Hyperscaler Night + Silicon Carbide
GOOG, MSFT, META, AMZN. Plus QCOM, KLAC, and Samsung. SK hynix takes the 12-high HBM lead, and a pod pick on silicon carbide’s four lives.
Hyperscaler earnings bonanza today! GOOG, MSFT, META, and AMZN. Also don’t forget QCOM and KLAC. Samsung is also tonight my time, but tomorrow their time 😅
If you don’t want earnings, tune in to a highly recommended pod pick below on SiC in photonics.
In other news, SK hynix completed validation for 12-high hybrid-bonding HBM (the stock is up 49% in the last month).
Oh yeah, and do read about new beginnings for Vik.
— Austin & Vik
Mag Night
Interesting things we’re listening for in tonight’s earnings:
MSFT framing on OpenAI. First MSFT call since OpenAI’s redefining-the-relationship announcement.
AWS commentary on OpenAI. Yesterday’s AWS event was the big coming-out party for AWS+OAI, and there was a nice Stratechery joint interview with Sam Altman and Matt Garman. Will we learn anything more?
GOOG TPU CapEx and the Anthropic $40B. Listen for explicit color on the reported $40B Anthropic investment/compute commitment, cloud backlog, and TPU demand.
META’s AI Infra. Meta has had a lot of silicon news lately. Meta + AWS Graviton, Meta + Broadcom, Meta + Arm, MTIA Roadmap
KLAC as fab read through. Watch services revenue (the installed-base tell on fab utilization), advanced-packaging tool demand, and see if we can back out any insight regarding TSMC N2 / A16 and Intel 18A/14A tooling.
Samsung: HBM4 timing and 2nm. Memory: HBM4 production timeline and 12-high stack progress. Foundry: 2nm yield commentary and any talk about Elon/Tesla after all the Intel/Terafab press.
QCOM automotive. Qualcomm’s automotive business has been growing nicely over the past year. Expect to hear more of the same.
Austin: CapEx revisions and cloud growth are the metrics everyone’s watching.
I’m personally interested in the OpenAI vs Anthropic split and what color each hyperscaler gives on both. Anthropic is widely available across hyperscalers, but OpenAI has momentum after its recent Microsoft exclusivity breakup.
And I’ve been waiting for Microsoft to talk more about GitHub and the strategy there. Huge asset, but it doesn’t get much strategic narrative. Missed opportunity IMO.
🎧 Pod Pick: silicon carbide’s four lives
Austin recently listened to a Following the Photons episode with Barry Silverstein, who just left a 7-year run as CTO of optics and display at Meta Reality Labs (Quest, Orion) to lead the new Center for Extended Reality at the University of Rochester. He also won an Academy Sci-Tech Award in 2024 for his work on IMAX’s laser projection system. The whole episode is worth your time, but there was an interesting bit about silicon carbide we wanted to call out.
Most semis readers know SiC as the power-electronics material: EV inverters, wind, solar, anywhere you want higher breakdown voltage than silicon. But wait, there’s more!
Barry Silverstein: “How many materials do you know that can go from power to high-speed electronics to photonics to quantum and back again?”
Optical-grade SiC (pure crystal, no dopants, refractive index 2.6) is the waveguide material in Meta’s Orion AR glasses. The high index pushes the rainbow dispersion artifact out to the corners of the field of view, almost making it disappear. The wafer ramp has been fast:
“At the time [Orion] was built, it was only available at 150mm wafers. It’s now at 200mm, rapidly going to 300mm. The prices dropped dramatically, 7 to 10X.”
Next up could be integrated photonics on SiC, and (with the right defect) a quantum computing substrate.
SK hynix takes the HBM lead
SK hynix reportedly completed validation for 12-high hybrid-bonding HBM, raising yields ahead of mass production. As a reminder, 12-high pushes past current 8-high stacks to give AI accelerators more memory bandwidth per package.
Quick refresher on hybrid bonding: stacked DRAM dies are joined directly copper-to-copper instead of through tiny solder microbumps (the older thermocompression-bonding approach). The benefit is smaller pitch, lower electrical resistance, better thermal conductivity, and enough vertical headroom to keep stacking more dies without blowing up package height. It’s the same Cu-bonding family as TSMC’s SoIC for logic stacking and Amkor’s 3D Stack roadmap, and it’s the important unlock for HBM moving from 8-high to 12-high to (eventually) 16-high.
The stock is up 49% in the last month.
Austin: Not much else to say other than “when does SK hynix’s ADR list?”
One stat: 50 long haul flights for AI servers
Saw this tweet from a few days ago @dnystedt: Taiwan’s China Airlines and Eva Air will run ~50 AI server air-cargo charter flights in May, up from a normal 20/month. Hyperscalers are paying air-freight premiums to accelerate AI deployments.
Look ahead
More earnings tomorrow. Apple, MediaTek, SanDisk, and Western Digital. Austin is tuning in for Rivian and Volkswagen, too.
That’s it for today!