George Stv

Warning: The entire AI industry will likely be bottlenecked by two companies: 1. $AXTI ($700M) 2. $SMTOY ($31.7B) Which both control 60–70%+ of the world's InP substrates. Future $NVDA, $GOOGL TPU v7 pods, $META, $MSFT, $AMZN hyperscaler clusters require InP-based lasers and receivers. $AVGO, $LITE, $COHR use for EMLs for 800G/1.6T transceivers, DFB lasers, and other optical infra. Without InP substrates, the supply chain falters. After looking at TPU BOM to Maia BOM, it looks like future ASICs + GPUs + hyperscaler deployments are heavily reliant on photonics. And two vendors could freeze the global InP substrate market covering nearly all of: - Hyperscaler optics (TPU pods, etc) - Optical transceivers (5g, data) - LiDAR (robotaxis, drones, military) -Optical Modules (interconnect clusters) - Silicon photonics laser dies (Nvidia’s future co-packaged optics and Intel/Broadcom SiPh engines use InP CW laser arrays.) Since these companies make up majority of the market supply: -AXTI (est. ~30–35%) -Sumitomo (est.~30%) - JX Nippon (est. 10-15%) That’s it. (eg. 2021 industry note from Yole states that "Sumitomo Electric + AXT together had “more than 75%” of the InP substrate market") Hyperscalers/AI are moving toward photonics but the entire AI industry is fragile. If either $AXTI or $SMTOY stop supplying materials, the entire future AI buidlout gets crippled. It's even crazier that a $700m company could become the the center of it all. InP substrate will likely one of the biggest bottlenecks alongside HMB as the AI industry shifts to photonics.

$GLW (top up) Broke my promise, sizing just a little bit more at the pivot.

What is the smallest object that, if it stopped being made tomorrow, would freeze the entire AI industry by Friday? Not a chip. Not a GPU. Not a model. A polished piece of indium phosphide the size of a coaster, grown in a furnace over two weeks, made by exactly two companies in the world that are not Chinese. I learned that around 4 a.m. one night about two years ago. I have not really stopped thinking about it since. To understand why a coaster of crystal can hold up a trillion-dollar industry, you first have to understand that almost nothing about modern computing is normal. A leading-edge AI chip travels through roughly a thousand process steps over three to four months. The cleanroom it lives in is thousands of times cleaner than a hospital operating room. The fab itself draws as much electricity as a small city. The single lithography machine that draws the circuits has five thousand suppliers of its own, spread across six countries, and not a single nation on Earth could build one alone. By the time a finished chip pops out the other end, more humans have had a hand in its production than live in most American towns. Most of them will never meet. From the highway, a TSMC fab looks like a beige warehouse with a parking lot. Inside, it is the closest thing humans have ever built to alien technology. I find that genuinely moving. And I find it terrifying. Because a miracle that complicated has a lot of single points of failure, and almost nobody in mainstream coverage is mapping them. Two years of pulling on this thread keeps bringing me back to the same conclusion. The 2026 to 2030 AI buildout is gated by four physical constraints, and almost nothing else. 1. Indium phosphide wafers. Two credible non-Chinese suppliers in the world. 2. Advanced packaging. Four companies on Earth that matter. 3. Power. Industrial gas turbines sold out into 2030. Three vendors at scale. 4. Critical minerals. China's pause on gallium, germanium, and antimony export controls expires November 27, 2026. By the time a chokepoint is on the front page, the move is largely over. The prize goes to whoever was patient enough to map the chain when it was boring. So I built a dashboard A free public dashboard. The chokepoints, the names that own them, the live prices, the catalysts, and the written thesis all on one screen. No login. No newsletter. Not a portfolio. Not a recommendation. A prism. I wanted it free because the people I would have wanted to read this when I was younger could not have afforded a Bloomberg terminal. Students. Engineers. Journalists trying to understand what they are writing about. Retail investors tired of being sold someone else's conviction. Curious teenagers in countries where the local financial press is twenty years behind the actual frontier. The chain deserves to be walked. That is the whole invitation. links below 👇 Educational, not investment advice.

Fun Trade Idea: Long $RPI (Raspberry Pi) Reason: 🦞 Openclaw / Picoclaw / Nanobot + Hoarding. Everyone has been openly hoarding Apple Mac Minis and were long Apple. But $APPL is already a $3.7T+ company. Product mass-buying won't make a dent. Raspberry Pi, however, is a 542.68M company. The revenue is material. Feels like markets haven't priced this in since I've seen almost 0 mentions about the ticker on X (but many product mentions). And it's only recently that have the hoarding started Raspberry Pis, as they're much cheaper than $500+ Apple products. They also have their mini $NVDA CUDA-light utility ecosystem that people use. So it turns out these extremely cheap $20 or $200 devices are perfect for deploying mass deploying isolated instances. The reason is for OpenClaw orchestration (so they don’t mess up your device) -> interfacing with a central LLM via API. Before people were just buying 1 or 2 for hobby/education purposes, so revenue has slowing. But now Silicon Valley startups and individuals anecdotally appear to be buying tens or hundreds of these things to run concurrent OpenClaw agentic swarms or do stuff like agentic marketing on Reddit and other places. And no, there are many applications that can't be done by spinning up AWS VPS, so people do it locally (there's TOS around automation/AI bots, so companies setup their own servers). That being said main downside risk is that its - partially foundation owned, and they might not hike rates like $SNDK or $MU does, even if there's extreme demand - Subject to memory price hikes like LPDDR4 component so this is not a major position. However, going forward, revenue should increase due to people buying tens or hundreds of these things for running AI agents. Balance sheet also looks clean with low downside risk: - ~$280M - $300M revenue - ~$75M+ Gross Profit - ~25% Gross Margin - Net income: ~$10M - $15M - Net Cash: $28M Analysts currently project revenue growth closer to 14–17%. But if the demand influx continues, we might see revenue numbers might hit increase from 14% growth to a modest 48-55% if hoarding continues. Consumer segments are roughly 1/3rd of revenue but the newfound buying from Openclaw + variants is a new cataylst nevertheless for re-rating. Especially now that Picoclaw and compressed OpenClaw variants are now able to be run on $20 Raspberry Pis instead of just the Raspberry Pi 5’s. But seems like people just forgot Raspberry PI was a publicly stock as well. The stock price is down 56% 1Y to 542.68M euro MC to an all time low. So this might be that tailwind for a reversal. There's also a non-zero chance OpenClaw is a long term catalyst for Raspberry Pi based, agentic deployments. TLDR: People are openly buying Raspberry Pis and Apple Mac Minis for Openclaw/Picoclaw, so revenue should benefit from increased demand.

What is the smallest object that, if it stopped being made tomorrow, would freeze the entire AI industry by Friday? Not a chip. Not a GPU. Not a model. A polished piece of indium phosphide the size of a coaster, grown in a furnace over two weeks, made by exactly two companies in the world that are not Chinese. I learned that around 4 a.m. one night about two years ago. I have not really stopped thinking about it since. To understand why a coaster of crystal can hold up a trillion-dollar industry, you first have to understand that almost nothing about modern computing is normal. A leading-edge AI chip travels through roughly a thousand process steps over three to four months. The cleanroom it lives in is thousands of times cleaner than a hospital operating room. The fab itself draws as much electricity as a small city. The single lithography machine that draws the circuits has five thousand suppliers of its own, spread across six countries, and not a single nation on Earth could build one alone. By the time a finished chip pops out the other end, more humans have had a hand in its production than live in most American towns. Most of them will never meet. From the highway, a TSMC fab looks like a beige warehouse with a parking lot. Inside, it is the closest thing humans have ever built to alien technology. I find that genuinely moving. And I find it terrifying. Because a miracle that complicated has a lot of single points of failure, and almost nobody in mainstream coverage is mapping them. Two years of pulling on this thread keeps bringing me back to the same conclusion. The 2026 to 2030 AI buildout is gated by four physical constraints, and almost nothing else. 1. Indium phosphide wafers. Two credible non-Chinese suppliers in the world. 2. Advanced packaging. Four companies on Earth that matter. 3. Power. Industrial gas turbines sold out into 2030. Three vendors at scale. 4. Critical minerals. China's pause on gallium, germanium, and antimony export controls expires November 27, 2026. By the time a chokepoint is on the front page, the move is largely over. The prize goes to whoever was patient enough to map the chain when it was boring. So I built a dashboard A free public dashboard. The chokepoints, the names that own them, the live prices, the catalysts, and the written thesis all on one screen. No login. No newsletter. Not a portfolio. Not a recommendation. A prism. I wanted it free because the people I would have wanted to read this when I was younger could not have afforded a Bloomberg terminal. Students. Engineers. Journalists trying to understand what they are writing about. Retail investors tired of being sold someone else's conviction. Curious teenagers in countries where the local financial press is twenty years behind the actual frontier. The chain deserves to be walked. That is the whole invitation. links below 👇 Educational, not investment advice.