Ferrotec has four massive buildings making different things in Kulim. Consistent with what I’ve been hearing about machine fabrication capacity becoming tight, they were moving CNC machines into building four.

Sounds like resolution soon.

Multibagger city.

AT&S.

Maybe not as well known as other commentary but Funda has been tracking Ant and OAI ARR growth and Big Tech consumption of tokens for several weeks now.

Bruh, $amat footprint in Singapore is largest outside the US and they are more than doubling cleanroom space. businesstimes.com.sg/singapo…

They seem to like the stock. collyerbridge.com/p/discount…

Was this also listed on the slide as an Nvidia partner

UMS Integration and Metasurface have been big winners this year, both up more than 120%. Why? $amat is looking to hire about 1,000 additional workers, at least, across the region, mainly in Singapore, which is becoming the company's major manufacturing operation, global logistics center and R&D hub for next-generation chip packaging equipment. The top U.S. chip equipment maker considers the city-state its most important production base, with "a very significant percentage of all of our semiconductor tools actually assembled, manufactured and shipped out of Singapore," Tan said. Outside its Silicon Valley headquarters, Singapore -- where the economic growth is being fueled by the artificial intelligence boom -- has also become a key R&D hub for Applied Materials, particularly for advanced chip packaging and assembly tools, which are playing an increasingly critical role in the semiconductor industry. "Almost all of Applied Materials' advanced packaging R&D is done in Singapore with a strategic partner of A*STAR's Institute of Microelectronics," the executive said. " We have recently launched a hybrid bonding tool [for advanced chip packaging] that's ideated, developed, created and built in Singapore." ... Applied Materials is also building up a massive supply chain network in Southeast Asia, including a growing presence in Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnam, according to Tan. "One of the things that we have learned in the last supply chain crunch and COVID [pandemic], is you do want to have a lot of your supply chain very close to this operations manufacturing hub," Tan said. He said the company has focused on strengthening supply chain resilience by bringing more regional suppliers closer to its production hub in Singapore. The executive also said talent in and around Singapore is becoming increasingly interested in careers in the high-tech sector, whereas in the past many graduates prioritized jobs in finance and services. ... Lam Research, a leading U.S. supplier of chip etching and cleaning equipment, has significantly enlarged its manufacturing footprint in Penang, Malaysia. asia.nikkei.com/editor-s-pic…

50% since...YMTC and CXMT IPOs and capex coming too.

Thoughts on Mythos cybersecurity winners and losers.

Deep|Coherent Lite Reshapes AI Optical Interconnects The industry’s prevailing narrative of Coherent Lite still largely centers on DCI/LR/campus interconnect: the 2–20 km reach segment, where a lower-cost, lower-power coherent solution replaces the conventional IMDD, which is increasingly strained in mid-reach transmission beyond 400G/lane. This narrative is not wrong, but it captures only Coherent Lite’s “reach dimension” and misses the “system-architecture dimension,” where the real volume will come from. From an AI infrastructure standpoint, Coherent Lite’s most important use case — and the one most likely to scale — is not 2–20 km DCI or LR, but rather pairing with OCS in Google TPU / AI clusters. OCS improves network-topology reconfigurability and expands the Scale-Up and Scale-Out interconnect scale; however, the cost is that each OCS node the optical link passes through adds insertion loss. OCS is fundamentally a passive device, introducing roughly 1.5–3 dB of additional loss. For conventional IMDD FR/DR links, the link budget is typically only a few dB; after subtracting OCS’s ~3 dB of loss and additional fiber/ connector losses, IMDD has almost no remaining link margin in the 2.4T/3.2T generations. In other words, the more OCS becomes the core component of AI cluster network expansion, the more exposed IMDD’s link budget bottleneck becomes. Coherent Lite’s strategic significance is therefore not merely “pushing coherent down to 2–20 km,” but providing the next-generation optical transport solution for OCS-paired interconnect. Through a simplified coherent detection scheme, Coherent Lite can recover the link budget margin consumed by OCS, allowing the OCS architecture to continue scaling into the 2.4T/3.2T module era. In short, DCI/LR is the surface-level application the industry understands best, while OCS-paired links are Coherent Lite’s most central and scale-driven deployment scenario in AI infrastructure. On the value-chain mapping: Nokia/Infinera, Lumentum, Coherent Corp, and Sumitomo Electric are the core InP beneficiaries; Marvell is the core DSP beneficiary; Semtech is the TIA beneficiary; TeraHop/InnoLight, Lumentum, and Coherent Corp are the core transceiver beneficiaries; while TSEM, Soitec, and AXT correspond respectively to the underlying area-amplification logic of SiPh foundry, Photonics-SOI substrate, and InP substrate. In 2028, Coherent Lite may bring $15–20 billion of incremental industry value, and this figure will rise further in 2029. $LITE $COHR $AXTI $NOK $MRVL Detailed Report fundaai.substack.com/p/deepc…

*Nand supply will grow 22% CAGR. Kioxia will keep pace and said they will observe supply discipline. They have enough space to do this till 2029.

Funda sat me down in March and told me to spend less time on microcaps because there were companies called Kioxia and Marvell.

No shade on Jukan but it sounded to me like it is the customers, not Kioxia, who are keen to sign LTAs covering 2029 and beyond.

Nikkei: TOKYO -- As the boom in memory demand for data centers spreads to NAND flash memory, Japan's Kioxia Holdings seeks to regain market share with new technology it has commercialized ahead of rivals. Kioxia holds its first investor strategy briefing in a year on Tuesday. The company's share price has climbed 34-fold since the last briefing, and the upcoming session has drawn strong investor interest. The memory chip supplier is expected to present its technology development road map. ... "The read and write speeds of Kioxia's NAND are about 20% to 30% faster than those of its competitors," said Kazuyoshi Saito, a senior analyst at IwaiCosmo Securities. When Kioxia announced its CBA technology at the end of 2023, some in the industry reacted coolly, convinced that stacking was the more straightforward approach. But as NAND processing speeds have become increasingly important for artificial intelligence, CBA has entered the spotlight. ... Rivals such as Samsung Electronics had focused investment on DRAM, for which demand surged in the early stages of the AI boom. That worked to Kioxia's advantage, as the company's competitors were slower to invest in NAND technology development. asia.nikkei.com/business/tec…

Chris Hohn and Berkshire 🤝 TPU supply chain.