The AI trade rotates to a new sector every week. Which one is it going to be this week?
The AI trade has rotated by sector almost every week: software, then photonics, then memory. So which corner of AI runs next? I make the case for the one group that keeps riding along without ever leading.
Hedge Fund Citadel already held every stock in Leopold Aschenbrenner's book before buying it
Citadel's own quarterly filing, out Friday, already listed every stock in Leopold Aschenbrenner's book, about a month before it bought the book. The catch is what those holdings actually mean.
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.
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.
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.
Nine Aschenbrenner stocks report earnings Aug. 4 to 6, led by SanDisk (SNDK). Nobody can say which six are still his.
Citadel bought the fund's public stock book on July 30. Six of the names in its last itemized filing report earnings between Tuesday and Thursday, and no filing yet says who owns them.
Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness fund owned 19 stocks outright. Every one of them rose Thursday after he sold his positions
Four SEC filings name 19 companies Situational Awareness owned outright, and every one of them rose on July 30. Nebius was the biggest at about $1.84 billion, and the quarterly report understates SharonAI by twelve times.
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.
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.
SK Hynix (SKHY) reported a record quarter and still missed. One analyst broke from the pack and called it within a quarter of a percent
SK Hynix reported 60.5426 trillion won ($41.6 billion USD) of operating profit against a 64.09 trillion won consensus, 5.5% short, on revenue 5.6% short. Both figures are records. The operating margin came in at 76%, right where the street had it, so the entire miss was revenue rather than profitability. Korea Investment & Securities was the only firm below the pack and landed within a quarter of a percent.
Kioxia hit limit-down again and is down 60% from its June peak. Sandisk (SNDK) co-owns its factories (July 28, 2026)
Kioxia closed at its limit-down price of 44,550 yen ($272 USD), down 18.33%, after finishing at the bottom of its daily band on July 17 as well. It is 60.5% below the 112,700 yen peak it set on June 22. It shares the Yokkaichi and Kitakami NAND plants with Sandisk (SNDK), which is why the two keep falling together.
Citadel says the Fed hikes Wednesday. All 104 economists Reuters asked say it won't (MU, NVDA, July 28, 2026)
I was sure Citadel's rate call knocked the Nasdaq down 2% Tuesday morning. Nvidia (NVDA) was green while Micron (MU) fell 7.69% and the 2-year yield never moved, so it was not the Fed at all. It was Seoul. Here is the split that actually matters at 2 p.m. Wednesday.
Korea's Kospi fell 10.84% and halted trading. Nvidia (NVDA) is flat and Micron (MU) is down 10% (July 28, 2026)
Korea's Kospi closed at 6,023.66 on Tuesday, down 10.84%, its fourth largest one-day fall on record, after Korea Exchange stopped all trading for 20 minutes. Samsung and SK Hynix each lost more than 13%. The US carryover went into memory and storage, with Sandisk (SNDK) down 14.52% and Micron (MU) down 9.54%, while Nvidia (NVDA) held flat and the Dow rose.
ChangXin Memory (CXMT) closed up 466% on day one and is worth as much as Intel. Its factories are sold out through 2027.
ChangXin Memory (CXMT) closed its Shanghai debut up 465.82%, passing ICBC as China's most valuable listed company and drawing level with Intel. Only 6.73% of its stock was tradable. The order book behind it is the part that matters for Micron (MU) and SK Hynix (SKHY).
US strikes on Iran paused. Oil fell more than 3%, and Micron (MU) and Nebius (NBIS) rose over the weekend
US Central Command has gone two straight nights without striking Iran, and a Defense Department source told CNN operations are on a hold. Polymarket puts an effective ceasefire at 75% by August 31. US markets were shut all weekend, but the tokenized stock market never closed, and it spent Sunday buying the AI trade and selling oil.
The busiest stock on Hyperliquid isn't Nvidia. It's SK Hynix (SKHY), and it out-traded Ethereum
Real world assets did $25.1 billion on Hyperliquid in the week of July 13 to 19, out-trading crypto on the venue for the first time. The busiest contract is not Nvidia or Tesla. It is SK Hynix, which passed Ethereum for second place on the whole exchange, and whose Nasdaq listing (SKHY) fell 8.8% on Friday.
Memory stocks fell hard this week, from Micron (MU) to Western Digital (WDC). Sandisk (SNDK) lost 29%, and Goldman's price target says it should be 60% higher.
Sandisk (SNDK) fell 29% this week, the worst of a brutal stretch for memory stocks that also hit Micron (MU) and Western Digital (WDC). Two weeks ago Goldman Sachs raised its SNDK target to $2,200, more than 60% above Friday's close. Earnings on August 5 start settling the argument.
SK Hynix (SKHY) and Samsung make almost 80% of the world's AI memory. That's why Micron (MU) and US chip stocks crashed again (July 16, 2026)
Chip stocks fell hard again on July 16: SK Hynix's US shares (SKHY) closed down 13.7%, SanDisk (SNDK) 12.6%, Western Digital (WDC) 9.2%, Micron (MU) 5.7%, even after TSMC's record quarter. The reason traces back to Korea, where Samsung and SK Hynix make close to 80% of the world's AI memory, and to China's CXMT pricing an $85.7 billion IPO the same day.