Corvin

Alphabet ($GOOG) is on course for its worst post-earnings day since its 2004 IPO. However, Its cloud business just doubled. Google Cloud revenue +103% to $30.7B (consensus $29.1B). Cloud operating margin 36.2%, up from 23.7% a year ago Cloud backlog $561B, just over 55% due within 24 months. Search & others: $63.4B vs $64.9B consensus, the real miss. Free cash flow was -$9.1B. Capex of $51.4B ran ahead of $42.3B of operating cash flow, which also carried a build-up of Google's own AI chips in inventory and a $5.2B EU fine payment. EPS of $2.12 includes an $8.2B unrealized loss on the SpaceX stake. 2026 capex guidance held at $195-205B. My view: the market is pricing a cash-burn problem at a company holding $265B of cash and securities and a $561B cloud order book. For chip suppliers, Alphabet's 2027 spending plan is the number that matters which is going to increase significantly per the management.

Foreigners turned net buyers on Korean market. Bought ~1.4T won ($1.1B) of KOSPI shares over the last two sessions. T The KOSPI rose 9.9% over the two days, from 5,469 to 6,012. Institutions bought about 1.2T won as well, while individuals sold about 2.7T won into the rally. They were net sellers of ~18.3T won (about $13.7B) of KOSPI shares in October. $SKHY starts buying back shares tomorrow, Oct 29, and runs the program through Jan 28, 2027. It will buy about 20T won (~$15.0B) of its shares between Oct 29 and Jan 28. Samsung may join the league as well post earning tomorrow. Foreign net buying coupled with buyback from SK Hynix and Samsung could start the next phase of bull run in Korean market.

$GEV now has 122 GW of gas turbines on order or reserved, up from 116 GW three months ago. It expects at least 130 GW by year-end. Q3 orders $29.3B, up 96% organically Power segment orders up 178% Total backlog $197B, up $20B in one quarter, and seen above $200B in Q4 2026 revenue guidance raised to $46.5–47.5B from $45.5–46.5B Q3 free cash flow $5.4B The turbine queue is still getting longer. That makes power, not chips, the limit on how fast 2027–28 data center capacity comes online.

Vertiv's orders more than doubled last quarter while sales grew 61%. Customers are ordering AI data center power and cooling faster than Vertiv can ship it. Q3 sales $4.31B vs $3.75B consensus Adjusted EPS $2.21 vs $1.82 consensus Adjusted operating margin 25.2%, up 2.9 points 2026 sales guidance raised $650M to ~$14.65B, vs $13.99B consensus Q4 EPS guidance about $2.25 vs $2.21 consensus Customers had also prepaid $4.1B by September 30. My view: when buyers pay up front for gear that ships over the next year or more, the 2027 data center build is already funded. $VRT is up more than 12% premarket.

SK hynix posted a record quarter and a clean beat vs expectation. Operating profit was 83.3T won (about $62B) against about 76T expected, at 80% margin. Revenue 104.6T won (~$77.5B), +328% from a year ago, first quarter above 100T. Nine months: ~$134B operating profit on ~$175B revenue What matters for 2027-28: long-term contracts already cover more than half of 2027-28 capacity, and management sees the shortage running through 2030. It's a matter of time, market starts looking memory as no more cyclical business, that's when we will see significant re-rating considering the ultra cheap valuation they are trading at. Very bullish on $SKHY, $MU and Samsung.

Since Monday, AI buyers have lined up about $160B of outside money for compute. $META: a $97.5B equity plan. $25B of common at $625 (upsized from $22.5B), $12.5B of convertible preferred, and up to $60B at market prices from Q1 2027. Nvidia is taking $3B. Anthropic: a $63B financing to buy Broadcom custom chips and networking gear, leased to Anthropic from 2027. Meta's free cash flow turned negative in Q3, a $2.1B burn and its first in over a decade. Its answer was to raise more and keep building. My view: the buyers want to build faster than their own cash flow allows, and this week the capital markets showed they'll fund the gap. For Nvidia and Broadcom, that means 2027-28 orders are backed by committed money, not just plans.

Foreign investors are ~$1.6B (₩2.1T) away from their biggest month of selling Korean stocks on record, with five sessions to go. October so far: $14.1B (₩19.0T) sold on the Kospi through Oct 23. The record is $15.7B (₩21.1T), set this February. About three quarters of it is two stocks: SK hynix $7.6B (₩10.3T) and Samsung $2.8B (₩3.8T). February's record came while the Kospi rose 19% in the month, and the index was 36% higher three months later. This time the Kospi is down 19% this month, and SK hynix's $30B (₩40T) buyback, which absorbed much of the selling, ended Oct 21. $SKHY reports Wednesday. Donga Ilbo reports it plans a special dividend of about $12B (₩16T).

$SPCX jumped 6.6% after hours to $157.6 after beating consensus on every line. The bigger story is what it says about demand for AI chips. Q3 vs consensus: Revenue $14.6B vs $12.87B, +87% QoQ, +161% YoY EPS $0.35 vs $0.13–0.14 AI segment $7.56B vs $6.47B, +195% QoQ, +830% YoY Q1 2027 revenue guided at $33–37B vs about $22–23B consensus The demand signal: Q4 capital spending is guided at $35 to 40B, almost double Q3's $19.6B. Plan to go from 1.7 GW of computing in September to 2.5–3 GW by year end, then add 10 GW in 2027. Management is aiming for $100B revenue run rate by December and $500B–1T by end of 2027. Musk on the call: "I think we're going to face a shortage of super intelligence compute. And that shortage is going to remain for a long time." My view: This is bullish for the other new AI cloud players too. If demand is strong enough to turn SpaceX's AI unit profitable this fast, the rest are seeing the same shortage. I'd expect a similar story from Nebius when it reports: revenue running ahead of guidance and spending going up, not down.

$SMCI just said its September quarter came in about $4B above its own guidance. Revenue: $18.5-19.5B Its guidance: $14.5-15.5B Consensus: $15.23B Gross margin: 12.0-12.5% vs 10.4-10.8% guided This comes after a two-week selloff in chip stocks on doubts about AI data center spending. Server revenue is where that spending shows up first, and the midpoint came in about 25% above what the Street expected. Full results and guidance come Nov 3. Curently semi stocks movement and earnings are completely disconnected. It won't last longer imo. Gradual accumulation is the way to go.

Chip stocks are down 24% from their June 22 peak. Nvidia is up 2.6% over the same stretch. The losses are somewhere else: $CRWV −48% $NBIS −42% $AMAT −37% $LRCX −36% $AVGO −15% $TSMC −11% The market is marking down chip-equipment makers and the debt-funded companies that rent out AI computing, the two groups hit first if AI spending slows or borrowing stays expensive with the 10-year yield above 5%. Expecting market to remain rangebound until mid term election. However, don't see much downside from here.

Hedge funds sold tech at the fastest pace in Goldman Sachs data (back to 2016) in the five days to Oct 15, led by chips. Tech is still 23.5% of their net exposure, above 90% of readings in the past five years. Coming week $META , $MSFT and $GOOGL will report earnings. Let's see whether the sale continues.

$MSFT has pulled out of Nscale's £2 billion AI data center in Loughton, Essex. Power for the site was due by the end of this year. The grid now says it won't arrive until the early-to-mid 2030s. Only last month, Microsoft still counted the site as part of its $30 billion UK investment. Nscale says it will keep building and look for other power sources, and its other Microsoft projects in Norway, Portugal and the US aren't affected. The chips and the customer were both ready. The project stalled because the grid connection is now about eight years late.

Is Japan dumping Treasuries? Its holdings fell $171B between February and August, to $1.07T. But $120B of that drop came from short-term bills. Net sales of longer-dated notes and bonds were just $13B. The timing matches Tokyo's defense of the yen: ¥27.1T (about $170B) of dollars sold between April 30 and May 6, and again in August. So far this is about supporting the yen, not Japan walking away from long-term US debt. Japan's own 10-year yield hit 3.1% in September, its highest since 1996, which gives Japanese investors more reason to keep money at home over time.

The next two weeks will shape how the AI trade looks going into 2027. Big Tech is expected to spend $1.1-1.2T USD on capex next year, and none of them has put a number yet. I'm watching for the first guidance. Here's how the next two weeks go: Tue 20: $SPCX Wed 21: $META, $LRCX, $TSLA, $TXN, $IBM Thu 22: $WDC Wed 28: $MSFT and $GOOGL, same day as the Fed decision, plus $KLAC Thu 29: $AMZN, $INTC What I'm watching: $META hasn't given a 2027 outlook yet. A first range on the 21st sets the tone. $GOOGL said capex will "increase significantly in 2027." Whether it puts a number on it. $LRCX and $KLAC on 2027 chip-equipment orders, which is where that spending lands first.

CXMT's Q3 revenue rose 15-20% QoQ to RMB 114.7-119.7B (about $17-18B) but its bit shipments barely moved. DRAM prices rose 10-20% in Q3. So almost all of CXMT's growth came from higher prices, not from selling more chips (which grew ~5% as per my estimate). Omdia had CXMT at 7.7% of global DRAM in Q4 2025. Bernstein sees about 12% by 2028. For Samsung, SK hynix and Micron, that's the pace to watch.

AI took 82.7% of all US venture capital through September, according to PitchBook and the NVCA. That's about $427 billion, more than all US startups raised in 2021, the previous record year ($358 billion). AI's share fell to 65.9% in the third quarter as the giant rounds for AI labs slowed, and total deal value dropped about 40%. Excluding the AI labs, US startups are raising roughly what they did ten years ago.

A day after the crash, Jensen stepped up for $CRWV. In Stockholm he said Nvidia doesn't need to backstop CoreWeave, and that its cost of capital is actually coming down. The stock liked it. It bounced about 17% off the intraday low, from $59.51 to a $69.69 close. And honestly, the debt side backs him up more than the headlines do. CoreWeave has two very different kinds of debt. The newest secured loan, $8.5B from March, is investment grade at around 5.9% because it's backed by customer contracts. Meanwhile the unsecured 2032 bonds trade under 80 cents, yielding over 15%. Lenders with contracts behind them are calm. Lenders with nothing behind them are nervous. EBITDA covers interest about 2.3x, so this isn't a near-term default story. What I'm watching is whether secured lenders keep the door open. As long as backlog keeps turning into contracts, CoreWeave can fund itself. If that slows, those 15% bonds will have been the early warning.

The Kospi closed down 7.6% on Thursday after a 20-minute circuit breaker. SK hynix fell 11% and Samsung fell 9.5%. Today, we have seen some recovery in the Korean market. KOSPI recovered ~3%, SK Hynix and Samsung both are up ~4%. What set it off: China's CXMT said it will launch server DDR5 on a denser 4F² cell design by year end, and a Korean newspaper column warned of memory oversupply in 2029. Elon Musk added: "China will be making a LOT of RAM in 2028." What I take from it: CXMT says its first 4F² server DDR5 ships by year end, with no volumes or yields given. Bernstein has it at 9% of global DRAM bits in 2026 and 12% in 2028, and Deutsche Bank still sees 2028 demand at 129% of supply. Even if every CXMT wafer got the full 4F² gain, that's ~6 extra points of supply, less than a year of ~22% bit growth. Buyers are signing longer. The same day, KeyBanc's John Vinh said $GOOGL is discussing memory supply deals through 2035, and HP and Dell are extending theirs into 2031. He expects DRAM prices up 15-20% in Q4 and HBM prices up 80-100% in Q1 2027. The thing I'd watch next is whether $MSFT, $AMZN and $META ask for terms like Google's.

$TSMC Q3 results Net profit: $23.9 billion (NT$763.1 billion) vs $23.4 billion (NT$746.3 billion) consensus. Up 69% year on year. Revenue: $46.7 billion, above its own $44.6–45.8 billion guidance. Up 16% quarter on quarter and 51% year on year. Gross margin: 66.4%, down from 67.7% in Q2 because of the early costs of its new 2-nanometer chips. Operating margin was 58.7%, above the top of guidance. Q4 guidance: revenue of $52.3–54.3 billion, about 14% higher than Q3 and 58% higher than a year ago. Analysts were looking for growth of 10–15%. Gross margin is guided at 65–67%. Full year: TSMC now expects 2026 revenue to grow about 44% in dollars, up from "above 40%". Capital spending stays at $60–64 billion. CEO C.C. Wei said demand is extremely robust with no sign of slowdown, and that AI demand will probably grow faster than TSMC's earlier estimate of the mid-to-high 50s percent a year.

Anthropic told investors on Wednesday that it made $16.8B of revenue in Q3. That's up 45% from $11.6B in Q2. Total revenue in first 9 months stands at $33 vs full 2025 revenue of $4.6B. On an adjusted basis, gross margin was 85%, operating margin was above 11%. Free cash flow was positive. Per the FT, it made $1.70 of revenue for every $1 spent on compute. Per Reuters expecting $110B annual run rate by year-end. This is very bullish news for entire AI space. Anthropic has committed at least $518B to compute and cloud over about a decade.