The Thesis

Samsung’s preliminary Q2 2026 results confirm the memory supercycle thesis in full: operating profit of roughly 89.4 trillion won (about $58.4 billion) surged 19-fold year-over-year and beat consensus estimates of around 86 trillion won by roughly 6%. Revenue more than doubled year-over-year to 171 trillion won. On operating income, Samsung has now posted the highest quarterly profit ever recorded by a technology company, ahead of Nvidia’s most recent quarter. And yet Samsung shares fell as much as 6.8% in Seoul on the news — a reminder that in this cycle, “beat” and “priced in” are not the same thing.

Strategy has sold 3,588 BTC for roughly $216 million over the past two weeks, the first real test of the company’s newly announced Bitcoin Monetization Program — a formal reversal of Michael Saylor’s long-standing “never sell” accumulation strategy.

What actually happened. The sales came in two tranches: 1,363 BTC for $80.8 million between June 29 and June 30, and 2,225 BTC for $135.2 million between July 1 and July 5. Strategy still holds 843,775 BTC, with an average acquisition cost of roughly $75,500 per coin — meaning the company is selling at a steep unrealized loss relative to its cost basis, since Bitcoin has been trading near $60,000.

SK Hynix formally launched its Nasdaq ADR offering this week, targeting roughly $28 billion in proceeds — a deal that would rank among the largest share sales in history, trailing only SpaceX’s IPO from last month. Pricing is expected Thursday, with trading set to begin Friday under the ticker SKHY.

The scale. SK Hynix is selling 17.79 million new shares via ADRs, with 10 ADRs representing one common share. The target was revised down from an earlier filing that sought closer to $29.6 billion, after the stock corrected in Seoul in the run-up to pricing. Even at the reduced size, it would surpass both the Saudi Aramco and Alibaba IPOs.

SpaceX enters the Nasdaq 100 before the market opens today, and the mechanics matter more than the headline. Index funds and ETFs tracking the Nasdaq 100 — collectively managing on the order of $800 billion in assets — don’t get to decide whether they want to own SpaceX. Once the exchange adds it, they have to buy, regardless of valuation.

The weighting is smaller than the market cap suggests. SpaceX priced its IPO at a valuation north of $2 trillion, comparable to Amazon. But Nasdaq 100 weightings are based on free-float market cap — the shares actually available to trade — not total valuation. Insider holdings and lockup-restricted shares don’t count. That’s why SpaceX is expected to enter at roughly a 1% weighting despite a market cap that would otherwise put it near the top of the index. JPMorgan has estimated the resulting mechanical buying at over $4 billion.

TeraWulf signed a 20-year lease with Anthropic for its Justified Data campus in Hawesville, Kentucky, a deal expected to generate approximately $19 billion in contracted revenue over the initial term. The announcement sent TeraWulf shares up more than 17% on the day — a striking outcome for a company that started life as a Bitcoin miner.

The scale of the campus. Justified Data is expected to support roughly 401 megawatts of critical IT load once fully built. Initial capacity comes online in the second half of 2027, with the site reaching full capacity by early 2028. That timeline matters: this is a multi-year commitment, not a near-term revenue bump, and the $19 billion figure averages out to roughly $950 million a year across the lease term, with actual cash flows depending on phased delivery and escalation terms.

Cerebras is two companies wearing one ticker. One is a genuinely differentiated silicon engineering shop with an architectural edge that the rest of the industry is now scrambling to copy. The other is a revenue base so concentrated that until roughly two months ago it had, functionally, two customers — both in Abu Dhabi. Any honest read of CBRS has to hold both at once, and the second one deserves far more weight than the momentum around the stock suggests.

The joint venture just did the thing it does best: ship a genuine engineering advance and wrap it in a press release that says more than the underlying event quite supports. Kioxia and SanDisk announced the “start of production” of their 10th-generation 3D flash — BiCS10 — at the K2 fab in Kitakami. The technology is real and competitive. The framing is doing some work. And the business underneath it is the most cyclical, least-cushioned corner of the memory complex, which matters a great deal for how much of this belongs in a SanDisk valuation that has already run over 750% this year.

The memory trade finally blinked. Micron and SanDisk each fell roughly 10.6% on Wednesday, July 1, with Western Digital and Seagate dropping 6.3% and 5.2%. Thursday brought a second leg down: SanDisk lost another 11%, Seagate 7%, Micron 4%. The Roundhill Memory ETF (DRAM) — the cleanest sector proxy, launched only in April — shed nearly 11% Wednesday and another 5% Thursday. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index posted a 7.9% weekly decline, its worst since April 2025.

Micron broke ground this week on a roughly $9 billion HBM fab inside its existing Hiroshima campus, with first shipments targeted for the summer of 2028. Strip away the ribbon-cutting and the strategic logic is genuinely sound: HBM is the most constrained component in the AI supply chain, Micron is the number-three player trying to close the gap on SK Hynix and Samsung, and the Japanese government is covering a large slice of the bill. Every part of that is defensible. The problem isn’t the decision — it’s the arrival date. This capacity lands in 2028, which is precisely the year the supply-glut argument that drove this week’s memory selloff says the cycle rolls over. The same event is the bull’s bottleneck-reliever and the bear’s Exhibit A, and which one it becomes won’t be knowable for two years.

The memory bull case rests on a single assumption, and it is worth stating plainly because everything else follows from it: every incremental dollar of AI compute requires proportionally more high-bandwidth memory. GPUs pair with HBM, HBM is scarce and expensive, and that scarcity is precisely what handed Micron and SK Hynix gross margins near 85% and market caps north of a trillion dollars. If the assumption holds, memory demand scales with the AI buildout indefinitely. The SRAM wildcard is the possibility that a meaningful slice of AI demand quietly stops needing the memory these companies sell.