Chip Stock Investor Podcast

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...

Veeva Systems has been hammered by the AI-driven software selloff — but when you look past the stock chart, the fundamentals tell a completely different story. Zero debt, over $6 billion in cash, $1.4 billion in free cash flow, and a reverse DCF suggesting the market is pricing in only 5% growth. That seems like a very easy hurdle for Veeva to clear. In this episode, Kasey breaks down why Veeva is...

Circle Internet Group (CRCL) just dropped its first annual report — and this "crypto stock" operates more like a bank than most investors realize. We dig into reserve income, USDC in circulation, the Circle Reserve Fund managed by BlackRock, and exactly what the Federal Reserve's rate moves mean for this business. We also break down Arc Blockchain, the Circle Payments Network, and ru...

Sony quietly controls 50% of the world's CMOS image sensors — including every camera inside every iPhone. But most investors still think of them as a gaming company. In this episode, Bob Ma, investor at WIND Ventures and physical AI specialist, breaks down why Sony Semiconductor could be one of the most undervalued positions in the entire AI hardware stack — and what the shift from digital AI...

The 2026 CPU shortage is making headlines — but the real story isn't a supply crisis. It's Intel losing its data center CPU dominance at exactly the wrong moment, and AMD stepping in to fill the gap. In this episode we break down: Why the CPU bottleneck is an Intel market share problem, not a shortage AMD's EPYC Turin and Venice CPUs and why they're positioned to win Intel's Ap...

ARM Holdings just made history. For 35 years, ARM was a licensing company — selling IP blueprints to Apple, Nvidia, and Qualcomm. Now they're designing and selling their OWN chips. The ARM AGI CPU is their first-ever production silicon, built specifically for AI inference in data centers — and it's already got Meta, OpenAI, and Cloudflare as customers. In this episode, we break down: What...

What can a group of machine-smashing craftsmen from 1800s England teach us about AI, data centers, and the chip trade? More than you'd think. We brought in Jacob Goldstein — host of Business History Pod and What's Your Problem, and author of Money: The True Story of a Made Up Thing — to dig into what the Luddites actually got right, and what that means for where we are today. The Luddites were ski...

ASML is known for one thing: the most advanced EUV lithography machines on the planet. But there's a quieter story developing in their advanced packaging division that's worth paying attention to. While the Fab Five have seen a recent sell-off, the second half of 2026 is shaping up to be a revenue inflection point for the semiconductor equipment sector. In this episode, we dig into how ASML is ite...

IPG Photonics just dropped an earnings report without mentioning AI once. In a world where every tech company is waving the AI wand, that's either boring or brilliant — we think it's the latter. IPGP is flying under the radar as a critical player in global industrial manufacturing, and the industrial slump may finally be turning a corner. In this episode we cover: Why the "no AI"...

Is High-Bandwidth Flash (HBF) a direct competitor to HBM, or something entirely new? In this episode, we break down the technology of High-Bandwidth Flash (HBF) and its role in solving the "memory wall" for AI inference.<br>We explore how HBF fits into the existing memory hierarchy—sitting between HBM and traditional NAND flash—to provide high capacity and increased speed for the n...

Are the hyperscalers including Alphabet the ultimate cybersecurity investment for 2026? While hyperscalers like Microsoft—boasting a projected $37 billion in fiscal 2025 revenue—Google, and Amazon are the safest entry points , pure-play companies like CrowdStrike often provide more robust, fast-moving products for organizations that prioritize high-level data security. We explore how the shift tow...

Chip Stock Investor breaks down Micron’s Q2 fiscal 2026 earnings, highlighting nearly $24B in quarterly revenue (tripling year over year), surging AI data center demand, and standout Q3 guidance of $33.5B versus about $23B expected. <br>Financial highlights include $13.8B GAAP net income, $5.5B free cash flow amid heavy capex, and a strengthened balance sheet with $14.6B cash and about $10B...

Nvidia’s GTC 2026 is finishing up and there is a lot of focus on AI inference. Remember that licensing deal with Groq? By pairing Groq 3 LPX compute with Vera Rubin systems, Nvidia is targeting a 10x revenue jump—moving from $30 billion with Blackwell to a staggering $300 billion opportunity in Ai inference. <br>Jensen Huang’s "five-layer cake" strategy now dominates the entire dat...

Onto Innovation is a critical "choke point" in the semiconductor supply chain, providing the essential metrology and inspection gear that makes advanced packaging and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) possible. In this deep dive, we break down why their flagship Dragonfly system is a winner in the AI era and how the company is successfully pivoting growth toward Taiwan and South Korea to offse...

Transmedics (TMDX) finished a great fiscal year in2025, but the market is reacting to some interesting shifts in their 2026 guidance. In this video, we break down why this organ care leader is a small bet in the Chip Stock Investor portfolio and what the inflection point from operating loss to profit means for long-term holders.<br>In this video, we cover:--37% annual revenue growth and the...