APAC Wrap: 28 June 2026
Looking back on the last three days, there has actually been quite a bit of reassuring AI headlines and talking points.
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.
