Original|Odaily Planet Daily(@OdailyChina)
Author|Wenser(@wenser2010 )
Speaking of SemiAnalysis, the massive earthquake in the US stock memory and chip industry triggered by the institution's research report content not long ago is still fresh in memory.
As an independent investment research institution with annual revenue expected to surpass $100 million, today's SemiAnalysis integrates multiple roles such as consulting firm, model service platform, and technology laboratory. At the helm of this rapidly developing, highly recognized research institution—praised by Nvidia founder Jensen Huang and AMD CEO Lisa Su—is not a technical expert or an engineer deeply involved in chip manufacturing, but a former beekeeper from Minnesota and a 'forum enthusiast' who anonymously discussed technical issues on various US hobbyist forums.
This edition of Character Decode by Odaily Planet Daily shares the story of —SemiAnalysis founder Dylan Patel.
SemiAnalysis Founder: A 'Forum Tech Wizard' Who 'Maxed Out Skill Points' and is Self-Taught
Compared to Citrini, which focuses more on macro trends and long-term themes, SemiAnalysis chooses to dig deeper and more narrowly into the semiconductor industry, and its founder Dylan Patel (hereafter referred to as Dylan) is a proper 'industry legend'.
Early Experience: Georgia Countryside Beekeeper, American Version 'Forum Enthusiast'
According to Dylan's sharing during an interview on Latent Space's culinary-themed program, he grew up in rural Georgia, attending the University of Georgia. After college, he even worked as a beekeeper in Minnesota for about a year and a half.
At that time, he was somewhat in a 'lost state'. Now, summarizing his past in his own words, he said: 'I feel like I've just gone through many stages of life... It seems there wasn't any clear, direct path to follow.' (Odaily Planet Daily Note: This refers to his identity shifts from chip enthusiast, semiconductor forum moderator, anonymous chip blogger, to investment research institution founder, hedge fund founder, and even more roles)
His entry into the industry was also 'full of twists and turns'.
As early as between the ages of 8 and 12, he was highly active on semiconductor forums as a 'forum warrior' (Odaily Planet Daily Note: similar to the domestic tech enthusiast gathering spots like Baidu Tieba, commonly known as 'Tieba old-timers'). He taught himself semiconductor knowledge by reading chip documentation while repairing hardware devices like Xbox and exchanging ideas with community enthusiasts.
Thus, starting as an anonymous chip blogger, he began sharing chip knowledge, discussing chip manufacturing technology, chip industry supply chains, and other hardcore topics on platforms like Reddit, WordPress, and Silicon Twitter.
In May 2020, Dylan officially founded his personal blog channel, SemiAnalysis, with the goal of providing accurate, independent technical analysis of the semiconductor industry. Looking at the timing back then, this was before the 'AI explosion moment driven by GPT', and the semiconductor industry was still a technically niche field, with very few such in-depth contents available in the market.
Initially, SemiAnalysis was just a very niche personal content channel built on WordPress. Upon repeated suggestions from his good friend Doug, Dylan later migrated it to the Substack platform and switched from a free model to a paid subscription model. (Odaily Planet Daily Note: According to Dylan himself, this friend later joined Substack a few years later)
From then on, Dylan began building his 'personal business system' around the paid content channel, including technical content analysis, business consulting, and research report production covering semiconductor supply chains, AI infrastructure products, cloud ecosystems, machine learning models, and even more cutting-edge industries.
SemiAnalysis: From a One-Person Company to a Global Team of Over 60
By 2025, SemiAnalysis had gradually transformed from Dylan's original 'One-Person Company model' (OPC) into a global company with a professional research team of about 60 people. They also established a professional chip and semiconductor product teardown laboratory, STEEL (SemiAnalysis Teardown Engineering & Evaluation Lab), in Oregon, USA.
Last year, the institution's revenue reached a scale of $20 million; this year, according to The Information's report, SemiAnalysis' revenue is expected to break $100 million, with main income coming from hyperscalers, semiconductor giants, startups, and institutional subscriptions/models/consulting. Dylan himself has indicated plans to subsequently establish a VC investment firm. Previously, he had personally invested/invested via SPV structures in about 20 startups, and even helped computing power giant Fluidstack raise $50 million in funding through an SPV structure.
External Influence: High Recognition from Jensen Huang, AMD CEO, and Others
After nearly six years of development, Dylan and SemiAnalysis have become the 'industry textbook' and 'must-read guide' in the current AI track and semiconductor industry.
Previously, Nvidia founder Jensen Huang mentioned SemiAnalysis multiple times during his speeches at the GTC Developer Conference, publicly praising the details of their reports, especially benchmarks like Nvidia's InferenceX, which could be considered a 'public endorsement'.
Earlier, in December 2024, after conducting about five months of in-depth testing and benchmark evaluation of AMD's MI300X GPU, the SemiAnalysis team published a critical report titled 'MI300X vs H100 vs H200 Benchmark Part 1: Training - CUDA Moat Still Alive'. The report pointed out that although the AMD MI300X GPU hardware had decent paper specifications, its ROCm software stack had significant gaps (e.g., many bugs, poor usability, immature ecosystem), resulting in a far inferior actual user experience compared to Nvidia's CUDA software stack architecture, making it ineffective as a powerful product for training workloads.
Within hours of the report's release, AMD CEO Lisa Su personally contacted Dylan and had a phone conversation with him the next day. Notably, this exchange was originally scheduled for 30 minutes but ultimately extended to 90 minutes due to the large amount of information, numerous feedback issues, and technical detail discussions involving engineers. This is a rare, in-depth dialogue between the CEO of a trillion-dollar market cap listed company and an independent third-party investment research institution. Finally, Lisa Su publicly thanked him for his 'constructive feedback' (even if it was critical) (Odaily Planet Daily Note: The original quote was 'Feedback is a gift even when it's critical').
High praise and positive response from AMD CEO Lisa Su
In April 2025, SemiAnalysis againpublished a follow-up reportstating 'Over four months later, AMD is accelerating progress in ROCm, developer relations, CI/CD, etc. AMD MI450X is expected to beat Nvidia,' also acknowledging AMD's subsequent improvements, becoming a landmark case of its 'independent research directly influencing major company decisions.'
In early June, Citrini analyst Jukan forwarded parts of a SemiAnalysis research report, which indicated that 'Nvidia's next-generation AI server cluster Rubin NVL72 made significant adjustments to its memory configuration. To address tight supply chain constraints and ensure the on-time delivery of Rubin racks, the single-rack capacity was drastically reduced from the originally planned 55TB to 28TB, a reduction of about 50%, using scaled-down 96GB SOCAMM memory modules instead of the previous 192GB high-spec modules.' Possibly influenced by this news, many memory-related stocks including Micron and SK Hynix came under pressure and fell that day.
In response, Dylan stated: 'I love this: When people forward what we say, they often take it out of context. Actually, our original report did not use such a clickbait headline.' The image he subsequently posted showed the original report title was 'Thanks for the Memories...'.
In comparison, SemiAnalysis places greater emphasis on 'technical implementation details,' focusing on real bottlenecks in AI construction (power shortages, supply chain inheritance, inference scaling, Nvidia ecosystem dynamics, etc.). It often embeds realistic constraint analysis within optimistic demand judgments, making it more suitable for guiding specific investments and industrial decisions. For more details on SemiAnalysis, see 'From Community 'Hardware Geek' to AI Circle's 'Muddy Waters': How SemiAnalysis, Nearing $100 Million in Annual Revenue, Stirs the Semiconductor Market?'
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