DanielRomero

Samsung’s China Sales Triple, Surpassing US Sales
Samsung’s sales to China surged 208% YoY to KRW88.6T in H1 2026, overtaking the US at KRW70.7T, as the AI-driven memory upcycle boosted demand and pricing
The semiconductor DS division generated KRW209.2T in revenue, 68.5% of Samsung’s total, and 97.4% of operating profit. Samsung’s DRAM market share also rose to 39.4% from 34.0% in 2025, helped by AI server demand and higher memory prices
Samsung has begun selling HBM4 for Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform, but Nvidia was still not among its five largest customers in H1. The top five were Alphabet,

$NVDA Nears $100B Credit Guarantee for OpenAI’s 10GW Ohio Data Center
Nvidia is nearing a deal to provide around $100B in credit guarantees for OpenAI’s planned 10GW Ohio data center, down from earlier discussions of as much as $250B
The first phase could cost $250B over two years, while the full campus is expected to require at least $500B, including chips, power, construction and other infrastructure
The project is being developed by SB Energy, backed by SoftBank. Nvidia is also considering investing $3B in SB Energy, on top of its existing exposure to OpenAI
The guarantee would help SB Ener

$AMD Taalas Acquisition Aims to Reduce HBM Dependence
AMD is acquiring Taalas, an AI chip startup founded by former AMD and Nvidia architect Ljubisa Bajic, as it expands beyond GPUs into more specialized AI inference architectures
Taalas takes a radically different approach by hardwiring model weights directly into silicon instead of storing them in external HBM. The company says this allows its systems to operate without HBM, advanced packaging, 3D stacking or liquid cooling
Its first HC1 chip, built on TSMC 6nm, reportedly runs Llama 3.1 8B at 16,960 tokens per second per user, 48x faster th

Taiwanese chip design services are exploding
Alchip generated NT$7.43 billion in July revenue, up 108.1% month over month and 181.8% year over year
Global Unichip (GUC) reported NT$5.77 billion, up 17.1% month over month and 158.4% year over year. Faraday posted NT$1.06 billion, down 25% month over month but still up 10% year over year
Alchip said key customer designs have moved into mass production, supporting revenue growth. It also expects continued strength in NRE projects, including accelerator designs based on 2nm technology
GUC continues to benefit from ASIC projects for cloud service p

$TSEM CEO Russell Ellwanger sold $45M worth of shares in August, cutting his position by 45%
The sales were pre-arranged in March

Ex-SK Hynix employee gets 18 months for leaking chip secrets to Chinese firms
The Seoul High Court has upheld an 18-month prison sentence for a former SK Hynix employee who leaked trade secrets related to CMOS image sensor (CIS) technology to Chinese companies while seeking new employment, including at Huawei’s chip unit, HiSilicon

Memory shortage could turn into a glut by 2028, says Kwon Seok-joon, a professor at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul
"Chipmakers are making these plans on the assumption that demand from AI data centers will remain strong for the next two to three years," Kwon said. "But memory demand will fall if returns on AI investments fail to meet expectations."
Kwon said oversupply was less likely in highly customized HBM, but conventional DRAM could face excess capacity beginning in 2029. China, he said, is the largest uncertainty
"China will be the decisive variable," Kwon told the FT. Korean suppliers

$INTC Is Getting Back Into Memory
The company is developing HBM alternatives: ZAM and XBM
Intel is studying next-generation memory architectures such as Z-Angle Memory (ZAM) and Cross-Batch Memory (XBM)
ZAM changes how the memory stack is built. It uses thinner memory layers and denser vertical connections, which allow for more memory capacity, higher bandwidth, and lower power consumption in the same area
XBM changes how the memory connects to the GPU. Instead of HBM’s extremely wide interface and expensive interposer, it uses high-speed serial links such as UCIe

$SKHY believes HBM is not the final answer to the memory bottleneck
VP of Memory System Research Kim Hong-il said SK Hynix is researching other solutions to ease the memory bottleneck, suggesting the company is preparing for the next stage beyond HBM even as it leads the market

I’ll be covering SEMICON Taiwan this year
Quite excited about it

Maybe I’m wrong, but why wouldn’t $TSM hike their prices like memory companies?
They want to preserve their good relationships and don’t want to incentivize others to move to $INTC or Samsung
But that’s happening anyway
They have a quasi-monopoly
Why not take advantage of it and make an insane amount of cash before Samsung and Intel get to large scale and achieve competitive yields in advanced nodes?
It seems almost cowardly not to make the most out of your pricing power when there’s an opportunity to do so
And even if your price hikes make others seem like attractive options because of the re

$GOOG making up 12.6% of Berkshire's portfolio feels crazy
Imagine telling Berkshire investors in 2023 that Warren would become AI-pilled
(Yes, he said it was his choice to buy Google.)

Both Elon Musk and Lip-Bu Tan want $SPCX and $INTC to move into memory manufacturing
If that's not a sign that high memory prices will last longer than most expect, I don't know what is

$AMAT plans to invest to double its system manufacturing capacity by 2028
You heard that right: 2x capacity in 2 years
The demand every company across the semiconductor supply chain is seeing is mental

Terafab has started construction
Insane speed

Jukan does a great job but the timing to capitulate was just SPOT ON