The Blade Weekly: Micron, Apple and AMD Start Funding Their Suppliers
Week of July 5 to July 11, 2026 · Zero One Investment Research
Executive Summary
- Micron, Apple and AMD committed a combined US$43bn-plus to the suppliers they depend on, moving the industry from ordering capacity to financing it and shifting build risk onto the buyers.
- Memory economics reached record levels: Samsung's operating profit rose 19x, and Nanya's gross margin hit 79.5% on flat shipments, with prices doing all the work.
- SK Hynix raised US$26.5bn in the largest US listing by a foreign company, and the week's selloff reversed in two sessions as money returned to memory and compute.
Chip buyers moved from ordering capacity to funding it
Three deals in one week showed the AI supply chain's biggest customers writing checks so the capacity they need gets built.
- Micron pre-funds its wafer supply: up to US$3bn committed to the US supply chain on July 10, anchored by US$500m of strategic funding for Taiwan's GlobalWafers (6488 TT) and a 10-year agreement locking in the raw silicon wafers its US fabs will need.
- Apple locks in five years of US silicon: an agreement with Broadcom (AVGO US) worth more than US$30bn through 2031, covering at least 15 billion US-produced chips.
- AMD pays to reroute its packaging: more than US$10bn pledged across Taiwan's supply chain, routing its CPU into Powertech Technology's (6239 TT) advanced packaging.
For most of the past decade, suppliers built capacity on their own balance sheets and competed for orders. With compute, memory, packaging and now raw wafers all tight, the buyers are pre-funding the build to secure supply and pricing, which shifts the risk of overbuilding onto them. GlobalWafers chairman Doris Hsu said the committed volumes justify planning a second phase of the Texas site: a customer's capital converted a possible expansion into a planned one.
Memory economics: record profits on flat shipments
Another quarter of record memory results, and the margin levels are still climbing.
- Samsung's operating profit rose 19x: guided at about KRW 89.4tn for the second quarter, against KRW 4.7tn a year earlier and above analyst consensus.
- Nanya's gross margin hit 79.5%: revenue rose 68% from the prior quarter and gross margin jumped from 67.9% to 79.5%. Shipments were flat; selling prices, up about 60%, did all of it.
- Contract prices did the work: standard DRAM rose roughly 90% in the first quarter and 50-60% in the second, and Samsung is negotiating a further increase of up to 20% for the third.
An 80% margin on a commodity product means the shortage, not the product, is setting the price, and the question is no longer how high margins go but how long they stay there. The duration evidence firmed this week:
- Etron sees no relief before mid-2027: the memory designer (5351 TT) forecasts DRAM prices climbing 10-20% a month through at least the third quarter, among the most specific public price forecasts any chipmaker has offered this cycle.
- Customers are signing for years, not quarters: Nanya's management says buyers are seeking two-to-three-year supply contracts.
- Phison's order visibility reaches 1H27: the NAND controller maker (8299 TT) put first-half revenue above NT$100bn for the first time, up more than 240% on last year.
The series that ends this run is the monthly contract-price cadence: the first month prices stop rising is the turn, and July's negotiations are still pointing up.
SK Hynix raised US$26.5bn in the largest US listing by a foreign company
Two days after a circuit-breaker selloff, investors bid for seven times the stock on offer.
SK Hynix (000660 KS) priced its US-listed shares at US$149 on July 9 and raised about US$26.5bn, ahead of Alibaba's 2014 record, with the stock due to trade on Nasdaq as SKHY. Baillie Gifford, Coatue Management and Situational Awareness Partners were reported bidding for up to a combined US$7bn. The listing gives US investors their first direct access to NVIDIA's lead supplier of high-bandwidth memory, and it belongs beside the week's supplier-funding deals: between customers pre-paying for capacity and public markets oversubscribing a record listing, the memory expansion is finding capital faster than it can convert it into fabs.
Pricing power broadened across foundry, memory and materials
With capacity tight at almost every layer, the suppliers are setting the terms.
- All three big contract chipmakers raised prices this month: TSMC notified NVIDIA, Apple and AMD of wafer price increases of 5-10%, Samsung followed with about 15%, and UMC (2303 TT) added selective increases. The new part is the coverage: the hikes now reach older, mature chips that were oversupplied a year ago, and this is the first stretch in years where the fabs set prices instead of competing for orders.
- Components and materials are pricing too: Taiwan's circuit-board material makers all posted record June revenue with further increases queued into 2027, and Delta Electronics (2308 TT) began a second round of power-supply hikes as copper climbed above a fifth of its bill of materials.
- The gauge to watch is Murata's orders-to-backlog ratio, orders waiting versus orders filled: at 1.27 it is past the 1.25 it reached as the severe 2018 component shortage took hold, and spillover orders are already reaching Taiwan's Yageo (2327 TT) and Walsin (2492 TT). A slide back below that mark would be the first sign the shortage is easing. Nothing in the late-June readings pointed that way.
Scarcity spread beyond the chip, to boards, packaging and optics
The supply chain now carries scarcity at many points, not just the chip.
- A circuit board, not a chip, drove the week's scare: research firm SemiAnalysis blamed a board component for a possible one-year slip in NVIDIA's next AI rack, and board leader Elite Material (2383 TT) lost NT$216.7bn of market value in a day before NVIDIA denied any delay. Real or not, AI server boards keep getting more complex and more material-hungry.
- A new standard routes around the tightest packaging step: the industry body JEDEC published a way to run the fastest AI memory on an ordinary circuit board instead of the expensive, capacity-constrained packaging (called CoWoS) it needs today. It is slower, but it hands chip designers a cost lever around one of the cycle's worst bottlenecks.
- Optics won its first volume order: Largan Precision (3008 TT) will supply fiber arrays for chip-to-chip optical links, with mass production possible by mid-2027, as TSMC plans to lift its photonics capacity more than thirtyfold by 2028.
Where scarcity sits is what sets pricing power in this cycle. Whether CoWoS-class packaging still commands premium pricing a year from now is the test of whether the workaround worked.
In brief: China regained limited NVIDIA access. Beijing will let Alibaba, ByteDance and DeepSeek buy capped quantities of NVIDIA's two-generation-old H200, the first crack in its procurement ban; the quantities are small and NVIDIA's China revenue is already near zero, so the signal is about priorities: near-term compute won out over self-reliance purity, even as DeepSeek raises about US$7bn for its own chip and China's CXMT now sells DRAM at prices near the global leaders.
The past week's tape: one violent session, reversed in two
Foreign investors had sold Korean stocks for eleven straight sessions when Samsung's record print landed on July 8, and the record did not stop the selling: the session tripped Korea's circuit breaker and handed Taiwan its eighth-largest point drop on record before memory led a two-session recovery. Last week investors chased the smaller supply-chain names; this week they sold them just as hard, and Winway Technology (6515 TT), up about 21% the prior week and down 21.6% this one, is the whole round trip in one stock. The divergence worth noting is Global Unichip (3443 TT): record June revenue, up 103.7% on last year, yet down 13.9% on the week. The selling followed positioning, not the order books, which kept setting records straight through it.
| Company | Ticker | Group | 1-week |
|---|---|---|---|
| Meta | META US | Hyperscaler | +14.8% |
| Broadcom | AVGO US | Custom silicon | +11.0% |
| CoreWeave | CRWV US | AI cloud | +8.7% |
| Silicon Motion | SIMO US | NAND controllers | +8.5% |
| NVIDIA | NVDA US | GPU | +8.3% |
| AMD | AMD US | GPU / CPU | +7.7% |
| Qualcomm | QCOM US | Fabless | +7.3% |
| Realtek | 2379 TT | IC design | +7.3% |
| NXP Semiconductors | NXPI US | Auto / analog | +6.9% |
| Nanya Technology | 2408 TT | Memory | +6.7% |
| Tripod Technology | 3044 TT | PCB | -11.4% |
| Voltronic Power | 6409 TT | Power / UPS | -12.0% |
| Elite Material | 2383 TT | CCL | -12.9% |
| Ibiden | 4062 JT | IC substrate | -13.0% |
| Silergy | 6415 TT | Power IC | -13.6% |
| Yageo | 2327 TT | Passives | -13.9% |
| Global Unichip | 3443 TT | ASIC design | -13.9% |
| Asia Vital Components | 3017 TT | Thermal | -14.9% |
| Walsin Technology | 2492 TT | Passives | -16.9% |
| Gold Circuit Electronics | 2368 TT | PCB | -17.6% |
| Samsung Electro-Mechanics | 009150 KS | Passives | -20.4% |
| Winway Technology | 6515 TT | Test sockets | -21.6% |
Taiwan-listed names are week-over-week to the Thursday July 9 close, as Taiwan's market was shut Friday July 10 for a typhoon; Korea, Japan and US names are to the Friday July 10 close. Coverage-grade names ranked by one-week change; off-theme holdings excluded. Source: Zero One Investment Research; prices via public market data.
Week Ahead / What to Watch
- TSMC June monthly revenue (July 13, typhoon-delayed). A record month of about NT$428bn means the quarter is on track for the midpoint of guidance; anything below roughly NT$409bn means even the low end is missed.
- TSMC 2Q26 earnings release (July 16). The first hard read on whether the peak-earnings fear or the shortage call is right: full-year revenue and capex guidance, the 2nm ramp, and packaging allocation after a week of foundry price hikes.
- Taiwan's reaction to Nanya's 79.5% gross margin. Nanya reported through the typhoon while Taiwan's market was shut; Monday is the first session where the memory group can trade on a print that beat expectations by nearly 10 points of margin.
- SK Hynix's Nasdaq debut. The first sessions after pricing at US$149 test whether public-market demand matches the record order book.
- Taiwan's June sales prints. Watch whether the memory, component and foundry price hikes are showing up in the monthly revenue of Taiwan's listed suppliers.