I respect Jukan, but I feel a little frustrated whenever I see this kind of argument. You can build any scenario around plausible assumptions, and yes, of course, the outcome will follow from those assumptions. If you assume demand collapses, customers accumulate inventory, and contract terms get renegotiated, then naturally, memory companies’ revenue and profits will decline. But honestly, this feels like the perspective of analysts who treat memory as just a commodity you manufacture and sell, without properly understanding the technological changes taking place in custom memory. Who exactly are these customers we are talking about when we say they could cancel LTAs or defer deliveries? They are the very customers working with memory companies to design the next generation of HBM and 3D stacked DRAM. After jointly designing and validating these products, can customers really cancel those volumes so easily or push deliveries out by one or two years? How would they manufacture their own products, which were designed around that memory? What happens to the launch and system deployment schedules they have already coordinated? Switching suppliers also raises questions of design compatibility and requalification. If you are going to argue that contracts can be adjusted, you also need to explain what that decision would mean for the very customers canceling them. This is one of the biggest reasons I keep saying that memory is no longer the same cyclical industry it used to be. The parties to these LTAs are already tied together from the design stage. But if you still view memory simply as a commodity where rising prices lead to more production, and inventory buildups lead to price cuts or canceled orders, you will inevitably miss this shift in the technical and business relationships. One more thing. These arguments about a collapse in memory demand seem to assume that planned AI data center investments will be canceled on a massive scale, or that AI infrastructure expansion will slow so substantially that memory demand falls sharply. What interests me more than whether contracts can be adjusted is why you expect demand to weaken that dramatically in the first place. I think it would be more realistic to discuss directly whether the AI era we expect will actually fail to materialize, and whether much of the AI infrastructure investment currently planned will disappear. If that is your outlook, I can at least understand why you would expect memory demand to collapse and customers to cut volumes even for products they have jointly developed.

Heard a funny story about Terafab. Apparently, Elon went to an equipment supplier and confidently declared that he didn’t need process control (basically, inline metrology). He figured they could just catch the defects during wafer testing at the end. Then he came back later saying, “Okay, I was wrong. Can you sell me those tools?” 🤣 Honestly, that should have been obvious. TSMC and Samsung aren’t stupid. There’s a reason they use all that equipment. It comes down to economics… Still, I like that he’s willing to learn as he goes. 👍

These days, you can hardly read a semiconductor news story without hearing about substrate bottlenecks. Okay, so we get it. But do you know which substrates are we actually talking about? In this article, I’m gonna explain the types of substrates and what they do, then looks at why AI chips use more substrate, why substrate supply cannot be expanded quickly, and why larger substrates yield fewer good units. It then briefly covers where the supply chain is most blocked, which companies keep the profits, and who secures substrate supply. I am confident that once you have read it, you will be able to tell for yourself which companies each piece of substrate news favors.

I’ve worked hard to bring you semiconductor technology and insights from the industry faster and more clearly than anyone else, and I think I’ve done a pretty good job. In particular, I’ve focused on quickly getting up to speed on complex technologies and explaining them in a way that people without a technical background can understand. When it comes to investing, though, I’m still learning. An irrational market like this gives me plenty of lessons. Many of my subscribers are far better investors than I am, so I see this Substack chat as a chance to share my insights and learn from them as well. Come join me on Substack. Let’s talk and learn from each other.

Thoughts on Memory 1. I do not agree with the idea of a memory supply glut in 2029. I expect demand growth to accelerate further. 2. Around 2029 to 2030, the memory business will undergo a fundamental transformation. Think of how we no longer view NVIDIA as simply a gaming GPU company. 3. China will remain a competitive threat, but equipment constraints will make capacity expansion harder than many expect. Its impact on the supply and demand balance in 2029 will also be smaller than the market fears. 4. I expect memory stocks to begin rerating within the next six months. This also ties into a broader rerating of the KOSPI. 5. I believe memory needs to rerate first for other AI themes to follow. That view has not changed. Source: me

What’s next for memory in the AI era? 🔎 At OCP Global Summit 2026, SK hynix showcased next-generation memory solutions and live demos of memory-centric server systems. Explore our vision for AI infrastructure. 👇 #SKhynix# #OCPGlobalSummit#

Damnang is a voice of reason and technical expertise in a sea of self-serving and manipulative conjecture. I’m biased because I’m very long memory and agree with him, but I believe that is because we are both right when signal is filtered from the noise. $MU $SNDK

Thoughts on Memory 1. I do not agree with the idea of a memory supply glut in 2029. I expect demand growth to accelerate further. 2. Around 2029 to 2030, the memory business will undergo a fundamental transformation. Think of how we no longer view NVIDIA as simply a gaming GPU company. 3. China will remain a competitive threat, but equipment constraints will make capacity expansion harder than many expect. Its impact on the supply and demand balance in 2029 will also be smaller than the market fears. 4. I expect memory stocks to begin rerating within the next six months. This also ties into a broader rerating of the KOSPI. 5. I believe memory needs to rerate first for other AI themes to follow. That view has not changed. Source: me

Since the market took a turn for the worse, some people have started mocking me, and the mood on X has been pretty subdued. Still, I’ll keep doing what I’ve always done, technical analysis. I’ll publish my article on lasers as soon as I finish putting it together.