🚀 Archer and Anduril launch Thunder, an autonomous aircraft for military and commercial sectors. Developed to enhance response for specific missions. Its first flight is scheduled for 2027. Aims to diversify revenue amid challenges in the air taxi market. Features hybrid propulsion, expanding operational capabilities. A key advancement in the development of autonomous aerial platforms.

What’s interesting about this story is that SanDisk is partnering with UMC. For those that don’t know UMC is a partner on HBF (High Bandwidth Flash). As compute architectures advance being as close to the packaging as possible is going to be more common. SanDisk would not be working with UMC to have HBF w/ FinFET logic node like HBM does if it were not being used in someone’s architecture 👀 Things are looking very interesting for HBF to complement HBM as model weights continue to expand. $SNDK

Hyperscalers don’t want to be locked into paying premium prices for $NVDA GPUs forever. A 76% gross margin is extremely difficult to sustain as customers push for more alternatives and greater supply diversity. $AMD is positioned to keep taking share. First $MSFT, now potential $AMD momentum with $Anthropic next? 🚀

New Mexico has continued to show the market and operators that they're not a power friendly state. Anyone looking to build a datacenter or bring compute online here should look elsewhere As an investor, be acutely aware in your underwriting where some of these power plays operate or have pipeline as anything in NM will likely be heavily discounted. Risk premium too high

At 54, he'd been fired from two companies and failed his PhD exam twice. He asked Intel, TI, Motorola, and Sony to invest in his next idea. All four said no. He built the company anyway. It's now worth over $2 trillion. His name is Morris Chang. He wanted to be a novelist. He grew up in China during three wars, moving six times before he turned 18. Fled to Hong Kong at six. Walked 50 days to reach Chongqing when the Japanese invaded. His childhood was, in his own words, "war, poverty, injustice." But he loved stories. He spent years dreaming about writing for a living. His father killed it in one sentence. "You'll go hungry." So he went to America instead. Harvard first. Then MIT. He typed other students' papers for $1.25 a page to pay for shrimp fried rice in Chinatown. He got his bachelor's and master's in mechanical engineering. Then he took the PhD qualifying exam. He failed. He took it again. Failed again. MIT's rules allowed only two attempts. His academic career was over at 24. He took a job at a small semiconductor company called Sylvania. Not because he loved chips. Because he needed a paycheck. Three years later his team got shut down. He moved to Texas Instruments. He turned a production line with almost zero yield into a working operation within months. TI noticed. They promoted him. Then promoted him again. Over 25 years he climbed to Senior VP of TI's entire global semiconductor business. Third most powerful person in the company. TI sent him to Stanford to finish the PhD that MIT wouldn't give him. This time he passed with flying colors. In the late 1970s, TI shifted away from semiconductors and into consumer electronics. Chang disagreed with the move. TI launched a personal computer called the TI-99/4. It was an embarrassing failure. Chang ran the consumer division. He took the blame. They moved him to a nothing role. Director of Quality and Productivity. His bonus was cut. His seniority was reduced. He described it himself: "put out to pasture." He resigned in 1983. He was 52. He took a job as president of General Instrument. That lasted about a year. The CEO wanted him to flip small companies. Chang wanted to build things. He was asked to leave. He was 54. Then Taiwan's government came calling. They wanted someone to build a semiconductor industry from scratch. Chang accepted. He left the country he'd lived in for 36 years. His idea was radical. A company that only makes chips for other companies. No competing with your own customers. A pure-play foundry. He asked Intel to invest. They said no. He asked TI. No. Motorola. No. AMD, Panasonic, Sony. All no. Only Philips, a Dutch electronics company, said yes. In February 1987, Morris Chang founded Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company with $220 million. He was 55. Then Intel's Andy Grove visited. He looked at the production quality. He placed an order. TSMC makes the chips inside your phone right now. It makes the majority of the world's advanced AI chips. Apple, Nvidia, Qualcomm, AMD. They all depend on the company a 55-year-old built after failing twice and getting fired twice.

ASML aims for a market capitalization of €1 trillions 🚀 The Dutch giant ASML could become the first European company to reach a valuation of €1 trillions. The surge in demand for lithography equipment for AI chips has propelled the company to the top of the European stock market. The main driver of the rally remains the massive investments by tech giants in AI infrastructure. #Finance | #ASML | #Ai

AMD's Helios rack system landing Microsoft as a customer isn't just a product win: it's evidence that hyperscalers are actively diversifying away from single-vendor dependency. Chip stocks had their worst week in a year, but the real story is which ones get design wins in the fragmentation era. 13F Pro scores: $AMD 78.8/100 quality (#64 of 6,000+): Earnings Growth: 97.2, Revenue Scale: 96.0. Weakest: Shareholder Dilution: 26.7

Microsoft just bought a second lane on the AI highway. MSFT doesn't bet on underdogs: it bets on leverage, and locking in AMD's Helios rack means Azure gets a credible pricing club to swing at Nvidia every time renewal talks get spicy. $MSFT

Latest News: Microsoft to deploy next-generation AMD Instinct and EPYC processors across its infrastructure. $AMD