Are the Fab 5 wafer fab equipment companies — ASML, Applied Materials, Lam Research, Tokyo Electron, and KLA Corp — still worth buying at today's valuations? CSI breaks down 20 years of revenue data across the five companies that control roughly 70% of annual global fab equipment spending, and explain why 2026 and 2027 are shaping up to be record revenue years — with a potential speed bump in 2028 worth watching. The conversation also covers the wave of creative M&A reshaping the equipment l...
May 29, 2026•16 min
Amphenol (APH) just reported Q1 2026 earnings and the stock sold off — but the revenue numbers tell a different story. In this episode, Kasey and Nick break down every segment of Amphenol's business and ask whether this "boring" semiconductor supply chain stock is one of the better values in AI infrastructure right now. Amphenol is one of the world's largest manufacturers of electrical connectors, cables, antennas, and sensors. It operates across 350 facilities worldwide and sits at the intersec...
May 26, 2026•15 min
Nvidia just reported Q1 fiscal year 2027. The numbers are extraordinary even by Nvidia's own standards. Free cash flow of $49 billion. A nearly 60% free cash flow margin. Revenue guidance implying over $300 billion for calendar year 2026, with some estimates suggesting $400 billion is possible. Next quarter alone: $91 billion in guided revenue. Vera Rubin is beginning to ship and is expected to generate $20 billion in its first six months. And then Jensen Huang said something on the earnings cal...
May 21, 2026•13 min
On the Q1 2026 earnings call for TransMedics, the CEO said something that stopped everyone in their tracks. Major transplant programs, he said, are going to Home Depot and buying YETI coolers to preserve human hearts before transplantation. None of those coolers are FDA-approved. None are validated for that purpose. That is the status quo TransMedics is trying to replace. This is CSI's update on TransMedics following their May 5th earnings report. TransMedics is not a semiconductor company — it ...
May 20, 2026•14 min
Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta just collectively committed to over $750 billion in capital expenditure for 2026. They spent $130 billion in a single quarter. That is a 70% increase from what these companies spent in 2025 — and the spending is still accelerating into the second half of the year. The ROI is showing up. Operating margins are expanding across all four businesses. Google Cloud grew 63% year over year. AWS grew 28%. Microsoft Intelligent Cloud grew 29%. Meta grew revenue 33%. T...
May 15, 2026•19 min
In 2000, venture capitalists funded 200 semiconductor companies. By 2015, that number had fallen to single digits. The cost of designing a chip went from $33 million in the late 1990s to over $200 million today, and it takes four or more years to complete. There are not enough engineers. The timelines are too long. The investment risk is too high. Faraj Aalaei has spent three decades watching this problem build. He co-founded Centillium Communications and took it public on Nasdaq in 1997. He co-...
May 14, 2026•47 min
Over a year ago, CSI did a three-part deep dive on co-packaged optics after Nvidia dedicated an entire segment of its GTC keynote to the technology — naming Lumentum and Coherent as the primary beneficiaries. The analysis was right. They did not buy. That mistake is now worth talking about directly. Lumentum just reported fiscal Q3 2026 revenue up 90% year over year. Q4 guidance implies triple-digit year-over-year growth. Nvidia made a $2 billion investment in both Lumentum and Coherent, and sep...
May 13, 2026•10 min
Intel stock is up big over the last year. On the stock price, CSI was wrong — and they are saying so directly. On the business analysis, they are standing firm. AMD is steadily taking data center CPU market share from Intel. The driver is availability — both companies rely on TSMC for their most advanced chiplets, but AMD has used that availability more effectively in a CPU shortage environment where demand is outpacing supply. After AMD's most recent earnings, the trajectory is clear: if things...
May 09, 2026•9 min
Almost nothing in semiconductor land is cheap right now. First Solar might be the exception — and that is worth paying attention to, even if you have never thought of a solar panel manufacturer as a chip stock. First Solar trades at 12.7x forward earnings and 12.7x forward free cash flow. It carries over $2.4 billion in cash with almost no debt. It just reported record Q1 2026 revenue of just over $1 billion, up 24% year over year, with expanding profit margins. It manufactures domestically in f...
May 08, 2026•15 min
Prediction markets have been easy to dismiss as a gambling product dressed up in financial language. That became harder to do when Intercontinental Exchange — the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange — quietly took a 25% stake in Polymarket. And when Robinhood partnered with Susquehanna to acquire a MIAX exchange platform that is already regulated and cleared specifically for prediction markets trading. The finance industry has a long habit of showing up wherever money is moving and tak...
May 07, 2026•9 min
Seagate just reported its best free cash flow in a decade. EPS is up 115% year over year. Revenue grew 44%. Management is calling it a structural shift — the idea that nearline hard disk drives have permanently broken out of their long secular decline thanks to AI data center demand. The numbers are real. The demand from hyperscalers is real. The Mozaic 4 platform shipping at 40-plus terabytes per device is real, and the Mozaic 5 roadmap targeting over 50 terabytes in late 2027 is genuinely impr...
May 05, 2026•14 min
Many investors were not aware of Advantest. This Japanese company quietly controls roughly 70% of the global semiconductor test equipment market — the quality assurance layer that every AI chip, every HBM memory module, and every packaged GPU must pass through before it ships to a customer. As AI chips have gotten more complex and more expensive, the cost of shipping a faulty one has risen dramatically, and the demand for Advantest's equipment has followed. The stock reflects that. Up 450% in th...
May 01, 2026•10 min
Two years ago, Nick called out GE Vernova when the profit margin was still near zero and the company had just been spun off from GE. The thesis was straightforward: free of the conglomerate, management could finally allocate capital productively, margins would expand, and the company would be perfectly positioned for the AI-driven build-out of the electric grid and data center power infrastructure. That thesis has now fully played out. GE Vernova just reported Q1 2026 earnings — nearly $5 billio...
Apr 30, 2026•11 min
Lam Research just reported its best quarter ever — and then guided the next quarter to $6.6 billion in revenue. Wall Street was expecting $6.1 billion. In this episode, Nick and Kasey break down everything that matters from Lam Research's Q3 fiscal year 2026 earnings: the headline numbers, the mix shift toward memory, the advanced packaging growth story, what management's $796 million share buyback at all-time highs is actually communicating, and why Lam has quietly become CSI's largest semicond...
Apr 23, 2026•10 min
Amazon just agreed to acquire Globalstar for somewhere between $11 and $12 billion. The catch: Globalstar did $273 million in revenue last year and has never been consistently profitable. So what exactly is Amazon buying — and why now? In this episode, Nick and Kasey work through the full strategic logic behind the deal, explain what Amazon Leo actually is, and then reveal the small-cap satellite manufacturer sitting directly in the supply chain that some investors haven't found yet. The short a...
Apr 23, 2026•16 min
We've been following Aehr Test Systems since late 2022. We watched it run from a micro-cap to a $3 billion market cap on the back of AI accelerator hype — and we called what was coming next.In this episode, Nick walks through the full picture on Aehr Test Systems (AEHR): what the business actually does today, why the valuation has dramatically outpaced the fundamentals, and why management issuing $60 million worth of new stock into the market is exactly the signal investors needed to see.The cor...
Apr 22, 2026•8 min
ASML just raised guidance at both ends — new range is €36 to €40 billion for 2026, implying around 17% growth year over year. That's a strong result. But the data underneath it tells a more complicated story.In this episode, we break down what ASML's Q1 2026 earnings mean for the broader wafer fab equipment cycle, why ASML is expected to slightly underperform the 300mm equipment market this year, and what the semi.org outlook through 2028 is quietly flagging about the next mid-cycle slowdown. We...
Apr 21, 2026•8 min
AXT Inc. (AXTI) ran from a $200 million market cap to over $4 billion in a matter of months. Now it's pulled back — and a lot of retail investors are wondering if it's a buying opportunity. CSI says: not so fast. In this episode, they pull back the curtain on the base materials layer of the semiconductor supply chain — the specialty wafer and ingot suppliers that exist before a single chip ever reaches a fab like TSMC or GlobalFoundries. It's a part of the industry that rarely gets coverage, and...
Apr 21, 2026•11 min
Chip fab capacity is maxed out — and TSMC is the biggest winner. But new risks are emerging fast. In this episode, Nick and Kasey break down TSMC's Q2 2026 earnings guidance: $39–40 billion in quarterly revenue, 30% year-over-year growth, and gross margins approaching 67.5%. Then they dig into what could actually slow TSMC down. Topics covered: — Helium and LNG shortages driven by the Strait of Hormuz closure — Taiwan's energy security and how long government-secured supply lasts — The Intel-Tes...
Apr 16, 2026•9 min
Veeva Systems has been hammered by the AI-driven software selloff — but when you look past the stock chart, the fundamentals tell a completely different story. Zero debt, over $6 billion in cash, $1.4 billion in free cash flow, and a reverse DCF suggesting the market is pricing in only 5% growth. That seems like a very easy hurdle for Veeva to clear. In this episode, Kasey breaks down why Veeva is far more than a boring CRM company. Built specifically for the biopharma and life sciences industry...
Apr 15, 2026•10 min
Circle Internet Group (CRCL) just dropped its first annual report — and this "crypto stock" operates more like a bank than most investors realize. We dig into reserve income, USDC in circulation, the Circle Reserve Fund managed by BlackRock, and exactly what the Federal Reserve's rate moves mean for this business. We also break down Arc Blockchain, the Circle Payments Network, and run a Reverse DCF to show what growth rate is already baked into the stock at 80x forward earnings.We still hold a s...
Apr 14, 2026•14 min
Sony quietly controls 50% of the world's CMOS image sensors — including every camera inside every iPhone. But most investors still think of them as a gaming company. In this episode, Bob Ma, investor at WIND Ventures and physical AI specialist, breaks down why Sony Semiconductor could be one of the most undervalued positions in the entire AI hardware stack — and what the shift from digital AI to physical AI means for demand. Robots. Self-driving cars. AI glasses. Every single one needs multiple ...
Apr 09, 2026•34 min
The 2026 CPU shortage is making headlines — but the real story isn't a supply crisis. It's Intel losing its data center CPU dominance at exactly the wrong moment, and AMD stepping in to fill the gap. In this episode we break down: Why the CPU bottleneck is an Intel market share problem, not a shortage AMD's EPYC Turin and Venice CPUs and why they're positioned to win Intel's Apollo equity buyback and what it signals about their manufacturing strategy ARM's pivot from IP licensing to chipmaking —...
Apr 08, 2026•9 min
ARM Holdings just made history. For 35 years, ARM was a licensing company — selling IP blueprints to Apple, Nvidia, and Qualcomm. Now they're designing and selling their OWN chips. The ARM AGI CPU is their first-ever production silicon, built specifically for AI inference in data centers — and it's already got Meta, OpenAI, and Cloudflare as customers. In this episode, we break down: What the ARM AGI CPU actually is and why it matters How it stacks up against Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC Venice Why A...
Apr 06, 2026•10 min
What can a group of machine-smashing craftsmen from 1800s England teach us about AI, data centers, and the chip trade? More than you'd think. We brought in Jacob Goldstein — host of Business History Pod and What's Your Problem, and author of Money: The True Story of a Made Up Thing — to dig into what the Luddites actually got right, and what that means for where we are today. The Luddites were skilled workers who saw automation coming and fought back. They weren't wrong about what was coming — t...
Apr 03, 2026•46 min
ASML is known for one thing: the most advanced EUV lithography machines on the planet. But there's a quieter story developing in their advanced packaging division that's worth paying attention to. While the Fab Five have seen a recent sell-off, the second half of 2026 is shaping up to be a revenue inflection point for the semiconductor equipment sector. In this episode, we dig into how ASML is iterating on decades-old i-line technology with the Twinscan XT:260 — and why that "ancient" tool is su...
Mar 30, 2026•8 min
IPG Photonics just dropped an earnings report without mentioning AI once. In a world where every tech company is waving the AI wand, that's either boring or brilliant — we think it's the latter. IPGP is flying under the radar as a critical player in global industrial manufacturing, and the industrial slump may finally be turning a corner. In this episode we cover: Why the "no AI" earnings report is actually a signal worth paying attention to IPGP vs. LASR: defense, drones, and momentum How fiber...
Mar 28, 2026•13 min
Is High-Bandwidth Flash (HBF) a direct competitor to HBM, or something entirely new? In this episode, we break down the technology of High-Bandwidth Flash (HBF) and its role in solving the "memory wall" for AI inference.<br>We explore how HBF fits into the existing memory hierarchy—sitting between HBM and traditional NAND flash—to provide high capacity and increased speed for the next generation of AI data centers. We also discuss the technical side of the SanDisk and Kioxia partnership, i...
Mar 25, 2026•10 min
Are the hyperscalers including Alphabet the ultimate cybersecurity investment for 2026? While hyperscalers like Microsoft—boasting a projected $37 billion in fiscal 2025 revenue—Google, and Amazon are the safest entry points , pure-play companies like CrowdStrike often provide more robust, fast-moving products for organizations that prioritize high-level data security. We explore how the shift toward AI agents and platform-based models is driving massive vendor consolidation across the industry....
Mar 23, 2026•12 min
Chip Stock Investor breaks down Micron’s Q2 fiscal 2026 earnings, highlighting nearly $24B in quarterly revenue (tripling year over year), surging AI data center demand, and standout Q3 guidance of $33.5B versus about $23B expected. <br>Financial highlights include $13.8B GAAP net income, $5.5B free cash flow amid heavy capex, and a strengthened balance sheet with $14.6B cash and about $10B total debt. DRAM and NAND volumes and ASPs jumped sharply, and while higher memory prices may drive ...
Mar 21, 2026•11 min
