Thursday was a banner day for followers of the microprocessor trade, with Intel reporting results after market close and Advanced Micro Devices holding what has become an annual affair in San Francisco, its update on its artificial intelligence chips.

Intel initially spiked double-digits in late trading, but gave up some gains but is up just 2% in early Friday trading, at $102.87. AMD shares traded down two points during Thursday’s regular session.

The key for Intel still is the “foundry” business, bringing in outside customers to use Intel’s factories.

The song remains the same at Intel, in a sense: Going back in time to the Gelsinger days, Intel has always had interested parties, and never found a large customer. In years past, the PDK simply didn’t deliver the goods. Hopefully, with Tan’s rigor, and the sense of opportunity, this 14A will be the real deal. We may know in October.

With turmoil over Chinese AI models, worries about AI infrastructure’s private credit market exposure, and persistent questions about return-on-investment of massive spending, it was no surprise the Street spent all of Wednesday evening peppering Alphabet’s Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, and CFO, Anat Ashkenazi, about all those things.

It sounded to me like no one got a straight answer about any of it. As a result, Alphabet shares sold off by five percent in early trading Thursday morning.

The report itself was favorable. Google’s cloud revenue surged 85%, year over year, to $24.8 billion, an astounding rate at such scale and higher than expected. The cloud business now has a remarkable backlog of business of $514 billion. Google CEO Sundar Pichai noted that the use of “tokens,” the unit of currency for AI, rose by 40%, quarter over quarter, to 22 billion tokens per minute. And five hundred Google Cloud customers have now exceeded a trillion tokens in usage apiece in the past twelve months.

With shares of Micron Technology up 235%, year to date, at a recent $955.60, including more than doubling in the past ninety days, the question of how long a very strong DRAM and NAND flash market can last is one of the most interesting questions in the very hot AI chip market.

The question implicates shares of competitors Samsung Electronics, which have more than doubled this year, and SK Hynix, whose newly minted American Depository Receipts are down two percent from their first-day close at a recent $166.65; and NAND maker Sandisk, which is up an astounding 470%.

Three brilliant technology analysts dug into the details of what might continue to make Micron stock work. You don’t have to go through them because I’ve extrapolated and summarize the high points for you.

Once again, the tech trade is rebounding on Monday morning. Shares of many of the TL20 stocks to consider, all of which, just about, are linked to a AI, are on the march higher. Fiber-optics component maker Lumentum is one of the strongest, up 8% at $790.74. Sandisk is also doing well, up 6%. I don’t think there’s any special significance here, as I indicated in this morning's podcast. There is simply a reversal of the trade, a continued search for direction…

UBS MAKES THE CALL TO GO BOTH WAYS!

Among the many who are searching for direction in Street research this morning are UBS strategists John Talbott and Jonathan Carson, who offer two different stock screens. One screen is a guide to look for bargains in beaten-down names, the other one consists of suggestions for how to reposition oneself, assuming the recent tech sell-offs are some kind of lasting “reset” of stocks.

Sigh. Perhaps slightly more certain is life on LHS 1140b, a small planet forty-nine light years from Earth that has been found to have a helium-based atmosphere, and therefore might support life, as reported today in Science magazine by researchers at Harvard University…

SO MANY AI GIGAWATTS, SO MANY WAFERS

Meanwhile, back on earth, makers of semiconductor capital equipment, such as Applied Materials, Lam Research, and KLA are now actually in “correction territory,” according to Bernstein analysts Stacy Rasgon, David Dai and colleagues in a note this morning. Despite the correction, “The group is still up >80% year-to-date,” they note, “with heavily expanded valuations,” they observe.

The week ending July 17th was one of the worst weekly returns ever for the AI-heavy TL20 group of stocks to consider, down 10%, though still up 47% for the year. 

This is not the beginning of the end, simply a cooling-off of what had been a parabolic move upward.

There are a lot of explanations. The folks at Citrini Research contend that investors just don’t get how important AI is.

Bloomberg is talking about how the latest breakthrough Chinese AI model, “Kimi K3” from Chinese startup Moonshot AI, is the source of market panic. 

Fact is, there will steadily be a commoditization of technology that has been touted as miraculous by OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, etc., but can be replicated fairly easily.

Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor are trading down in Thursday pre-market trading by 4% at $402.22 despite a very robust outlook from the company overnight.

As I wrote on Monday, the revenue for the June quarter was already known, so the issue at hand was the forecast for the rest of this year and beyond.

My sense is the stock is down because of another big increase in spending, which is a good thing and a bad thing.

Shares of the entire AI trade are falling hard today, including a 9% drop in Micron Technology stock, and one possible explanation is a report late Tuesday by Reuters’s Max Cherney stating that CoreWeave, the neo-cloud computing provider, has been talking with bankers about ways to hedge against a decline in memory-chip prices, citing unnamed sources.

“AI cloud computing company CoreWeave is exploring the use of financial derivatives as a potential hedge against a future drop in memory and storage chip prices,” writes Cherney.

Cherney relates that CoreWeave is locked into pricing agreements with Micron — something I don’t believe either company has actually disclosed — and that CoreWeave wants to make sure it has a way not to overpay if memory prices drop. For that reason, relates Cherney, CoreWeave is considering, among other things, use of puts, contracts that would allow CoreWeave to sell its contracted chips if memory prices drop below the contract price down the road.

Shares of IBM are down 23% in Tuesday morning trading at $224.91, after the company preannounced the June quarter’s revenue and profit below consensus as a result of mainframe sales being hit by a shift in customer spending to servers, storage and memory chips — all the things that are being consumed in massive quantities to fund the AI buildout.

Regarding ASML’s report tomorrow morning of its June-quarter revenue and profit, Jefferies & Co.’s Jenardan Menon relates to clients today that “it feels as if there is an awful lot riding on tomorrow,” observing that “if ASML cannot increase its shipments, then TSMC [Taiwan Semi] cannot raise capex [capital spending], and Applied materials and WFE [semi equipment] expectations will be difficult to achieve, etc., etc.”

Shares of data center operator Terawulf are down 7% Tuesday at $19.22, and other AI data center names are being hit hard as well, after New York State governor Kathy Hochul Tuesday signed an executive order pausing for a year any construction of data centers in New York of fifty megawatts or larger while the potential effects of the data centers can be studied.

We’re heading toward earnings reports this week for ASML and Taiwan Semiconductor, two of the most consequential names of the AI trade, and that happens amidst a tug of war between deepening skepticism over AI investments and continued positive trends for companies such as Micron Technology and SanDisk that serve the AI trade.

Shares of the heavily AI-influence TL20 group of stocks to consider rose 4% for the week ended Friday, July 10th, a recovery from two weeks of selling prior to that.

For the month of July, the TL20 is up 2% through Friday’s close, and up 64% for the year — way better than the 3% decline this month of the Nasdaq Composite Index and the 13% gain of the Nasdaq thus far this year.

Ahead of Taiwan Semiconductor’s quarterly report on Thursday, the key number has, as usual, already been disclosed in TSM’s monthly sales report overnight. As usual, it’s above expectations.

Taiwan Semi’s June sales rose 68%, putting the quarterly total, $1,270 billion, in New Taiwan dollars, ahead of Street consensus for $1,254 billion.

Remember that April’s report, though very strong, saw the stock weak because management didn’t raise TSM’s outlook for its capital spending this year, causing some concern the business might not be as white hot as it has been.

So, the issue is really not the quarter but outlook for the second half of this year, as Wedbush analyst Matt Bryson points out in a note Monday: “The question in our view is how much can TSMC potentially exceed current 2H expectations (with any shortfall unlikely in light of the strong demand backdrop),” he writes.

Some of the parties that have been software’s strongest defenders amidst the threat of AI destroying software are starting to throw in the towel. 

Jackson Ader of KeyBanc on Wednesday cut his rating on shares of Salesforce to Sector Weight from Overweight, and he reflects back on the vigorous defense of software he’s been carrying on since August. 

Ader had previously argued the biggest software firms such as Salesforce were too big to be replaced by new stuff cobbled together with AI.

But, he relates, customer feedback is not good for Salesforce. “We attend more Salesforce partner and customer events than any other company in our coverage, and feedback from those customers has been consistent in two ways,” writes Ader. “1) customers' data is not in order to do meaningful AI work; and 2) Agentforce, as a product, just isn't there.” He’s referring to Salesforces offering for “agentic AI” to automate tasks such as sales prospecting.

I’m not surprised this is turning out to be a dud.

If you read through the 398-page prospectus for the expected offering Friday of American Depository Shares of SK Hynix, the Korean maker of DRAM and NAND, you will be struck by the lack of important information.

Hynix is the second-largest memory-chip company after Samsung Electronics, also based in Korea, and ahead of Kioxia (a spin-out of Japan’s Toshiba), Micron Technology and SanDisk. Hynix is also the top maker by revenue of “high-bandwidth memory,” HBM, currently the cutting edge of DRAM that is crucial for AI applications.

The company already has common shares listed on South Korea’s Kospi exchange. This $28 billion offering in the U.S. is meant to raise funds for the company’s factory expansion in Korea and China by tapping into the recent fervor for memory-chip stocks. Hynix’s ordinary shares are up 236% this year, slightly ahead of Micron’s 232% rise.

Given that Hynix is funding manufacturing expansion, what you would like to know from its prospectus, what’s crucial, is the shape of the global market for DRAM and NAND. That’s key because in a commodity industry, profit and peril rest on the control of supply to prevent over-supply situations.

It’s been a distressed market for software companies for a long time now, and that has proven fortuitous for forty-five-year-old Progress Software, which has built a billion-dollar business rolling up companies that might just have gone away otherwise.

Those privately held companies that Progress buys have promising technology, maybe $70 million to $100 million in annual sales, and their valuations are often at rock bottom. They are not distressed assets, but their small size, modest growth and minimal profit means they probably wouldn’t make it on their own, says Progress CEO Yogesh Gupta.

They might not want to sell at low valuations, but when Gupta meets with them, “I give them a reality check,” Gupta says, in a chat we had via video last week.

Tech is falling out of bed again today, with the TL20 group of stocks to consider down over 5%, the heaviest-hit being Bloom Energy and SanDisk.

The proximate cause is what appears at first blush a very positive preliminary profit report for the June quarter from Samsung Electronics overnight, which, nevertheless, sent shares down over 7%.

A WHOLE LOTTA RUMSFELD IN SPACEX

Even a raft of bullish notes on SpaceX cannot lift the mood, with SpaceX stock selling off by 5% at $152.84 — still below the first-day close on June 12th of $160.95.

The coverage is almost universally bullish, and some analysts are projecting prices as high as $900 — over time, mind you. The average target of all analysts at the moment is around $250.

Among the most bullish, Citigroup’s John Godyn starts coverage with a Buy rating and a $200 price target, but, “we believe this price target is a milestone along the path to $900.”

Wow. I remember when a price target was just a price target, not a “milestone.”

This morning, I joined a video call with Merrill Lynch analysts Savita Subramanian and colleagues in which they offered their mid-year outlook. That included a negative slant on the AI trade, no surprise. Not only are valuations elevated, but the group are “starting to become a little clunkier,” as Subramanian put it.

What she meant is that the hyper-scalers, such as Alphabet’s Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, Meta, are more capital-intensive than energy exploration and production companies such as Exxonmobile.

The hyper-scalers are “all as capital intensive as one another, and, in fact, some of the hyper-scalers are more capital intensive than Exxon, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips,” said Subramanian.

My former Barron’s colleague Shuli Ren, now a Bloomberg columnist, penned a nice column this weekend about how legendary trader Michael Burry has written on his Substack that he is short Micron Technology stock.

Burry is one of the protagonists of the 2015 movie The Big Short about the subprime mortgage collapse that prompted The Great Recession of 2008, based on the novel of the same name by Michael Lewis.

The temptation is obvious to make an analogy between the current artificial intelligence data center craze and the mortgage mess. Like the housing bubble eighteen years ago, a major bright spot in the economy currently is one industry, spending on data centers. And that spending is to support an obsession with AI “tokens” that is questionable.

It’s tough to be in an industry that represents a commodity because it is driven by supply, and the slightest whiff of extra supply becoming available throws into doubt the economic fortunes of the suppliers. (In non-commodity businesses, there’s only one or two suppliers, so supply shocks are less likely.)

That’s the situation faced by both DRAM maker Micron Technology and CoreWeave, the lessor of compute capacity that came public in March of last year. I have slightly more confidence in the survival of Micron. 

Wednesday, both stocks were rocked by news of new supply. 

Both Micron and CoreWeave are slightly higher Thursday morning.

I’m less concerned about Micron given that it takes years to build new factories for DRAM and NAND, which means that increasing aggregate supply for a DRAM and NAND industry that is strapped for supply cannot happen overnight.

In the case of cloud computing and AI data centers, it’s not easy, perhaps, but it is less complex to bring on supply of more GPUs, and that’s precisely what CoreWeave investors fear if Meta is going to rent out its own computers.

I’ve been negative of late on the over-valued AI companies such as SpaceX and OpenAI and Anthropic, and I wanted to clarify that I’m not entirely negative on tech.

We’ve seen real worries about the AI trade that have made for a volatile market of late, even though we just closed the best quarterly performance in the U.S. stock market in six years.

As an example of the volatility, last week, the TL20 group of stocks to consider was down 6%; this week it’s back up 5% as I record this.

Chip equipment prospects are going up again, in what seems an endless run of encouraging observations. 

Tuesday, Mehdi Hosseini of Susquehanna Financial raised his outlook for six names in his coverage, Applied Materials, ASML, Lam Research, Teradyne, KLA, and Advanced Energy, after concluding customers are paying a premium to get ahold of equipment.

The stocks are all rising sharply Tuesday, by over 7% in a couple cases.

Hosseini now models total chip equipment, “WFE,” or, the wafer fab equipment market, the catch-all term for the industry, speeding up its growth: Industry sales may total $142 billion this year, up 60%, with another hike of 61% to $196 billion in 2027, and a rise of 69% to $250 billion in 2028.

Quantum computing hopeful Quantinuum, which spun out of Honeywell in a $1.7 billion public offering on June 4th, is down 5% this afternoon at $71.95 despite most analysts today initiating coverage of the stock with a Buy rating or the equivalent, and price targets averaging $94, which would be a pretty terrific return from here.

The stock is still above the offer price of $60.

‍As is the case with so many startups, Quantinuum is being valued by bullish analysts based on potential returns way out in the future. Analysts are mostly using a multiple of sales or of profit based on 2030 projections, which means there’s a lot of hope baked into the price targets. 

I regard Quantinuum as a startup business that has to prove its technology is “scalable,” meaning, can be reliably improved generation after generation to reach a level that is commercially valuable. Every single one of Quantinuum’s supposed advantages is set against a backdrop of an industry that is immature. None of the players have proven the industry is ready for prime time, as I laid out in an October feature

Evercore ISI’s Mark Lipacis, starting the stock at Outperform with a $98 price target, lays out what’s at stake for each generation of machine: “Sol introduces the 2D sortable-array trap and integrated, scalable control electronics – which will prove to be the architectural foundation for everything after it,” he writes. “Thus a Sol slip would cascade.”

This podcast comes later in the week than usual because I was preoccupied with the earnings of Micron Technology, a highlight of this week’s news. It was a stellar report once again from Micron driving the stock up 15% Thursday morning.

I’ve been lately digging into stocks of a “parallel universe,” names that have not been seeing as sharp gains as the AI crowd, and many of whose valuation multiples have collapsed this year, across many different categories of tech.

Shares of Micron Technology and Qualcomm were surging in late trading Wednesday as both companies surprised analysts with their projections for artificial intelligence-linked revenue. 

In the case of Micron, the payoff is more real, while Qualcomm’s is more aspirational. Nevertheless, both companies told the Street exactly what they needed to hear.

As I said on television on the Schwab network on Tuesday, for Micron, it was important for CEO Sanjay Mehrotra to finally come clean about the details of long-term agreements he has been signing with customers. 

Wednesday evening, he delivered, outlining $100 billion worth of backlog tied to 16 agreements. Those agreements stretch five years into the future, on average, and are tied to specific volume and price commitments.

Cerebras’s CEO Andrew Feldman was kind enough to sit down with me this afternoon following his company’s report of March-quarter earnings after market close on Tuesday, the first report since the company went public on May 14th. 

Cerebras makes the world’s largest chip, the “Wafer-Scale Engine,” or, WSE, and an AI computer to house it, the “CS-3.” It sells those computers to run AI but it also gets an increasing amount of revenue by running jobs in the cloud on its computers for a fee.

I have followed Cerebras since they were in stealth mode over a decade ago, and so it was great to be able to congratulate Feldman on having made it to the starting line as a public company.

This first report was rather rudely received by the market, with Cerebras shares closing down Wednesday by 20% at $182.26, below the IPO offer price of $185.

Feldman handled the sell-off with his characteristic good humor. “I managed one of the rare tasks, which is beating expectations, raising guidance, and having my stock fall precipitously,” he quipped.

AI’S PARABOLA RETRACES

Stocks are falling in a big way, with high single-digit or double-digit declines in most of tech and especially the AI trade. There may be something of a “flight to quality,” as shares of Apple and Meta are up slightly after declining on Monday, while names that had been up sharply on Monday such as Micron Technology, SanDisk and Bloom Energy are selling off heavily.

QUANTUM ORDER

One thing that is not selling off today is quantum computing, with the three front-runners, IonQ, D-Wave, and Rigetti up 1%, 5%, and 2%, respectively, following the White House’s two executive orders on quantum signed by U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday to “usher in the Next Frontier of Quantum Innovation,” as the White House put it.

QUALCOMM’S PITCH

Shares of Qualcomm are down 10% at $$199.46 in advance of the company’s analyst day meeting in New York that spans Wednesday through Thursday. The last analyst day was in November of 2024 — eons ago in AI time.

ASML shares are down two points at $1,929 Monday morning despite an upbeat note from Merrill Lynch’s Didier Scemama, who reiterates a Buy rating and raises his price target to €2,022 from €1,921 on the ordinary shares traded in Amsterdam, and $2,345, up from $2,268 previously on the U.S. American Depository Receipts. That’s a potential twenty-two-percent gain.

This is Scemama’s second price-target increase in less than a month.

SPACEX’S AI BUSINESS IS THE X FACTOR

SpaceX, currently worth $2.3 trillion at Monday’s price of $165.30, is so big that ittakes a village to cover it.

It’s still a bit before we receive stock ratings from Goldman Sachs and the other underwriters of SpaceX’s June 12th initial public offering, but Monday, three KeyBanc analysts, Michael Leshock, Brandon Nispel and Justin Patterson commenced coverage of the shares with a “Sector Weight” rating, the equivalent of a Hold. Each equity analyst has one of the three businesses: Leshock on rocket technology, Nispel on communications (Starlink), and Patterson on the AI part of SpaceX, the least mature part.

Shares of Intel are up almost 9% at $131.68 following a post by U.S. President Donald Trump on Trump’s Truth Social network saying that Apple has “agreed to work with Intel to design and build chips in America.”

That is, of course, not really new news. An article last month in The Wall Street Journal said that Intel had reached a preliminary agreement with Apple. And speculation about Apple by Intel investors had been going on long before that.

PRICES KEEP GOING UP FOR MICRON

Shares of Micron Technology are up another 8% this morning at $1,151.21 as analysts at Wedbush and Stifel & Co. raised estimates once again on continued strength in DRAM and NAND prices, and continued demand, and also raised price targets toward the $1,500 level, which we saw earlier in the week.

Social media pioneer Snap on Tuesday unveiled their next product offering, a set of augmented reality glasses called “Spectacles,” or, Specs for short. The battery life is short like most AR and VR gadgets, just four hours. The price is high: $2,195 as a pre-order. Oh, and it weighs as much as a baseball when it’s sitting on your face.

Those three things tell you we are still living in a post-Steve Jobs world, a world where feature set will probably not lead to a mass market, and where the technology has yet to catch up with the ambition.

DATABRICKS GAINING ON SNOWFLAKE

Analysts this week were attending the user conference of privately held software maker Databricks in San Francisco, a twenty-three-year-old company that is one of those tech startups that seems to have been ready to go public but hasn’t for a long time.

• The week ending June 12th, 2026, was a whipsaw week for stocks as tech shares swooned the first part of the week but turned around on Thursday as everyone became encouraged by Friday’s historic initial public offering of SpaceX. 

• I feel like I’m living a double life: I recommend great stocks such as Nvidia and Micron Technology but they’re attached to the insane valuations of SpaceX and OpenAI and Anthropic.

• The TL20 group of stocks to consider rose 8% for the week as many AI names had a sharp upward turn. The TL20 was up 66% for the year as of week’s end, and up 544% since inception. Which is great but, again, it’s tied up with this unrealistic valuation of giant companies that are buying all the AI infrastructure, company’s such as SpaceX.

Going on this morning: Shares of software maker Dynatrace have been getting some more favorable attention of late from the Street, receiving an upgrade to Buy from Neutral at UBS Tuesday, a day after getting the thumbs up from Merrill Lynch. The stock is up a point in response at $41.66.

The one part that’s missing in these positive notes is an assessment of Dynatrace’s prospects with the largest AI firms such as Anthropic and OpenAI. A big part of Datadog’s favorable perception among investors is that they have scored enormous deals with those AI giants. Dynatrace has ot exhibited the same success with the “AI natives” as those firms are called.

As expected, SpaceX, sprinting from its initial public offering on Friday, on Tuesday said on Twitter it is exercising its option to acquire AI coding startup Cursor (formally Anysphere, Inc.) for $60 billion, for the purpose of “building the world’s most useful AI models.”

SpaceX shares rose another 8% to $208.71, now up 30% from the first-day close of $160.95.

The deal is wildly overpriced, in my view.

Some things this morning: Shares of streaming pioneer Roku are selling on the news that Fox is buying the company for $22 billion in cash and stock, or $160 versus the current price of $143.29 — a deal that had been rumored on Friday and had driven prices higher by 20% that day. Fox’s CEO, Lachlan Murdock, described the deal as a “natural extension of the deliberate and focused strategy we have been executing for a decade,” including Fox’s own streaming, ad-supported service, Tubi.

The deal represents a multiple on next year’s projected Ebitda profit of 26.3 times, notes William Blair analyst Ralph Shackart, so you can use that for any media properties about which you’re currently speculating.

The trade in AI-linked names is certainly a bumpy ride, with Nvidia and others swooning last week before the SpaceX IPO reassured investors on Friday and stocks rose again to close out the week sharply higher.

Don’t expect a retreat by AI names, writes Jefferies & Co.’s Desh Peramunetilleke, head of quantitive strategy, in a note to clients Monday. The stocks are not going to really go down unless there’s some fundamental change in the earnings outlook, he opines, which doesn’t appear likely.

THE CASE FOR MICRON AT $1,500

I made a bold prediction back in March, when Micron Technology was trading at $447.02, that the stock could go as high as $700. It reached that level May 7th, and quickly moved past it, to $1,075.45 as of Monday.

And it seems I can’t keep up with Micron because over the weekend, as I was staring into the distance and contemplating the prospect of Micron rising to $1,500, someone else was doing much more serious work and beat me to the punch.