Just Too Many News... & Two Big Winners

TLDR;

Welcome back! I was going to send this newsletter yesterday, but the release of Opus 4.6 and Codex 5.3 were only minutes apart and required some additional study.

I’m not going to lie, keeping up with this industry has become more than a full-time job. This week, we discuss these two big model launches, market data showing two stocks looking better than ever amid a huge sell-off, Google’s earnings, Opus 4.6's reckless behavior selling KitKats (yes, that headline is real), and OpenAI’s first official enterprise product: Frontier.

Enjoy!

MEMORY

Micron Potential HBM4 Disappointment

Micron had a small dip today after SemiAnalysis raised doubts about whether it would deploy any HBM4 chips in 2026, putting the projection at literally zero. That’s really bad, considering Micron was seen as being well-positioned to start HBM4 mass production in 2026, citing “no indications of Nvidia ordering Micron HBM4.”

If true, that puts Sk Hynix and Samsung as the sole suppliers of HBM4 in the world, putting them in a unique position to supply both NVIDIA and AMD for their upcoming top-tier GPUs (Google’s upcoming TPUv8 will still be using HBM3e, which Micron does supply), as well as Intel’s “Jaguar Shores” platform.

People talk a lot about ‘HMB’, but it’s a little bit more complex than people realize. I talked about HBM technology in greater detail here, but the point is that this technology needs to be ‘homologated’ by your customers; it's not off-the-shelf DRAM sticks like the ones you buy at your local IT store (though these are also produced by these three companies).

Customers, like NVIDIA, have very specific pin rates (the speed of each memory bus lane), power consumption, and even logic (HBM stacks have a ‘base die’ at the bottom), which basically sums up as a complex technology to sell.

However, this comes at a benefit, and that’s being an extremely profitable business, one of the most profitable on the planet right now, actually, as consensus from sell-side analysts puts both Samsung and Hynix in the top 10 most profitable companies, measured by operating profit, in the entire world.

Yes, you are reading correctly, SK Hynix is expected to generate more profits than JP Morgan, Meta, or TSMC in 2026.

And you know where you heard about this company opportunity first, right? Here!

Is this the end for Micron? Not at all, HBM3e is still in great demand, with most ASIC chips being all HBM3e allocations, like Google’s TPUv8, Microsoft’s Maia inference chip, Amazon’s Trn3, etc. They are going to be just fine, but it takes no genius to see who’s faring better right now (again, assuming prediction SemiAnalysis is correct).

What Micron has been going for is being in the US market and thus listed there, giving it way more liquidity access (nonetheless, crazily enough, Micron has a higher market cap than Hynix). This is rarely discussed, but Samsung and Hynix, especially the latter, are notoriously difficult for US investors to access. Hynix is rumored to be preparing for…

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