Taiwan Semiconductor Manufactur (TSM) news and analysis
A day before Nvidia (NVDA) earnings, OpenAI says its Jalapeño chip beats it on efficiency
OpenAI used a Hot Chips presentation to claim its custom Jalapeño chip beats Nvidia on inference efficiency, one day before Nvidia reports. The benchmarks are real, and so are the caveats.
Nasdaq rebounds before Nvidia (NVDA) earnings, with options pricing a $313 billion swing in the stock
The Nasdaq rose about 0.7% Tuesday, recovering Monday's chip-led drop, one day before Nvidia reports. Wall Street expects about $92 billion in revenue, double a year ago.
Memory chip prices are soaring. So why are Micron (MU), SanDisk (SNDK) and SK Hynix (SKHY) falling?
Korea's chip exports nearly tripled in the first 20 days of August and its semiconductor export price index has quadrupled since 2023. Micron, SanDisk, SK Hynix, Samsung and Kioxia all peaked within one week in June and have fallen 21% to 51% since.
Michael Burry says Etched is 'serious competition' for Nvidia. The catch is what its chip can't run.
Michael Burry, who has bet against Nvidia (NVDA) all year, called AI chip startup Etched 'serious competition' on Tuesday. Etched's Sohu chip is 10 to 20 times faster at one job, but it can't run several of the model types teams deploy most, and it's raising at up to $21 billion before shipping at scale.
Leopold Aschenbrenner's latest filing shows he closed 13 of his 16 options positions and moved more than half his fund into SanDisk and Micron
Situational Awareness LP reported $8.46 billion of put positions on March 31 and one on June 30. The money went into SanDisk, Micron, Nebius and STMicroelectronics.
Anthropic is building AI chips and paying up to $850,000 to teach Claude how to design them.
Anthropic confirmed Wednesday it is building an in-house Custom Silicon team for Claude, the first time it has said so publicly. The job listings pay $320,000 to $485,000 for the chip designers and $500,000 to $850,000 for the researcher teaching Claude to do the design work.
Leopold Aschenbrenner's AI fund sold its levered stock book, longs and shorts, to a single buyer. It was levered as much as four times.
CNBC's David Faber reported that Situational Awareness sold its entire public equities book, longs and shorts together, to a single buyer. The fund reached $24 billion near its highs and ran leverage of as much as four times. Its last public filing shows 62% of a $13.68 billion book was bets against chip stocks, and the stocks it owned outright fell twice as far.
Microsoft (MSFT) grew Azure 43% with $678 billion already booked. That is what Nvidia (NVDA) and Micron (MU) needed to hear.
Microsoft held its capital spending outlook near $190 billion, grew Azure 43% and rose 7.6% after hours. Meta raised its capex range by $10 billion at the low end, missed on earnings at $6.18 against a $7.14 estimate, and fell 9.0%. The market stopped scoring hyperscalers on capex announcements and started scoring them on whether the revenue arrives. That is a better setup for Nvidia, Broadcom and Taiwan Semiconductor than another spending headline, though it does nothing about the memory supply problem that actually caused July.
The Fed held rates 9 to 3. Warsh says the AI capex boom is driving up chip prices.
The Fed held the federal funds target range at 3.5% to 3.75% on July 29 in a 9 to 3 vote, with Beth Hammack, Neel Kashkari and Lorie Logan dissenting in favor of a quarter-point increase. Chairman Kevin Warsh listed the AI capex boom as one of four questions the committee debated and said it is driving up prices of memory and logic chips. The June minutes show many participants expect AI infrastructure demand to keep pressuring technology and electricity prices.
Korea signed $950 billion in AI deals, then foreign investors sold 2.9 trillion won of SK Hynix and Samsung (July 27, 2026)
Monday was the first Seoul session after Korean companies signed about $950 billion of AI agreements in San Francisco. Kospi opened 1.7% higher, then fell almost 2% when China's CXMT closed its Shanghai debut up 465.82%. Foreign investors sold a net 2.9039 trillion won of Kospi stocks, and the two they sold most were SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics.
Samsung just signed a $200 billion deal with Broadcom (AVGO), a 32-year TSMC (TSM) customer.
Samsung Electronics signed a memorandum with Broadcom on July 24 covering more than $200 billion of work over five years, through 2030. Broadcom has had TSMC make its chips since 1994, and about 95% of the wafers it outsourced last year came from there. Samsung's foundry holds 6.5% of the world market against TSMC's 72%, and Seoul had closed for the week before any of it was announced.
Tesla (TSLA) and Alphabet (GOOGL) are falling hard. The rest of the AI trade isn't (July 23, 2026)
Tesla and Alphabet kept falling through Thursday morning even as chipmakers, neoclouds and photonics stocks held up fine. Oil topped $100 a barrel after Trump threatened to bomb Iranian infrastructure over any new attack on shipping.
Alphabet (GOOGL) raised AI capex to $205 billion, its third hike this year. Nvidia (NVDA) and Broadcom (AVGO) barely moved after hours
Alphabet raised its 2026 capex guidance to $195-205 billion during Wednesday's call, its third increase this year, and GOOGL fell as much as 5% in extended trading. But the chip and power stocks that are supposed to benefit from that spending, Nvidia, Broadcom, TSMC, Micron, Vistra and Constellation, barely moved.
Micron (MU), SK Hynix and AMD just gave chip stocks their first back-to-back gain in two weeks (July 21, 2026)
Micron (MU) closed up about 12 percent, SK Hynix's ADR about 14 percent, and AMD 8 percent Tuesday, chip stocks' first back-to-back gain in two weeks. A Bank of America upgrade on memory demand and a new AMD-Microsoft Azure deal did the heavy lifting.
Microsoft (MSFT) is testing Moonshot's Kimi K3 for Copilot to cut its Azure AI bill by $600 million
Microsoft is testing Moonshot's Kimi K3 for Azure and Copilot, hoping to cut AI costs by $600 million, the same week the model's launch gave chip stocks a rough ride and its maker began prepping a $30 billion Hong Kong IPO.
I gave five AIs a pretend $10,000 to pick 5 tech stocks. Four bought Nvidia (NVDA). Claude went rogue.
ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Meta AI and Claude each picked five tech stocks to hold for six months. Four bought Nvidia. Claude went the other way. Every pick is here and the scoreboard runs monthly.
SK Hynix (SKHY) and Samsung make almost 80% of the world's AI memory. That's why Micron (MU) and US chip stocks crashed again (July 16, 2026)
Chip stocks fell hard again on July 16: SK Hynix's US shares (SKHY) closed down 13.7%, SanDisk (SNDK) 12.6%, Western Digital (WDC) 9.2%, Micron (MU) 5.7%, even after TSMC's record quarter. The reason traces back to Korea, where Samsung and SK Hynix make close to 80% of the world's AI memory, and to China's CXMT pricing an $85.7 billion IPO the same day.
TSMC beat earnings for a seventh straight quarter. The whole chip sector sold off anyway, and health care picked up the money.
TSMC beat Q2 earnings for a seventh straight quarter and raised its own 2026 capex forecast, an unusually bullish print. The semiconductor sector sold off anyway, continuing this week's memory-chip unwind, while health care, led by big earnings beats from UnitedHealth and Abbott, picked up the money instead.
Semiconductors are having their worst day in weeks. Tomorrow, TSMC gets a chance to reverse it.
Semiconductor stocks are having their worst day in weeks, Micron, SanDisk, and SK Hynix's ADR all down double digits. TSMC reports Q2 earnings before the bell tomorrow, scores an 88 out of 100 on our Stock Scorer, and might be the one print that stops the bleeding.
We built a stock score tool. It gave Intel a D, and I bought the stock anyway.
One pick in every layer of the AI hardware stack, each one graded by the SEC-filings scoring tool we just built. Four picks agree with the tool: NVDA, WDC, TSM, VRT. Micron is a partial. INTC and COHR do not agree with the tool at all, and I am holding both anyway.
Inside the AI hardware stack, from Nvidia's chips to the grid that powers them
An AI data center is seven layers of hardware: GPUs, memory, storage, CPUs, networking, manufacturing, and power. Here's the full map, with the public companies behind each layer and where the bottlenecks actually are.
Hyperliquid's Sunday tape shows chip and memory stocks bouncing hard
Western Digital, SanDisk and Micron are all up more than 6% from Thursday's close on Hyperliquid's 24/7 stock perpetuals. Here is the Sunday snapshot, and why it is not the same as Sunday night's real reopen.
Micron (MU), Nebius (NBIS) and chip stocks jump on Hyperliquid's weekend tape
Real markets are closed for July 4th, but tech and chip stocks are trading green right now on Hyperliquid's 24/7 stock perpetuals. Micron, Marvell and Nebius lead the bounce, and the S&P 500 and Nasdaq perpetuals are up too. Here is the full read, and why Monday could look nothing like this.
Chips had their third worst day of 2026 and the S&P barely noticed (MU, INTC)
The S&P 500 closed within a whisker of flat on July 1 and the chip trade still had its third worst day of the year. Micron fell 10.5 percent, Intel lost 9 percent, and Meta gained almost 9 percent on the other side. Here is the damage report.