of industries by being able to replicate their products in just a few minutes using AI making all of their hard work pointless.” Also Anthropic: “Chinese AI labs are replicating and ripping off our product making all of our hard work pointless.”

“That supports sustained demand not only for GPUs, but also for HBM, networking, CPUs, storage and broader data-center infrastructure.” You know I wasn’t that worried about the demand before you brought it up to reassure me. It’s giving me “Bear Sterns is fine” vibes.

Leopold is a genius and he’s playing us all like fools. He knew his 13-F would be tracked like a hawk and retail would front run it. So what does he do? He sells everything and flips bearish the day he needs to report…. Then he waits for the perfect time. Drop it right before market open and *kaboom* 💥 he orchestrates a market crash in exactly the securities he wants to buy as retail copy trades him. Now he gets to short the market this morning and make a killing and buy back his positions cheaper. It’s. So. Peak.

The pod cell wagies are seething that I beat all of Wall Street to the most important story in semis and have convinced themselves I just got “lucky.” Intel was sitting out in the open for months. All you had to do was sit down and read 📖📚. But I can’t expect people who’ve never built anything that shipped and couldn’t tell a via from a TSV even if their PM held a gun to their head to understand what was happening in plain sight. Good luck 👍 with your mediocre Sharpe, your 2-and-20 haircut, and your cocaine addiction. After you blow up aping into Samsung at the top, shorting Tower into a squeeze, and going long GlobalFoundries right before the next trough, you’ll get cut, fail to land at the next pod, and end up managing a $40M “family office” for some Greenwich dentist pitching him the same SOXL/SOXS pair trade you read off a sell-side note while your wife cheats on you with a guy who actually knows how to read a data sheet.