What a way to kick of the year! Not only did the market experience drastic moves, but also as you probably already know, Funda AI had an overwhelming week. We published a couple of our most-read reports in history gathering great market interest, as acknowledged by our dear friend Gavin Baker, the best Semi research house SemiAnalysis and a few widely-followed sellside fellows among others. We are truly grateful to all your support, and will strive to continue producing insightful research and developing the next-gen AI research OS. On the latter, we do apologize for some technical issues during your exploration of our AI platform after subscribing, and we have managed to fixed them. Please contact us if you still have issue logging in the AI platform. Stayed tune for more!
This week’s reports
Addressing the debate on Google’s in-rack swtich tray and LITE - This is the most read report in our history,and it’s the latest update to our coverage series of Google’s optics strategy since 2024. Market has been concrened with Google’s new in-track switch tray design could dampen demand for OCS, and therefore negative for LITE. We detailed the network architecture and explained where market misunderstanding was.
Rare earth control on AXTI has limited impact on optics industry - Just to add a little more fuel to the chaotic week for optical names, AXTI, the InP substrate producer, pre-announced a poor 4Q on Thursday after close. This led to market concern on overall optics sector getting hit and thus we offered our analysis on what InP is, why it matters, and most importantly why market concern is overly exacerbated.
INTC’s general server CPU is becoming the next bottleneck in AI - This is another report that drove massive market attention. We were probably the first in the market to argue for structural demand tailwind to CPU servers, and therefore a potential turnaround of INTC. And now, we are starting to see price hike in supply chains beyond market expectations.
DRAM and SSD update - Another hottest topic in AI semi/hardware this week was obviously memory, ignited by Nvidia’s new Vera Rubin design release. We have been arguing for a supercycle for the sector, and provided a follow up analysis on why DRAM and SSD are transforming from purely cyclical upstream components to structurally important drivers of new AI system, with sustainable growth potential.
AMAT and other semicap is likely entering a new growth cycle - Semicaps are quickly becoming consensus long in the market, driven by TSM’s capacity expansion, technology upgrade as well as the resurgence of Samsung and INTC foundries. In our first report in this space, we laid out the investment case for AMAT.
Next week’s pipeline
Deep dive in Semicap - ASML, LRCX and KLAC
TSM preview
Enterprise AI Progress
On a side note, we are pleased to have our first Europe-based analyst onboard this week. She will be covering cutting-edge technology trends, such as space economy and humanoid robots, as well as some European names going forward.
