Semiconductor

My previous article covered the semiconductor cycle, and I feel like there’s a piece of background/context missing.

Your judgment/conclusion regarding this point—the overall direction is correct. Furthermore, I believe it is a prerequisite that is easiest to overlook when trying to understand this current semiconductor boom.

A more accurate way to put it is not that “all internet giants are fighting in the same field,” but rather: Large Models have, for the first time, brought together major players previously scattered across different domains—such as search, advertising, social media, e-commerce, office productivity, cloud computing, and content distribution—into direct competition within the same technical stack.

This technology stack includes models, computational power, inference, cloud, Agents, distribution gateways, and commercialization closed loops. Everyone’s original “moat” is different, but now we must all fill the same gap. Those who fail to do so will see their future search entry points, ad pricing, office suites, e-commerce conversion, and social traffic distribution rewritten by others.

Regarding this round of semiconductor trends, I temporarily do not see a peak in 2026.

If forced to give an initial judgment, as of May 12, 2026, I am more inclined to place the truly critical period between the second half of 2027 and the first half of 2028, rather than now. The core driver of this current uptrend—particularly in US listed storage and Korean semiconductors—is not a general recovery, but rather AI pulling HBM, DDR5, and enterprise SSD up simultaneously. If supply expansion fails, both prices and profits will rise together.

This also explains why companies like Micron, SK hynix, and Samsung seem to be “printing money” lately. The semiconductor cycle hasn’t vanished, but this time it is unlikely to collapse when demand first kicks in; rather, it is more likely to crash when capacity expansion finally catches up, and the market has already front-loaded two or three years’ worth of profit.

The most unusual aspect of this current AI market cycle is not that Nvidia has risen sharply, but that the increase in value has been transmitted throughout the entire industrial chain: first GPUs, then servers, switches, ASICs, HBM, and finally to NAND, hard drives, power, and data centers.

If it were just a concept, the market trend shouldn’t last this long. But saying that it has already formed a complete profit cycle might be premature.

I prefer to view it as a “bull market driven by certain expenditures”: cloud vendors and model companies are genuinely spending money, and upstream companies are indeed collecting revenue, which is why stocks rose first; however, terminal applications have not yet proven that these investments can reliably generate enough profit, meaning the risk of a bubble also exists.