USD.AI (CHIP) Plunge

For the first time, memory chip giants Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix have jointly invested in the same AI company, Anthropic, as part of its massive $65 billion Series H funding round. This strategic move, positioning the three rival HBM suppliers as "strategic infrastructure partners," highlights a fundamental shift in the AI industry's power dynamics. With HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) being a critically scarce resource essential for AI model training and inference, securing a stable supply has become a key competitive differentiator. By making these chipmakers shareholders, Anthropic aims to lock in this vital component for its rapid expansion, which includes securing major compute commitments from Amazon, Google, and others. For the memory trio, this investment represents a strategic bet on defining the future of AI hardware. Each company gains: SK hynix reinforces its dominant position in the NVIDIA supply chain; Samsung diversifies its client base beyond NVIDIA; and Micron leverages its geopolitical significance as the sole US-based HBM maker. Their collective move signals that competition in AI is evolving beyond model capability to encompass control over the entire compute supply chain—from chips and memory to power and networking. This vertical integration trend, where infrastructure providers become direct stakeholders in AI firms, marks the industry's maturation as AI transforms from a research project into essential global infrastructure, setting the stage for a new era of ecosystem competition.

Goldman Sachs Research Report Summary: Memory Shortage Until 2028, Maintain Buy Recommendations Goldman Sachs' latest Asia-Pacific equities report, "The 720," forecasts a sustained memory chip upcycle extending into 2028, driven by strong AI server demand visibility, limited supply growth, and binding long-term agreements. The firm believes the market significantly underestimates the cycle's duration, as evidenced by low P/E ratios for memory stocks. Key sector calls include raising 12-month price targets for Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, and upgrading Kioxia from Hold to Buy, citing higher and more sustainable peak profits over the next 2-3 years. The report also highlights the broader AI hardware supply chain benefiting from hyperscaler capex acceleration. Recommendations include: * MediaTek (Buy) for its data center/ASIC pivot. * Eoptolink (Buy) on 1.6T optical module ramp-up. * Biren (Buy) for its AI chip migration. * Huaqin (Buy, newly covered) for its shift from consumer electronics ODM to AI data centers. * Lenovo (Buy) on the AI PC refresh cycle. Other notable mentions include China property developers (under an optimistic scenario), BYD for its affordable city NOA strategy, and select Japanese semiconductor equipment makers. A macro theme notes the divergence between AI-boom beneficiaries (e.g., Korea, Taiwan) and energy-importing economies facing inflationary pressure. The report concludes with standard disclaimers, noting that price targets are forward-looking estimates and that sell-side research has an inherent bullish bias. The core investment thesis hinges on the longevity of the memory upcycle and the AI-driven capex wave.

The stock price of Marvell Technology surged 32.5% on June 2nd, driven by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang highlighting its custom ASICs and optical interconnects as core to AI data center architecture. This event brought attention to the Chinese semiconductor family behind Marvell: the Dai siblings. The story centers on three siblings, all UC Berkeley graduates, whose three-decade entrepreneurial journey aligns with major semiconductor industry shifts. In 1995, youngest sister Dai Wei Li co-founded Marvell with her husband Sehat Sutardja and his brother, focusing on storage controllers. Eldest brother Dai Wei Min founded EDA company Ultima, later sold to Cadence, and later founded VeriSilicon (芯原) in China, becoming a leading semiconductor IP provider. Second brother Dai Wei Jin co-founded EDA firm Silicon Perspective (sold to Cadence) and GPU IP company Vivante, later acquired by VeriSilicon. The combined "Dai-Sutardja" family network extends beyond Marvell. Their ventures and investments form a comprehensive ecosystem for the post-Moore's Law, chiplet era. Key holdings include: Dream Big Semiconductor (AI SuperNICs, acquired by Arm), Alphawave (high-speed SerDes IP, acquired by Qualcomm), and Silicon Box (a chiplet advanced packaging foundry). VeriSilicon itself thrives on the AI ASIC and IP boom in China. Collectively, the family's AI infrastructure-related portfolio is estimated at over $22 billion. Their strategy represents a distinct path: building critical components for open standards and key manufacturing capacity in the chiplet era, rather than pursuing standalone AI chip dominance. While this path may not create the next NVIDIA, it has enabled repeated successful exits and sustained influence within the global semiconductor industry.

**Summary:** At Computex 2026, Arm CEO Rene Haas announced that ByteDance and Oracle have adopted Arm's self-designed Arm AGI data center CPU. The company expects significant revenue growth from this product, projecting $20 billion in demand for the 2027/2028 fiscal years. Haas noted that restricting AI-capable CPUs from the US to China is nearly impossible due to their widespread applications. Arm's stock has surged dramatically this year, notably rising 16% after NVIDIA's Arm-based Vera CPU and RTX Spark announcements. A highlight was the informal, humorous on-stage conversation between Haas and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang. Huang joked about NVIDIA's failed attempt to acquire Arm and playfully lamented selling his Arm shares. Both executives showed a clear sense of camaraderie and shared regret over the missed merger. Key technical topics were discussed: 1. **AI PC Design:** Huang explained NVIDIA's RTX Spark superchip (with a 20-core Arm CPU) is designed for future AI agents that will autonomously run and use tools on PCs, blending local and cloud processing. 2. **Agent vs. OS:** Huang emphasized the operating system remains crucial, as AI agents rely on its APIs and tools to function. 3. **Growth Constraints:** He identified the shift to "useful AI" that generates profitable tokens as a primary driver for immense, almost limitless, computational demand. Haas outlined Arm's strategy across PC and data centers. For PCs, Arm collaborates with partners like NVIDIA and MediaTek, offering its compute subsystem (CSS) for custom SoCs. In data centers, its Arm AGI CPU (built on TSMC's 3nm process) has gained major partners including OpenAI, Meta, and now ByteDance and Oracle. Arm presented a multi-year roadmap for its in-house CPU line. The article concludes that while GPUs dominated the AI training race, the explosion of AI agents is shifting significant focus to CPUs for inference, state management, and tool orchestration. The industry is trending towards vertical integration, with companies like cloud providers designing chips and chip/IP firms offering full solutions, all competing to deliver more efficient computing per watt.

**Daily Tech & Markets Roundup: AI Advances, Market Turmoil, and Geopolitical Tensions** **AI / LLMs**: Anthropic's internal report on AI self-improvement sparked serious discussions about Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI). Meanwhile, debate continues on AI coding tools after Claude was accused of introducing bugs into the rsync codebase. In positive news, DeepSeek V4 Flash impressed in local deployment tests, and GitHub Copilot now supports custom endpoints for local models. A surprising research turn suggests removing chain-of-thought prompting can sometimes improve LLM performance. **Crypto / Web3**: Bitcoin plunged below $60,000, with its RSI hitting levels last seen during the COVID-19 crash, driven by strong U.S. jobs data reviving interest rate hike fears. Discussions highlight Ethereum DeFi's continued lack of a smooth consumer payment layer. **Chips / Hardware**: Chip stocks suffered a massive sell-off, with the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index posting its worst single-day drop in six years, erasing over a trillion dollars in value. Marvell, Micron, AMD, and Intel were among the biggest losers. **Tech Companies**: A leaked Microsoft document revealing goals to make Copilot "addictive" drew criticism. LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman left Microsoft's board to focus full-time on his AI agent startup, Manus. Google was revealed to be paying SpaceX $920 million monthly for AI training compute. **Markets & Macro**: A blowout U.S. jobs report (172k vs. 80k expected) crushed hopes for near-term rate cuts, sending Treasury yields soaring and triggering a broad market sell-off. CEOs from Kraft, McDonald's, and Whirlpool simultaneously warned U.S. consumers are exhausting their savings. **Geopolitics**: U.S.-Iran tensions escalated with missile/drone interceptions and U.S. strikes on Iranian radar sites, keeping the critical Strait of Hormuz largely closed since late February and posing ongoing oil supply risks. **The Bottom Line**: The strong jobs data acted as a single trigger for correlated sell-offs across equities, crypto, and chips. Underlying the volatility is a stark contradiction between robust employment data and warnings of consumer weakness, alongside geopolitical risks that could reignite inflation, leaving markets to price in a fraught macro outlook with no clear "soft landing" path.