What Is A Semiconductor IDM? Why Are IDM Stocks Booming In 2026?

After a roughly six-month downturn in from late 2025 to March 2026, semiconductor stocks are booming. April 2026 was perhaps the hottest run for chip stocks ever. At least the hottest run since the semiconductor industry was tracked as a standalone thing. But why? And why in particular are IDMs leading the charge? And… what’s […]

$750 Billion AI Arms Race: Q1 2026 and Full-Year Data Center CapEx

As has become the norm in this bull market, Q1 2026 earnings season is once again a referendum on the AI infrastructure race. The video linked above, from late in 2025 amidst a selloff for the same reason, is proof. Massive capital expenditure (CapEx, an accounting term denoting spending on property and equipment with an […]

TSMC Announces New Manufacturing Nodes Through 2029 – but No ASML High-NA EUV

TSMC factory

At its North America Technology Symposium this week, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSM) debuted its manufacturing process node through 2029. Last year, TSMC announced its A14 process (the Angstrom process naming lines), which will debut in 2028. This year management announced enhanced versions of A14, dubbed A13 and A12, that will begin production in 2029. This […]

Planet Labs — Commercial Space Race of the 2020s Stock Update

While there are several notable differences between the present bull market and the dot-com boom of the 1990s, there is one key commonality: The Earth-based infrastructure boom (AI data centers now, internet infrastructure then) has a corresponding expansion of the space economy (next-gen communications and space data center experiments now, early SatComm networks then). Starting […]

Arm Announces A New AI Chip – Why We’re Watching the Stock From the Sidelines

While most investors were (understandably) worried about geopolitics this week, semiconductor IP (intellectual property) licensing and royalties company Arm Holding (ARM) held its “Arm Everywhere” special event to officially announce a new AI chip. And not just any chip. This is Arm’s first in-house designed chip. Rather than selling access to the IP so a customer can do their […]

Nvidia Targeting 50% Return of Free Cash Flow — What Investors Should Know

Chip Stock Investor's image of Nvidia's 5-layer cake

We’re continuing to parse through the extensive information from Nvidia‘s (NVDA) annual GTC event this week. On Tuesday, we wrote about how the acqui-hire of Groq in December could propel the company to a cumulative $1 trillion in revenue from 2025 to 2027. In a follow-up Q&A, CEO Jensen Huang dropped another figure making its […]

What Is Sandisk’s HBF (High-Bandwidth Flash)? Should Investors Care About It?

Two people in lab suits holding a semiconductor wafer.

The last couple of years, HBM (high-bandwidth memory) has been all the rage. (See our write-up on HBM here.) HBM was one of the innovations that has helped new AI (like LLMs) get trained in an increasingly efficient manner. AI inference is the next phase of the AI data center build, and new memory architectures […]

Something Big Is Happening: Industrial Lasers and Manufacturing

high-energy laser for manufacturing and missile defense systems

We briefly called out the industrial laser IDM (integrated device manufacturer) companies a few weeks ago in our deep dive on analog chips used in auto/industrial/power semiconductor applications (video linked above). With a coming uptick in U.S. manufacturing activity — possibly a longer cycle of growth led by AI data center construction — let’s circle […]