TOTO is one of the top producers of electrostatic chucks used in NAND memory production. You guessed it. The boom in memory prices and shortages, driven by AI data centres stockpiling storage, has brought loads of business to TOTO. They don’t sell these to Samsung or SK Hynix directly. Instead, TOTO is reportedly a dominant supplier to Lam Research, whose cryogenic etching machines are then used by every major NAND maker including Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron, Kioxia, and YMTC, to carve channel holes through 200+ layer 3D NAND chips It comes down to ceramics. TOTO has been making advanced ceramic parts for over 40 years — and it turns out, those same ceramic capabilities translate into electrostatic chucks, the precision plates that hold silicon wafers in place during chip manufacturing. In o
Tencent’s first-quarter 2026 results show a company in transition. Its core business is still highly profitable and generates strong cash flow. At the same time, it is making an aggressive push into artificial intelligence. This pivot has yet to be proven. Tencent continues to position AI as its next major growth driver. But execution is still a work in progress. The launch of the Hy3 preview large language model is a sign of progress in its in-house capabilities. A revamped AI infrastructure supports this. Even so, Tencent trails its domestic peers. Alibaba Group and ByteDance are ahead. Global leaders like Microsoft and Alphabet are further ahead still, both in frontier model performance and ecosystem scale. Tencent’s hybrid approach uses both proprietary models and external partners lik
Modern GPUs can crunch numbers much faster than standard memory can feed them. If the data transfer rate is too slow, an incredibly expensive GPU sits idle, waiting for information. High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) solves this by stacking DRAM chips vertically and connecting them directly to the processor via a microscopic highway, delivering terabytes of data per second. Without HBM, scaling frontier AI models is physically and economically impossible. Memory is the bottleneck in AI right now. As AI models have grown exponentially—moving from training to continuous, high-context inference and multi-step agentic reasoning—the constraint has shifted from processing data (compute) to moving data (memory bandwidth). And supply is short. Producing HBM requires roughly three times the wafer capacity
SanDisk (SNDK) tops the S&P 500 for the highest return in 2026 YTD. The stock was already the best performer in 2025, and it has continued this year. We’re only four months in, and it’s already more than tripled. SanDisk was a spinoff from Western Digital just last year. It was loss-making initially, but Q3 FY2026 saw net profits soar to $3.6 billion. Revenue was up 251% year-on-year. From zero to hero, quite literally. Western Digital reported 45% revenue growth year-on-year. But what’s more impressive is that its gross margin expanded 10 percentage points—from 40.1% in Q3 FY2025 to 50.5% in Q3 FY2026. That’s a sign WDC is raising prices as it sells more storage. Supply shortages are driving up prices, and these companies are the direct beneficiaries. Finally with AI, cloud growth exp
i start with AI, cloud growth exploded. Q1 2026 year-on-year revenue growth nearly doubled to 63%. Gemini Enterprise—the stickier corporate customers—grew 40% quarter-on-quarter. That’s more than 200% annualized. Another proof point of surging AI demand: token usage grew 60% QoQ, or 555% annualized. As for Amazon and Microsoft, both saw strong cloud growth too—albeit slower than Google Cloud’s rate, though off a larger revenue base. AWS and Azure reported 28% and 40% year-on-year growth respectively And the AI CAPEX isn’t slowing down—it’s accelerating. The initial $600 billion industry projection has now been revised upward to $700 billion by 2027. AI remains firmly in the spotlight—and even as estimates and expectations have risen, many AI-related stocks managed to surpass them. Th
During the Iran War, the USD actually strengthened. At least two reasons for that. First, oil couldn’t flow out of the Middle East due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Oil prices shot up. Oil is settled in USD—hence the term PetroDollars. Countries suddenly needed more dollars to buy the same amount of oil. The demand for USD went up, strengthening the Dollar. Second, higher oil prices created inflationary pressure. The Fed was unlikely to cut interest rates as aggressively as initially expected. With higher rates on the Dollar, it attracted more demand for USD deposits and bonds—strengthening the USD once more. In the short term, it’s more likely the Iran War is coming to an end, even though there’s still plenty of politicking online between the US and Iran. Oil prices are expected
Gold should not be seen as a standalone asset. On its own, it has no intrinsic value—and naysayers have been banging on this point for years, saying it doesn’t produce cashflow and therefore can’t be valued. Gold’s value is driven by a myriad of factors. The earliest is that it’s perceived as a store of value—and that perception has lasted until today. In other words, gold has value as long as society believes it has value. Otherwise, we could have used anything. Here’s what matters more: gold’s value is relative to alternative stores of value. And in today’s context, the US Dollar is the single most important currency—a store of value and a medium of exchange. That’s why gold prices tend to have an inverse relationship with the USD. If the USD weakens, gold rises. And vice versa. To me, t
AI has been a buzzword for years, but it isn’t a bubble. While some overcapacity is possible in the short term, the long-term growth of AI is just beginning. If your investment horizon is 10 years or more — and you're interested in tech — this is a theme you can't afford to miss. But pause and flip that around — why are even the smartest minds in the world unanimously convinced that AI is going to dominate the next wave of technological progress, and do it faster than anything we've seen before? Finally You must be thinking: how many AI-related headlines do we need to see each day? With the new technology enabling AI becoming more and more common in everyday lives
Leadership in tech constantly shifts, usually once every decade. It’s important to recognize that today’s tech giants may not remain on top tomorrow. The Magnificent 7 feel unstoppable now — but so did IBM, Nokia, and Cisco in their heydays. Each era had its acronym: FANG, FAANG, and now the Magnificent 7. It changes because markets are always recalibrating who the real leaders are. That’s why investing in tech isn’t about blindly buying today’s winners. It requires you to forecast who will actually benefit from the next shift — and avoid those working against it. That’s not easy. Even though some tech stocks have delivered massive gains, there’s a strong survivorship bias — for every success, many others fade into irrelevance. Look at Alphabet. Despite growing revenue, its stock is down 3