Chip Stock Investor Podcast

Is memory truly cyclical, or has the AI data center boom changed the rules? In Part 2 of the How CSI Invests series, Nick and Kasey tackle one of the most debated questions among semiconductor investors by walking through the investment thesis checklist step that asks: what kind of business cycle does this company actually have? Rather than labeling companies simply cyclical or non-cyclical, the f...

Flex Ltd., ticker FLEX, surged roughly eighty percent in a single month — and the company hasn't even completed the spinoff that sparked it. Nick and Kasey cover this electronics manufacturing services giant for the first time at Chip Stock Investor, breaking down what drove the run-up, what the proposed spinoff actually is, and whether there is anything left for long-term fundamental investor...

Optical networking has spent years as a niche corner of the semiconductor industry. CSI makes the case that the moment for companies like Coherent may have finally arrived — and NVIDIA's two-billion-dollar equity investment in the company suggests the largest chipmaker in the world agrees. Coherent (COHR), is an integrated device manufacturer and base materials supplier specializing in indium...

Broadcom just delivered another strong earnings report for Q2 fiscal 2026, and the stock fell more than ten percent. CSI breaks down exactly why that happened, what it means for long-term holders, and whether anything has actually changed in the fundamental thesis for one of the most important companies in AI infrastructure. Broadcom has compounded its enterprise value at over fifty percent annual...

Ouster ($OUST) just reported $49M in Q1 2026 revenue — up 49% year-over-year — and crossed the 40% gross margin threshold as it shifts toward a fabless model. But the bigger story is product: the new REV8 LiDAR family and L4 Max chip now integrate native color sensing directly into the sensor, developed in partnership with Fujifilm. In this episode, Nick breaks down what that means for physical AI...

While the market chased AI names, communications software stocks like Twilio (TWLO) and Bandwidth (BAND) quietly re-accelerated. Here's what the financials actually show — and whether these forgotten names deserve a spot in your portfolio. CSI breaks down two API-layer software companies left for dead after the pandemic era that are now showing signs of fundamental re-acceleration. We analyze...

Are the Fab 5 wafer fab equipment companies — ASML, Applied Materials, Lam Research, Tokyo Electron, and KLA Corp — still worth buying at today's valuations? CSI breaks down 20 years of revenue data across the five companies that control roughly 70% of annual global fab equipment spending, and explain why 2026 and 2027 are shaping up to be record revenue years — with a potential speed bump in...

Amphenol (APH) just reported Q1 2026 earnings and the stock sold off — but the revenue numbers tell a different story. In this episode, Kasey and Nick break down every segment of Amphenol's business and ask whether this "boring" semiconductor supply chain stock is one of the better values in AI infrastructure right now. Amphenol is one of the world's largest manufacturers of elec...

Nvidia just reported Q1 fiscal year 2027. The numbers are extraordinary even by Nvidia's own standards. Free cash flow of $49 billion. A nearly 60% free cash flow margin. Revenue guidance implying over $300 billion for calendar year 2026, with some estimates suggesting $400 billion is possible. Next quarter alone: $91 billion in guided revenue. Vera Rubin is beginning to ship and is expected t...

On the Q1 2026 earnings call for TransMedics, the CEO said something that stopped everyone in their tracks. Major transplant programs, he said, are going to Home Depot and buying YETI coolers to preserve human hearts before transplantation. None of those coolers are FDA-approved. None are validated for that purpose. That is the status quo TransMedics is trying to replace. This is CSI's update...

Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta just collectively committed to over $750 billion in capital expenditure for 2026. They spent $130 billion in a single quarter. That is a 70% increase from what these companies spent in 2025 — and the spending is still accelerating into the second half of the year. The ROI is showing up. Operating margins are expanding across all four businesses. Google Cloud g...

In 2000, venture capitalists funded 200 semiconductor companies. By 2015, that number had fallen to single digits. The cost of designing a chip went from $33 million in the late 1990s to over $200 million today, and it takes four or more years to complete. There are not enough engineers. The timelines are too long. The investment risk is too high. Faraj Aalaei has spent three decades watching this...

Over a year ago, CSI did a three-part deep dive on co-packaged optics after Nvidia dedicated an entire segment of its GTC keynote to the technology — naming Lumentum and Coherent as the primary beneficiaries. The analysis was right. They did not buy. That mistake is now worth talking about directly. Lumentum just reported fiscal Q3 2026 revenue up 90% year over year. Q4 guidance implies triple-dig...

Intel stock is up big over the last year. On the stock price, CSI was wrong — and they are saying so directly. On the business analysis, they are standing firm. AMD is steadily taking data center CPU market share from Intel. The driver is availability — both companies rely on TSMC for their most advanced chiplets, but AMD has used that availability more effectively in a CPU shortage environment wh...

Almost nothing in semiconductor land is cheap right now. First Solar might be the exception — and that is worth paying attention to, even if you have never thought of a solar panel manufacturer as a chip stock. First Solar trades at 12.7x forward earnings and 12.7x forward free cash flow. It carries over $2.4 billion in cash with almost no debt. It just reported record Q1 2026 revenue of just over...

Prediction markets have been easy to dismiss as a gambling product dressed up in financial language. That became harder to do when Intercontinental Exchange — the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange — quietly took a 25% stake in Polymarket. And when Robinhood partnered with Susquehanna to acquire a MIAX exchange platform that is already regulated and cleared specifically for prediction m...

Seagate just reported its best free cash flow in a decade. EPS is up 115% year over year. Revenue grew 44%. Management is calling it a structural shift — the idea that nearline hard disk drives have permanently broken out of their long secular decline thanks to AI data center demand. The numbers are real. The demand from hyperscalers is real. The Mozaic 4 platform shipping at 40-plus terabytes per...

Many investors were not aware of Advantest. This Japanese company quietly controls roughly 70% of the global semiconductor test equipment market — the quality assurance layer that every AI chip, every HBM memory module, and every packaged GPU must pass through before it ships to a customer. As AI chips have gotten more complex and more expensive, the cost of shipping a faulty one has risen dramati...

Two years ago, Nick called out GE Vernova when the profit margin was still near zero and the company had just been spun off from GE. The thesis was straightforward: free of the conglomerate, management could finally allocate capital productively, margins would expand, and the company would be perfectly positioned for the AI-driven build-out of the electric grid and data center power infrastructure...

Lam Research just reported its best quarter ever — and then guided the next quarter to $6.6 billion in revenue. Wall Street was expecting $6.1 billion. In this episode, Nick and Kasey break down everything that matters from Lam Research's Q3 fiscal year 2026 earnings: the headline numbers, the mix shift toward memory, the advanced packaging growth story, what management's $796 million shar...

Amazon just agreed to acquire Globalstar for somewhere between $11 and $12 billion. The catch: Globalstar did $273 million in revenue last year and has never been consistently profitable. So what exactly is Amazon buying — and why now? In this episode, Nick and Kasey work through the full strategic logic behind the deal, explain what Amazon Leo actually is, and then reveal the small-cap satellite...

We've been following Aehr Test Systems since late 2022. We watched it run from a micro-cap to a $3 billion market cap on the back of AI accelerator hype — and we called what was coming next. In this episode, Nick walks through the full picture on Aehr Test Systems (AEHR): what the business actually does today, why the valuation has dramatically outpaced the fundamentals, and why management iss...

ASML just raised guidance at both ends — new range is €36 to €40 billion for 2026, implying around 17% growth year over year. That's a strong result. But the data underneath it tells a more complicated story. In this episode, we break down what ASML's Q1 2026 earnings mean for the broader wafer fab equipment cycle, why ASML is expected to slightly underperform the 300mm equipment market th...

AXT Inc. (AXTI) ran from a $200 million market cap to over $4 billion in a matter of months. Now it's pulled back — and a lot of retail investors are wondering if it's a buying opportunity. CSI says: not so fast. In this episode, they pull back the curtain on the base materials layer of the semiconductor supply chain — the specialty wafer and ingot suppliers that exist before a single chip...

Chip fab capacity is maxed out — and TSMC is the biggest winner. But new risks are emerging fast. In this episode, Nick and Kasey break down TSMC's Q2 2026 earnings guidance: $39–40 billion in quarterly revenue, 30% year-over-year growth, and gross margins approaching 67.5%. Then they dig into what could actually slow TSMC down. Topics covered: — Helium and LNG shortages driven by the Strait o...