AI chipmaker Tenstorrent raises $1.5 billion at a $6.2 billion valuation, with Sandisk (SNDK) among backers
Jim Keller's chip company more than doubled its valuation months after reported takeover interest from Intel and Qualcomm. Here's who invested and where the money goes.
Nasdaq posts worst week since June as memory stocks tumble. SpaceX, Tesla, and Meta report next week.
Micron lost 14.6% in a week that brought a Chinese memory launch, a hot inflation report, and two Elon Musk posts about RAM.
Micron (MU) falls after China's CXMT announces a year-end server memory launch using smaller DRAM cells
CXMT's president said the company expects to launch DDR5 server memory using a smaller 4F² cell design around year-end. Micron, SanDisk, and Korean chipmakers fell.
The memory shortage is making electronics more expensive. AI users aren't the only ones paying.
Nvidia's seven-year-old streaming box just got $100 more expensive. The memory makers behind the price hikes are earning record profits, and their stocks still trade at low multiples.
Memory stocks compared: Micron (MU) vs SK Hynix (SKHY) vs Samsung vs Sandisk (SNDK) vs Kioxia
Micron and SK Hynix earn most of their revenue from DRAM and HBM, Sandisk and Kioxia make only NAND, and Samsung does both plus phones. All five peaked in June, and only three have a US exchange listing.
Acer CEO says Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron are talking up the memory shortage.
Acer chief Jason Chen says the memory shortage driving up PC prices will not last to 2030, and accuses Micron (MU), SK Hynix (SKHY) and Samsung of talking it up to protect margins. He still sees PC prices rising into 2027 before cheaper Chinese supply pulls them down.
Applied Materials (AMAT) commits $5 billion to India and plans a 140-acre chip research park
Applied Materials (AMAT) will put $5 billion into India over the next decade: a 140-acre research park, a tenfold bigger supply chain, and double the R&D staff. Karnataka has approved 140 acres near Bengaluru's airport, and India has approved a $13.5 billion second-phase chip program.
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.
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.
JPMorgan (JPM) has ended its lending to Leopold Aschenbrenner's fund
JPMorgan notified Situational Awareness it would end their lending relationship after the July losses, Reuters reports. Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Bank of America remain active brokers.
Leopold Aschenbrenner is buying options again through a new broker, six weeks after a 67% portfolio drop
The Financial Times says Situational Awareness is working with Clear Street and rebuilding in AMD, Intel, SK Hynix, SanDisk and CoreWeave using customized flex options. CNBC's list is not the same one.
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.
Sandisk (SNDK), Dell (DELL), Palo Alto (PANW) and Arista (ANET) join the S&P 100 as Nike exits
Four technology companies replace a sneaker maker, a toothpaste maker, a mall owner and a jet-engine supplier in the S&P 100 before the open on September 21. Sandisk reached the index ten months after joining the S&P 500.
Korean investors can no longer see SOXL's price during their own trading hours. They bought $1.36 billion of it in one week.
Blue Ocean, the US venue behind Korea's daytime trading in American stocks, made 18 symbols unavailable from September 1. Four of them, SOXL, KORU, SNDU, and RAM, are funds Korean investors buy constantly.
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.
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.
Korean investors put $798 million into a 3x leveraged semiconductor fund (SOXL) in one week. It fell 9.5% the next session.
Korean investors made a 3x semiconductor fund their number one overseas purchase in the week of Nvidia's earnings, with $798.04 million going in. That's about 58 times what they put into Nvidia itself.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.