Ken Griffin says Citadel has closed out 80% of Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness risk
Griffin's first comment on the Situational Awareness purchase came in a Friday letter to clients. It took more than 100 block trades over $4 billion of market value to retire four fifths of the risk.
Memory chip prices are soaring. So why are Micron (MU), SanDisk (SNDK) and SK Hynix (SKHY) falling?
Korea's chip exports nearly tripled in the first 20 days of August and its semiconductor export price index has quadrupled since 2023. Micron, SanDisk, SK Hynix, Samsung and Kioxia all peaked within one week in June and have fallen 21% to 51% since.
For the first time, more money is going into running AI than building it. What that means for Nvidia (NVDA), Broadcom (AVGO), Marvell (MRVL) and AMD
Inference, running AI models, now costs more than training them, and that rewards custom chips and memory over raw GPUs. Here's what it means for Nvidia, Broadcom, Marvell, AMD and Micron.
Leopold Aschenbrenner's latest filing shows he closed 13 of his 16 options positions and moved more than half his fund into SanDisk and Micron
Situational Awareness LP reported $8.46 billion of put positions on March 31 and one on June 30. The money went into SanDisk, Micron, Nebius and STMicroelectronics.
I let Claude AI trade $100 on Robinhood week 9: it wrote down why indie Semiconductor (INDI) was a bad buy, then bought it
Claude AI flagged the indie Semiconductor (INDI) setup as the shape of most of its past losses, bought it anyway, and was stopped out 23 hours later. Both stops fired within two seconds of Tuesday's open as chip stocks sold off. The account is down about a third.
You can trade single-stock options premarket starting August 17 at 7:30 a.m. ET. The first session includes Nvidia (NVDA), Tesla (TSLA), Apple (AAPL) and 18 more.
Cboe Options Exchange begins trading single-stock options at 7:30 a.m. ET on Monday, Aug. 17, two hours before the regular open. Limit orders only, no market or stop orders, and trades in the new sessions do not count toward the day's high and low.
Memory is the bottleneck for AI, and the shortage is real
Elon Musk amplified a post calling memory, not compute, the limit for AI, and memory stocks ran. The shortage is real: demand is growing far faster than supply, and the new SK Hynix and Micron plants do not open until 2027 and 2028.
Applied Materials (AMAT) posted a record quarter and guided higher. Shares fell in extended trading
Applied Materials posted its highest quarterly revenue ever, beat Wall Street on both lines and guided the fall quarter higher. The stock still fell. DRAM is now 26% of equipment sales.
Nebius (NBIS) soars 27% as explosive AI demand burns Michael Burry's short
Nebius grew Q2 revenue 454% to $582 million, swung to a profit, and jumped about 27% as CEO Arkady Volozh said AI demand keeps growing exponentially. The whole data center trade rallied, and Michael Burry's fresh short went underwater.
Congressman Tony Wied sold up to $250,000 worth of AMD stock and loaded up on software stocks
Wisconsin Rep. Tony Wied sold up to $250,000 of AMD on June 3, then bought Adobe (ADBE), Salesforce (CRM), ServiceNow, HubSpot and The Trade Desk six days later. His February filing showed the same move out of chips and into software.
Kioxia spent its entire $5 billion buyback in six trading sessions
Kioxia had until October 30 to spend $5.0 billion buying its own stock. It finished on August 10, six sessions in, at an average of 49,586 yen ($312 USD) a share. Toshiba sold into day one and lost the largest shareholder spot. What the pace and the September guide say for SanDisk (SNDK) and Micron (MU).
Musk says memory demand grows 200% a year against 20% supply. The new Micron (MU) and SK Hynix (SKHY) plants open in 2027 and 2028
Elon Musk did the memory math out loud on SpaceX's call: supply up 20% a year, demand up 200%. Microsoft put $25 billion of its capex on memory and Amazon named it too. The plants that would fix it open in 2027 and 2028.
CoreWeave (CRWV) secured priority SSD supply from SK Hynix's Solidigm in a multi-year deal, but key terms weren't disclosed.
CoreWeave announced a multi-year agreement with Solidigm for priority access to enterprise SSD capacity. The release carried no dollar value, no term length and no capacity figure, which is not how CoreWeave's $21 billion Meta agreement read. Enterprise SSD contract prices rose about 80% in the first quarter.
Palantir (PLTR) grew revenue 93%, raised its full-year forecast by $500 million, and is still a third below its high.
Palantir reported second quarter revenue of $1.935 billion, up 93% from a year earlier, and adjusted earnings of $0.41 a share. It raised full year revenue guidance by about $500 million. Shares were up more than 8% in early after-hours trading.
The AI trade rallied Monday. Memory fell as much as 8% at the open even as chip prices kept rising.
Micron (MU) has lost a third of its value since June 25 and SanDisk nearly half. CoreWeave and Vertiv fell about half as far, and Nvidia rose. Memory contract prices never fell. What changed is the rate of increase, which went from 93-98% a quarter to a forecast 13-18%.
SanDisk (SNDK) beat every line and guided way above consensus. The stock fell anyway.
SanDisk (SNDK) reports fiscal Q4 on August 5 with Goldman's target at $2,200 and the stock at $1,214.87 after a 5.1% Friday drop. SK Hynix printed a 76% operating margin on July 29 and Seoul still closed down 9.61%, because revenue missed consensus by 5.5%.
You cannot buy China's CXMT in the US. You can buy the Roundhill Memory ETF (DRAM), which has $627 million riding on it.
The Roundhill Memory ETF (DRAM) added a $627.5 million CXMT total return swap at a 2.52% weight, five days after CXMT's Shanghai listing. The position is bigger than GigaDevice, and there was no CXMT line in the fund's July 23 file.
Kioxia is the memory chip maker that passed Toyota as Japan's most valuable company, then fell 66%. Here's who owns it
Kioxia is the former Toshiba Memory, and it makes NAND flash and nothing else. Toshiba still holds 15.10% and keeps selling, an SK Hynix (SKHY) vehicle holds 14%, and Sandisk (SNDK) co-owns the factories. What the company makes, who owns it, and how a US investor can reach it.
The Nasdaq fell six days straight, then chips ripped. Microsoft, Samsung, and Citadel buying out Aschenbrenner all landed inside 18 hours.
The Nasdaq's six-day losing streak ended at exactly six, which our own history piece said was the single most likely outcome. Microsoft's $678 billion backlog, Samsung's call that the chip crunch runs to 2028, and Citadel buying the bulk of a leveraged $24 billion book all arrived between Wednesday's close and Thursday afternoon.
Leopold Aschenbrenner's AI fund sold its levered stock book, longs and shorts, to a single buyer. It was levered as much as four times.
CNBC's David Faber reported that Situational Awareness sold its entire public equities book, longs and shorts together, to a single buyer. The fund reached $24 billion near its highs and ran leverage of as much as four times. Its last public filing shows 62% of a $13.68 billion book was bets against chip stocks, and the stocks it owned outright fell twice as far.
Samsung posted its best quarter ever. Seoul was up 5.54% on it, then gave the whole thing back.
Samsung's stock fell 5.23 percent on July 29, a day before its own confirmed earnings even came out. When the record numbers landed Thursday, the Kospi rose as much as 5.54 percent, then gave all of it back and closed lower.
Microsoft (MSFT) grew Azure 43% with $678 billion already booked. That is what Nvidia (NVDA) and Micron (MU) needed to hear.
Microsoft held its capital spending outlook near $190 billion, grew Azure 43% and rose 7.6% after hours. Meta raised its capex range by $10 billion at the low end, missed on earnings at $6.18 against a $7.14 estimate, and fell 9.0%. The market stopped scoring hyperscalers on capex announcements and started scoring them on whether the revenue arrives. That is a better setup for Nvidia, Broadcom and Taiwan Semiconductor than another spending headline, though it does nothing about the memory supply problem that actually caused July.
The Nasdaq is down six days straight. We checked what happened next all 85 times, so you don't have to.
The Nasdaq Composite closed lower for a sixth straight session on July 29, finishing at 24,442.94, down 5.4% over the run and 9.8% below its June record. It has happened 85 times since 1971. One month after those streaks the index gained a median 1.5%, which is exactly what a random month returns, and at three months it actually underperformed. The averages hide everything: every streak from 2000 to 2002 was followed by heavy losses, and every streak after 2009 by gains.
The Fed held rates 9 to 3. Warsh says the AI capex boom is driving up chip prices.
The Fed held the federal funds target range at 3.5% to 3.75% on July 29 in a 9 to 3 vote, with Beth Hammack, Neel Kashkari and Lorie Logan dissenting in favor of a quarter-point increase. Chairman Kevin Warsh listed the AI capex boom as one of four questions the committee debated and said it is driving up prices of memory and logic chips. The June minutes show many participants expect AI infrastructure demand to keep pressuring technology and electricity prices.