Who makes NAND flash? The five big makers, and why China is pushing in
Five companies make almost all the world's NAND flash: Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron (MU), Kioxia, and SanDisk (SNDK). How big each one is, where the chips are made, and why China's CXMT and YMTC are pushing in.
SK Hynix (SKHY) unit Solidigm is weighing its first US memory plant, with New York in the lead
SK Hynix's US flash-memory unit Solidigm is studying its first American plant, and upstate New York has emerged as a leading candidate, Korean press reported Friday. SK Hynix says no plan is confirmed. Solidigm's only NAND fab today sits in Dalian, China.
America is building chip factories. Samsung and Micron (MU) are struggling to find the workers.
A McKinsey and SEMI Foundation report projects a US chip worker shortfall of 127,000 to 157,000 by 2030. Only 3% of US graduates who take engineering jobs go into semiconductors. The short-term fix is Korean staff on temporary assignment.
Taiwan's chip industry has more than two openings per job seeker. The AI buildout needs people.
Taiwan's chip industry has more than two open jobs for every person looking for one. ASE needs at least 3,000 people this year, and one materials maker is calling old university classmates to staff a single new plant. Texas Instruments, GlobalFoundries, and ASE describe the same shortage.
Kioxia weighs $10 billion US ADR deal as SK Hynix (SKHY) stake comes into focus
Bloomberg reports Kioxia is weighing an ADR listing of at least $10 billion. The listing plan has been public since May, so the number is the new part, and the company's biggest holder is the NAND rival it competes against.
Three AI CEOs asked for a slowdown. Chipmakers sold off worldwide, and cybersecurity stocks went up.
Dario Amodei asked AI labs to slow the pace of capability development, and Sam Altman and Elon Musk agreed. The selloff that followed hit the AI supply chain and bid up the companies that sell defenses against it.
Babcock & Wilcox (BW) is building Applied Digital's power plants. Leopold Aschenbrenner's fund owned both companies.
Situational Awareness LP held 2,027,451 Babcock & Wilcox shares at the end of the second quarter, up 50 percent in three months. B&W's $2.4 billion contract is to build the power plants for Applied Digital's AI campuses, and the fund owned that company too.
SK Hynix's (SKHY) HBM share falls to 50% as Samsung gains ground
Counterpoint Research's second-quarter numbers put SK Hynix at 50 percent of HBM revenue, down from 58 percent in the first quarter and 64 percent a year earlier. Samsung went from 15 percent to 33 percent over the same year, and most of its sales are still HBM3E, with HBM4 only starting to count in the second half.
Nvidia (NVDA) cut Rubin Ultra's memory in half because HBM had become 40% of a rack's cost, SemiAnalysis says
SemiAnalysis says memory had reached 41% of a Rubin Ultra rack's capital cost after this year's HBM and DRAM price hikes. Halving the HBM per GPU takes it to 28%, with the savings moving to scale-up networking. The firm calls it a supply-crunch symptom, not weak demand.
Why SanDisk (SNDK) went from red at 3:15 to up 5.7% at the August 31 close
SanDisk was down at 3:15 p.m. Monday and closed up 5.7% at $1,569.61 after its MSCI World inclusion triggered a burst of closing-auction demand.
Goldman Sachs raises its 2035 humanoid robot forecast nearly fivefold to 6.48 million units
Goldman now sees 6.48 million humanoid robots shipping in 2035, up from 1.38 million, a $138 billion market. The driver is a price curve crossing labor costs, and Amazon's $72 billion in modeled savings is the proof it already works.
Why Micron (MU) stock looks cheap, and why the market doesn't think the earnings will last
Micron trades near six times forward earnings, behind only Charter (CHTR) and General Motors (GM), after a 228% year. The market still prices it as a cyclical, the $100 billion in contracts argues otherwise, and December 9 is when the buyback cap lifts.
Nvidia's (NVDA) $3.5 billion MediaTek deal turns the chips built to replace its GPUs into an ecosystem play
Nvidia is buying $3.5 billion of MediaTek convertible bonds as MediaTek joins NVLink Fusion to build custom XPUs. The bigger reveal is NVHBM, Nvidia's custom memory claiming 30% more bandwidth than HBM4E, with Amazon's Trainium4 first in line.
AI's storage ladder: HBM, flash and Seagate's (STX) race to the 100TB hard drive
HBM gets the attention, but every AI byte has to land somewhere. What each storage tier holds, who sells it, and why flash repriced about three times harder than hard drives did.
Leopold Aschenbrenner's fund owns 21.1% of SharonAI (SHAZ). It's currently sitting $101 million below cost.
Situational Awareness filed a Schedule 13D reporting 8,070,950 SharonAI (SHAZ) shares at a cost of $523.9 million. The same position was in its filings before the fund's July losses, and it's still there.
Growing up, nobody in my school knew what Korea was. Now it's the world's No. 3 AI power.
My classmates knew exactly two Asian countries. Stanford's AI Index 2026 now ranks South Korea third in the world in AI models, and the memory chips behind the whole AI trade come from Seoul.
China's top DRAM maker ChangXin (CXMT) lost money a year ago. It just earned $10.8 billion in six months
China's largest DRAM maker reported 150.31 billion yuan ($22.4 billion) in first-half revenue, up 873.6%, with profit 36% above its own IPO forecast.
Trump praised Micron (MU) again. The stock rose for two minutes (August 27, 2026)
Trump's third Micron post since July landed at 2:31 p.m. Thursday. The stock rose for two minutes, gave it back, and closed the day down 0.3%. The first two posts were followed by drops of 10.6% and 4.3%.
SK Hynix (SKHY) breaks ground on $4 billion Indiana HBM plant as production slips to 2029
SK Hynix broke ground Thursday on its first US plant, an advanced packaging site for AI memory in West Lafayette, Indiana. The company now targets mass production in the second half of 2029. Its CHIPS Act award said 2028.
Kioxia plans a $6.3 billion new memory plant in Japan, Nikkei reports
Nikkei says Kioxia plans to invest about $6.3 billion in a new memory plant in Japan for AI data-center demand. There is no US Kioxia ticker; Sandisk (SNDK), Western Digital and Micron are the proxies.
Nasdaq rebounds before Nvidia (NVDA) earnings, with options pricing a $313 billion swing in the stock
The Nasdaq rose about 0.7% Tuesday, recovering Monday's chip-led drop, one day before Nvidia reports. Wall Street expects about $92 billion in revenue, double a year ago.
The SEC subpoenaed four Wall Street banks over the Situational Awareness meltdown, the New York Times reports
Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase were told to preserve records on Leopold Aschenbrenner's fund as regulators examine trade timing and leverage from its near collapse in July.
Nvidia (NVDA) fell six straight days. Earnings will test the $775 billion AI spending boom.
Nvidia enters its Aug. 26 earnings report on a six-session losing streak, its longest since 2022. It has beaten EPS estimates for 14 quarters straight, and the stock still fell the next day six of the last eight times.
Korean investors poured $85.6M into Roundhill Memory ETF (DRAM) in one week. The fund already holds Samsung and SK Hynix.
Korean retail investors bought $85.61 million of the Roundhill Memory ETF in a single week, their second-biggest US purchase after Alphabet. The fund is 26.19% Samsung Electronics and 21.61% SK Hynix, two stocks they can buy at home in won.