Despite those [Meta Cloud] efforts, Meta is still hungry for even more computing power, the spokesperson said. It is still moving forward with plans for expensive new data centers and recently inked major computing deals with CoreWeave Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Oracle Corp., among others.

In fact, just days before the original Bloomberg article on Meta Cloud, Meta leadership has been making under-the-radar comments about the need for capacity and perceived ROI.

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In news that appears positive for sentiment on Anthropic and OAI:

Chinese authorities have held meetings with top tech firms over the past month ​about potentially restricting overseas access to China’s most advanced AI models, including those yet to be released, three people familiar with the discussions said.

At the meetings, led by China's Ministry of Commerce, participants discussed putting limits on the most advanced AI models — ⁠both closed-source and more open versions, according to two of the sources.

Anyone interested in the bureaucracy of AI regulation in China and the United States might find this piece helpful.

Deepseek developing its own inference chip (RT)

DeepSeek’s effort remains at an early stage, with the company reaching out ​to external partners and holding discussions with chip-design, foundry and memory companies, the three sources said. The effort began about a year ago, one of the people said.

Kyber delay

Funda’s channel checks in early June suggested that the rack architecture for Rubin Ultra is highly likely to continue using Oberon, while Kyber will not be adopted until Feynman.

This was followed by a note from Jefferies in mid-June, noting that the Kyber delay was discussed as early as May and that the firm prefers upstream PCB names to downstream names, citing price hikes driven by industry wide supply tightness:

Nittobo

GS raises FY3/27E–FY3/29E OP forecasts by 2% to 26% and increases 12m TP to ¥4,820.

GS thinks the Street got overly greedy, pricing in a massive 60% cumulative price hike for T-glass and proceeded to sell off when management did not deliver the hikes. The market is also terrified that new glass-core substrates will soon replace T-glass.

GS argues the sell-off is overdone. Industry checks reveal that glass-core adoption in ABF substrates won't happen before 2030 due to unresolved micro-cracking issues.

T-glass demand remains tight, and competitors are struggling with product quality and yields.

GS sees possible catalyst in new capacity expansion plans in FY3/27, which will likely come with a fresh round of ~15% price hikes for FY3/29 to ensure adequate ROI.

I read this as implying that GS don’t see any price hikes until the new capacity is online.

Kingboard

Having last raised prices on 16 June, Kingboard raised prices again yesterday. That is apparently 9 price increases since 2025:

Citi sees the correction as a buying opportunity, lifting its price target from HK$ 120 to HK$130:

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Remarkable 23% swing from the low today.

Kioxia announced the production of 10th Gen 3D Flash at Kitakami 2 today as well as the shipping of samples to customers.

I understand UBS also published a note forecasting 28%/11% ASP increase in Q3/Q4 ‘26.

Perhaps more important was the slew of notes defending Meta Cloud, which seemed to outweigh the Reuters report today of Meta’s townhall:

• In a very quick response to the original Bloomberg article, Funda framed Meta Cloud as the capex cycle maturing and Meta placing different GPU generations into their best-fit economic uses, noting that it is not contradictory to lease out older accelerators while renting new ones for continued frontier model training.

• That view seemed to gain traction. Remarkably, UBS’s report of feedback from clients seemed to repeat Funda’s take:

Relying solely on Meta’s move to lease out is not enough to determine the overbuild. Leasing out and continuously expanding capacity can happen same time (e.g. XAI). XAI is both leasing out GPUs and also expanding new generations of computing clusters. Meta itself also raise 2026 capex budget and has signed long term purchase agreement with NVDA through 2030s. underlying logic could relate to High-end new GPUs (such as GB300) are prioritized for internal use in cutting-edge large model training; previous-generationH100/H200 GPUs are used for inference, fine-tuning, and training small to medium models, and are leased out during idle periods to maximize resource utilization.

• SemiAnalysis argues that Meta’s capacity under construction just keeps accelerating, and that 2027 capex will be “shockingly high”.

• Alexandr Wang responded to some of the reports, and this one caught my eye:

• Jefferies struck a bullish note: “Overbuild narrative is backward: META is late to AMZN’s AWS playbook, monetizing excess compute to lift utilization, improve ROIC, and boost CF to fund more, not less, capex.”

• MS were more measured, expressing caution on whether Meta could pivot to a “full functioning hyperscale business with an API/suite of models and tools”.

Sumco +11%

We first flagged Sumco on 8 May after investors started discussing a tightening silicon wafer market.

We flagged Sumco again mid-week as it jumped 17% and has now followed through with another 11% to close out a strong week:

Today might have been helped by a note from Citi flagging this exchange:

Shin-Etsu Shareholders’ Meeting Q&A

Regarding silicon wafers, how do you distinguish between AI-related fields and other fields? Also, according to analysts, demand forecasts for semiconductors at the beginning of this year and up until around April predicted a correction phase from the second half of this fiscal year onward, but this has now changed. Does the company feel that demand is stronger than previously forecasted as of June?

In the case of silicon wafers, our users are divided into various types, such as customers who specialize in memory or customers who specialize in analog ICs for automobiles. We don't know exactly what percentage of the silicon wafers we sell are used in what applications, but by looking at the business activities of our silicon wafer customers and conducting sales interviews, we are able to make forecasts and estimates of how much silicon wafer is needed in each field. Currently, the proportion of silicon wafers used for AI has risen considerably to 20 to 30 percent. Regarding the second question, in January and February of this year, we expected moderate growth in electronic materials in general, but for silicon wafers, for example, there were still many customers with large inventories, and the prevailing opinion was that demand would not grow that much. However, from around May and June, the AI market has been stronger than expected, and as customers have had to produce more semiconductor chips, they have looked into various materials and have come to realize that the next two years will be tough. Demand for silicon wafers is increasing from May to June. We will examine how much it will grow in the second half of the year and what the outlook is for next year, but relatively speaking, we have the feeling that it is moving upward compared to our forecast at the beginning of the year

As we flagged on 8 May, Arista was already calling out a wafer shortage on their last earnings call.

Citi inteprets Shin-Etsu’s comments to mean that a growing number of customers are worried about the possibility of a wafer shortage in 2027 and 2028, and speculate that LTA negotiations are proceeding in Shin-Etsu’s favour.

Nan Ya Plastics

A favourite in the Collyer Bridge chat, this also closed out a strong week:

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Memory weakness?

This is thought to be a reference to Jerry Tworek at Core Automation.

Memory: Customary cooling announcement weighs on the legacy memory names, including Macronix.

Digitimes:

GigaDevice Technology Group Co. said in a risk alert filing on June 30, 2026, that the memory chip industry has historically shown clear cyclical volatility. It added that current product prices are already at historically high levels, and that the trend of continued steep increases is unlikely to last. As supply and demand move back toward balance, major product prices could fall sharply, weighing on its storage business margins and overall profitability.

China Times.

Memory: NAND overweight at the new SA / TEMA DISK ETF (PR)

MLCC: Yageo price increases

To add to Jukan’s tweet: the price increase will extend beyond distributors to include direct sales customers such as ODMs and EMS, which is expected to significantly boost future revenue and profits (Source)

Nittobo (Nikkei Asia)

Sumco +17%

Think we can attribute strength in silicon wafer names to a sell-side note today…

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Exponential View: AI demand is “revenue-validated”.

• Generative AI ecosystem revenue has already surpassed $175 billion annualized.

• It is just about covering the infrastructure bill.

• The investment debate is not ‘is there demand?’ but ‘can falling token prices drive enough volume and margin to earn back the AI CapEx cycle?’

  • Token volume growing 14x YoY.

Memory / Semicap:

• We are expecting more details of capex plans from Samsung and SK Hynix this week.

• On the All-in Podcast out over the weekend, Gavin Baker said he and Elon think had the DRAM / HBM bottleneck is the most important bottleneck:

The bottleneck that matters is DRAM. This is the most important bottleneck simply because memory capacity and bandwidth are foundational to the performance of every AI model. So, this is the most important bottleneck. Elon is focusing the Terrafab on memory because he sees it as the most important bottleneck.

Not lasers, not capacitors, not power power supply semiconductors, not NAND, not HDDs. DRAM.

Both points bullish for semicap.

Frontier Models and Open Source Models

Separately, Gavin on All-In Podcast on Anthropic:

I think Anthropic is worth $3 trillion today.

They're going to end this year well over 100 billion.

What's the 28 number? Is it 200? Is it 300 billion? It's probably not going to trade at 10 times that number. And it will be very profitable at that scale because it'll be inference dominated and people reporting they have 85% gross margins on inference

Side-note, the Funda Anthropic ARR tracker is at $63.7B:

Gavin on GLM 5.2:

I do think how good GLM 5.2 is has challenged some of my beliefs. And there was a great post from a TPU engineer that for sure distillation has happened. There's been an immense amount of distillation. No question.

But now that this model is so good, it is good enough to do its own RL and you know the kind of cat may be out of the bag.

Now I don't think we really know how good Mythos is. We don't really know how good the next OpenAI model is. We haven't seen the next SpaceX model. So maybe that gap opens up again.

But either way, I profoundly believe the future is composable models and you're going to every enterprise. You're going to have a what Andre Karpathy called a council of LLMs.

What I mean by a composable model when you have kind of um, you know, kind of a symphony of models working together with kind of the frontier models being, you know, maybe the conductors.

(Essentially he means most of the work being done by open source and the most difficult queries going to frontier models).

A common misconception that a lot of people have is that open- source models are, you know, somehow bad for AI. They're awesome for the AI infrastructure providers.

They just shift economic value from the margins of the frontier labs to the infrastructure. And that's not bad for AI.

But I do think there's still a role for these frontier models and it may be true to date frontier tokens are capturing 90% of the economic value and open source tokens are probably 80% plus of tokens processed and those ratios may be here to stay but I just think composable models are the future.

Sacks:

So we now have a Chinese openweight model that is as good as the currently available models from OpenAI and Anthropic. And look, this is a point I’ve been making really since I joined the administration is that we are in a very competitive situation with China.

I’ve been saying this from the beginning. Our whole AI strategy from the get- go was about winning this AI race, defining it as a race, as being globally competitive.

And we cannot afford to do things unnecessarily that slow our companies down.

But look, my view on it is we should not reward Daario by giving him exactly what he's always craved, which is some sort of labyrinthine government approval process that does reward regulatory capture. So I hope that very soon now do think that as long as Anthropic has resolved the jailbreak issue then I do think they should be allowed to come back to market and similarly for open AI. I don't think we should be delaying them unnecessarily.

CXMT

SemiAnalysis also sees Naura as a big CXMT WFE winner:

There is a long discussion of CXMT in the 27 June thread in the Substack chat, including thoughts on beneficiaries and what Apple is trying to achieve.

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Neocloud contract pricing

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Separately, Funda is ramping up its expert interview offering this month. A snapshot of some of the interviews published last week:

Led by the same analysts writing the reports, we are aiming to complete a hundred calls a month, summarised in a weekly update to clients.

The firm prides itself on the quality of the channel checks that feed into the reports as well as how quickly it responds to discourse dominating the AI trade (e.g. TurboQuant and InP export restrictions).

I’m particularly looking forward to being able to address more hot button topics by tapping on our growing expert network. For example, we could run a call on each of the topics discussed in the email below. Watch this space.

Please reach out to sales@funda.ai for more details.

Rigaku: 3,100 yen target from JPM

I believe the “Growing Demands” column describes an X-Ray application that Optical / CD cannot adequately perform.

PCB Supply Chain: Optical module upgrades benefit Compeq, ZDT and Unimicron (Commercial Times)

The increasing scale of AI clusters is driving demand for high-speed optical communications. With 800G optical modules entering mainstream deployment and 1.6T products being rapidly adopted, high-end PCB designs are moving towards higher layer counts, lower-loss materials, and mSAP (modified semi-additive process) manufacturing. Industry experts point out that the upgrade of optical modules not only boosts shipments but also raises the technical threshold and unit price of PCBs, benefiting supply chain companies such as Complux (2313), Zhen Ding-KY (4958), and Unimicron (3037).

Another bullish piece on Unimicron.

Kingboard:

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Optics: Weakness yesterday attributed to Dongshan expansion plans

Sorry, don’t have a better source than Futu.

Some concerns about VCSEL as well, and I’d expect Funda will have something to say about that soon.

Kingboard Holdings / Laminates

Doubled since it was flagged to us on 12 May. Price hikes + vertical integration make this quite a popular name with Asian investors.

On top of that, AT&S will potentially be this newsletter’s first 10 bagger (more on that below the paywall).

The “bottleneck trade” is very much alive, contrary to sniping on X. We’ll follow up on our Musashi-adjacent idea soon.

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Semicap: Penang / Kulim takeaways

I was in Penang last week and have been reporting live to the Substack chat, which has been very entertaining.

Takeaways below:

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Back for a conference in Singapore before heading to Penang / Kulim for the weekend.

Marvell: Production capacity secured to meet 50% DC growth target this year and 55% in 2027 (Digitimes)

Following on from S&P inclusion we got this Digitimes interview:

• COO says that current revenue forecasts were foreseen years ago; have been providing five year projections to suppliers since 2021; built trust with suppliers by meeting forecasts.

• If Marvel can secure more supply today, revenue growth would be higher.

• Supply chain constraints actually good for smoothing out cyclicality.

• “Products incorporating Marvell IP come in many forms, sometimes an XPU, sometimes a network interface controller, sometimes an accelerator device, or a storage accelerator, or a new memory computing device. There's a misconception that Marvell is in the XPU business, but the company is actually in the I/O business.”

  They are going to need all the production capacity they can get to meet Mizuho’s expectations for the ASIC ecosystem:

  ---

  Macronix / Yageo : May revenue out today

  

  Macronix

  

  Yageo

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  AP Memory / Intel

I’m told there was some enthusiasm about silicon capacitators at Computex, though the focus seemed to be on UMC and PSMC.

“Intel’s EMIB-T packaging will see large-scale adoption in 2027, while Google TPU v8e and Meta’s in-house CPU have already confirmed their use.”

From the chat this morning, AP Memory missed May revenue expectations:

Notably, sitting at the top of that list, Kingslide is hosting investor meetings in New York this week. Kingslide was also called out in MS’s Computex note yesterday, observing that Kingslide is the unsung hero found everywhere on the Computex floor.

Rigaku: Bruker also flags H2 inflection, suggests doubling of business by end of 2026

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It has been a very productive week at Computex - Fabian and I met Semi-Twitter celebrities and supply chain sleuths, and refined our booth-hopping technique.

It will take some time to piece together and digest all our notes. In the meantime:

• The FundaAI team is tracking implications for the likes of Marvell, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, Micron, Sandisk and Kioxia. Also in the background we have analysts dropping notes on Coherent Lite, NPO (institutional report), and Cybersecurity.

• Funda also tracks revenue growth at frontier AI labs, now getting more attention because Sam said token costs is becoming a “huge issue”.

• We have at least one new pick for this newsletter arising out of Computex, could well be our pick for June. It has barely run up despite being in a very hot space right now.

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Memory: SA plot twist; Jensen in Korea; Only YMTC and Kioxia adding Nand capacity

So the SA note yesterday carried the rather bearish headline:

Thanks for the Memories - VR NVL72 SOCAMM DRAM Capacity per rack Cut in Half.

But ends with:

We believe the reduction in SOCAMM content for Vera Rubin is being driven by constrained DRAM supply across all three memory suppliers.

Also not sure what the market is doing selling off Hynix and Samsung when Jensen is Korea and when the media feels like it needs to report what he is eating:

Samgyeopsal (pork belly) and soju are the likely dinner menu items.

Separately, Jukan reported today that SK Hynix is not adding Nand capacity:

FPS: +8% yesterday

We hit the double on FPS yesterday since we first flagged it in the chat. Thanks again to Guasty Winds for the tweet about it dropping below $30.

We have also been helped by the White House designating electrical infrastructure as essential to national defence as well as this chart:

We are going to comp folks for great contributions like this going forward.

Victory Giant: -11% as US weighs subsidies to boost domestic PCB manufacturing

Some attributing to this story.

From the chat:

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In particular, pleasantly surprised to learn today that silicon capacitators are levered to TPUs.

As always, thank you to those who flagged these to me.

MLCCs

MLCCs continue to be a US investor favourite.

A few notes out this week circling around the idea that the AI server is creating a structural, multi-year boom in high-end MLCCs.

GS put it most bluntly: they think this AI-driven MLCC cycle "will be the largest and longest in history," and that we're "still in the early stages."

Their note of a sell-side meeting with Murata Manufacturing held on 27 May:

1. Murata previously assumed AI infrastructure investment would peak around 2028, now sees possibility it extends to around 2030, partly because power shortages stretch the build-out timeline. On top of that, management flagged “edge AI” devices — autonomous driving/software-defined vehicles and humanoid robots — as a second growth wave over the next few years, playing to Murata’s strength in compact, lightweight components.

2. Pricing - Rather than hiking prices on identical parts, Murata sets fresh (higher) prices on each new-generation product as platforms change annually and bills-of-material climb. Management frames this as mix improvement; Goldman calls it a de facto price hike.

3. Silicon capacitors — Management acknowledged that TSMC, SEMCO, and Murata all have silicon capacitor technology. For PKG substrates with embedded capacitors, silicon capacitors are thin, enabling good surface flatness and high connection reliability with circuits. On the other hand, MLCCs are superior in terms of capacitance and customer usability. The company suggested that it is also developing MLCCs with high connection reliability and will be able to handle either approach.

Yageo

From the chat:

…its not true that Yageo is getting bid because of the spillovers going to tier 2 players.

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JPM continues to see semi trade extending its longevity supported by:

• Agentic AI benefits gradually materialize in real life applications across industries.

• Emerging adoptions in physical AI, like robotics, autonomous driving.

Both driving CSPs and enterprises to invest more.

JPM continues to like AI beneficiaries in Asian tech supply chains, naming TSMC, ASE, Alchip, Unimicron, SEC, and SK Hynix.

Citi with similar comment noting NVIDIA suggested the tightest constraints are not in GPU silicon alone, but broader AI system deployment capacity. Key bottlenecks now include HBM supply, advanced packaging, optical interconnects, liquid cooling systems, rack integration, and power infrastructure.

FundAI made these observations more than a month ago here.

Taiyo Yuden: +11% on Friday after sell-side roundtable on Thursday.

GS, MS and Citi published after the meeting with Buy (¥7,100), EW (¥4,700) and Sell (¥2,900). The stock ended the week at ¥9,100.

• MS says Taiyo Yuden’s MLCC market share (11.3%) is third place behind Murata (40.8%) and Semco (22.5%)

• AI server MLCC sales grew ~30-35% YoY in FY3/26 and guided to accelerate to +80% YoY in BOTH FY3/27 and FY3/28 (a ~3.2x jump in two years).

  • However, servers were only ~6% of total company sales in FY3/26 and GS adds that MLCCs for servers were just over 9% of total MLCC sales.

• Taiyo Yuden forecasts 32% CAGR for AI server MLCC demand 2026-2030 (4x over five years), which the company itself frames as conservative.

• No MLCC price hikes this fiscal year, but FY3/28 is a possibility. GS and Citi tie say the company will hike if there is ~95% capacity utilization.

• Mix shift toward smaller, higher-capacity parts is the ASP driver. Continued migration to small-case high-cap products is lifting ASP and carries high margins (GS gives the specifics: 47µF moving from 2012/1608 to 1005, 100µF from 2012 to 1608 in 2H 2026).

• Capacity expansion held at ~10%/year. Management cautious about going higher given past overbuild.

• Management acknowledged attempts to reduce MLCC count/capacitance per board via vertical power delivery and component-embedded substrates. The company (and Citi) view this risk as small.

None of the analysts appear prepared to chase and up pay up for this.

We hear investors lean towards Yageo and Murata, but happy to listen to counterarguments.

Mitsui Kinzoku: +6% after medium-term plan briefing (FY2025-27) after close on Thursday

Mitsui Kinzoku holds a near-monopoly — ~100% global share — in carrier/ultra-thin copper foil, sold under the MicroThin brand. It is a required ingredient for building the ultra-fine circuit boards used in advanced chip packaging and high-speed optical transceivers. Mitsui also sells a high-speed foil (”VSP”) for AI servers and switches.

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As always, if you can’t meet in person, always happy to hear from you in DMs about what you are interested in hearing more about.

This is the usual weekly roundup of what we have been discussing online, in the chat, DMs or on X.

AT&S: AMD and Intel supplier with capacity expansion funded by LTAs, with more on the way.

MLCCs: Fintwit now looking upstream

GL Techno: Industrials specialist Monolith Capital now a fan

Memory, PCBs, MLCCs

In case you missed it, this was being reposted on X yesterday, the point being the % increases of the various line items.

MS:

Based on our latest estimates, we estimate MLCC content for VR200 to be ~US$4.3K. This would present a quite meaningful increase vs. GB300 at only ~US$1.5K, and could explain why high-end AI server MLCC demand is currently so strong and causing all the ODMs to aggressively trying to secure and build as much inventory as possible, ahead of the Rubin rack ramp from 2H26 on wards. Our checks indicate that the MLCC content per computing board and switch board is increasing quite meaningfully, with the computing board MLCC content showing a larger content increase. In addition, the newly introduced BlueField and ConnectX modules will also contribute to more MLCC content per rack.

Feedback from chat on why this is the wrong way to look at it:

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Lots of questions about whether the boat has been missed so I thought to summarise the bull case being circulated by key opinion leaders and reproduce some highlights from the chat.

AI server demand for a tiny but critical component — the capacitor — is inflecting hard, and supply can't keep up:

• GPU power consumption is exploding across generations, and more power means proportionally more capacitors required per rack.

• New rack power architectures require more expensive, harder-to-manufacture capacitors, lifting average selling prices even before counting unit growth.

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We feature one such idea contributed via email today.

This is said to be one of the cheapest ways to have copper clad laminate (CCL) exposure. You can own the majority of a CCL company through a holdco, with the holdco’s four other divisions covering almost the entire market cap of the holdco.

The tightness of the CCL market, and its attractiveness to investors seeking AI exposure, is evident from this story translated in Jukan’s tweet:

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Thank you to all the very generous people who have met me online and offline over the last month. This is an interesting new direction for the newsletter, as it is starting to offer readers a sense of what investors in Asia are thinking.

The content of this post will be pinned to the main page and updated from time to time. As always, if you would like more colour, please reach out.

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Memory

For the average retail investor, memory is just one of the more accessible ways to get exposure to the AI trade.

We have a bias towards NAND, but they will all do well.

Generally, in our conversations with investors, many believe multiples will move up as long term supply agreements are signed and earnings will grow as the shortage worsens.

The desperation for supply is evident from this article:

SK Hynix flooded flooded with unprecedented offers from big tech firms to secure chip supplies (RT)

The offers, unprecedented in the global memory chip industry, underscore ‌the severity of the component's scarcity around the world, as chipmakers struggle to keep pace with surging demand amid an artificial intelligence boom.

The firm’s customers have been proposing a range of offers to the South Korean chipmaker, including investing in dedicated memory production lines, six people said.

Another proposal involved customers financing equipment purchases such as ASML’s (ASML.AS), opens new tab extreme ultraviolet lithography machines, which are used ​to print circuits onto silicon wafers and are worth hundreds of millions of dollars, three of the people said.

But the chipmaker, flush with cash, is cautious about taking financial commitments ​from customers, as such deals could hold it hostage to specific buyers and require it to supply chips at lower prices in exchange for ⁠securing longer-term and more stable revenue guarantees, two people said.

There are more exotic ways to play this, such as through SK Square. We discuss these in the chat but you can also reach out to Origo.

Legacy NAND

Macronix is a relatively differentiated idea. As a retail investor you may believe an idea has already been discovered because it has been written up on X and Substack, but I have quickly learned that this is only scratching the surface of discovery.

For example, someone told me last week that they have many analysts covering memory and have only just discovered Macronix.

This is what Macronix reported yesterday. I can offer you some resources if you would like to read in.

Source: Company documents.

ABF Substrate

This is another investor favourite at the moment and is seen as one of the most severe shortages next to memory.

Jukan occasionally pops up in the Substack chat and he offered this chart yesterday:

As a price insensitive product you would expect a 27% supply shortfall to cause a significant price increase. Coupled with LTAs being signed, you get a similar dynamic to memory here. Further, ABF supply is constrained by an upstream input called glass fiber, specifically the high-end variety known as T-glass.

Ibiden, Unimicron and AT&S are the three companies I follow. Again, they will all do well. I don’t currently have an informed opinion on which will do better.

We have some notes on what is driving this shortage, available on request.

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Taiwan

These are some bullet points on Taiwanese companies flagged to me recently:

• Generally, the TPU complex has done very well over the last month and Mediatek has likely been one of the best performers. This one has been raised a few times in the chat and in DMs.

• E&R was flagged as an Intel supply chain idea by some very credible people. Recent report from Taiwan also suggests equipment orders from Intel.

• Prosperity Dielectrics, a MLCC play, has doubled since it was first mentioned in our chat.

• Aspeed

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Toto closed at ¥5,425 yesterday and hit the +¥1,000 limit (+18.4%) early this morning.

Since Toto manufactures consumable electrostatic chucks and now reports it as a standalone segment, the company provides a read through for WFE consumable companies.

From the earnings release:

As replacement demand remained firm due to improved utilization rates at the existing factories of semiconductor device manufacturers, sales of the TOTO Group ceramic products used in semiconductor manufacturing equipment also increased compared with the previous year.

Positive read through for:

• GL Techno +6%

• UMS Integration (SGX closed today)

• Metasurface Technologies (HKEX closed today)

  • In particular, the replacement demand for vacuum chambers is key to the investment case for this company. I’m not sure the extent to which replacement demand is important for UMS Integration.

  • On a separate note, Metasurface has start referring to more than one semiconductor OEM customer in its annual report. The market will soon learn they supply more than just Applied Materials.

Remarkably, Toto’s electrostatic chucks business appears to form <10% of sales but generates 40% of profits. Guidance was strong and the company has plans to boost production capacity at three plants (BBG).

Tokyo Electron also gave strong guidance. TEL guided net sales of ¥1.57T for H1 FY3/27 — a 33% YoY increase and above market expectations of ¥1.42T — with OP of ¥431B, up 42% and ahead of consensus ¥405.9B.

In comments earlier this week, Tokyo Electron’s Chief Executive Officer Toshiki Kawai said there’s potential for more spending on NAND production capacity, and he has not yet factored in that upside to the company’s forecast.

Korea: Home to a cheaper TTMI?

Following up on our last note about Korea, using Funda AI we compared Korean’s version of TTMI to… TTMI.

This Korean company is thought to have Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, Cisco and Arista as customers, and is a purer AI play with a lower valuation:

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Two caveats: (1) These names have run alot this year and (2) some of this content is quite dated but should be a good place to kick off some reading.

We also pull some names from the FundaAI platform.

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Quite incredible to see ready answers to such a wide range of topics including:

• Frontier model updates (Mythos, Gemini 4).

• Anthropic's compute constraints and the opening it creates for OpenAI.

• Emerging CPU bottleneck.

• Cybersecurity.

• Memory/NAND pricing.

• Optics supply chain.

Business momentum has been great too as we sign up more clients to the institutional offering, which offers more AI skills, tools and features on the platform, more in-depth reports, and regular meetings with analysts. Reach out to sales@funda.ai for inquiries.

Rigaku limit up today as Onto takes 27% stake and announces that new jointly developed offering has already been selected by two key customers. (PR)

Rigaku is now up around 50% since we developed more conviction back in March.

Oppenheimer reiterates PT of $350 and has this to say:

Macronix: Dipped 25% this week on UMC eMMC rumours

Various people chatting with us have been discrediting the rumour that UMC is looking to compete with Macronix in legacy NAND products.

This was echoed in Digitimes yesterday:

MS is also constantly putting out bullish notes on Macronix, such as the one here.

Various semiconductor companies marked safe after earthquake in Japan (Nikkei)

Kioxia PR

TEL PR

No PR from Shin-Etsu or Mitsubishi Gas Chemical yet, but see Trendforce graphic below.

Victory Giant: Closes 50% above IPO price

Our friend and chat lurker, Acid Investments, has a take here.

In terms of where other peers trade at, the Taiwanese names are going absolute gangbusters. Nanya for example trades at a nose-bleeding 44.2x FY27 p/e and 20x FY28 p/e; Unimicrom is trading at 31.8x FY27 and 19x FY28 p/e. The Japanese names, Ibiden and MEC are also all trading in the 20s for FY28 p/e.

My guess it we let the initial quick traders wash out first before some long-onlys (who were reluctant to be locked up) come in and take this higher, as the the valuation discrepancy becomes apparent.

Victory Giant is a global leader in advanced printed circuit board and a key Nvidia supplier. See Victory Giant’s mentions in Nvidia’s roadmap below.

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The idea was knocked around for a bit and by popular demand, Iqbal is publishing his take on FPS below.

Iqbal is an occasional contributor to this newsletter and is responsible for uncovering D-Box Technologies as well as helping me write up ideas like Metasurface Technologies, AT&S, CTR Holdings, and Suncall Corporation. Which means to say he has a pretty good nose for this work.

As always, by accessing this content you acknowledge our terms and conditions. Also, to be clear, Iqbal is not associated with FundaAI and what follows is written in his voice.

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