Zero One Investment Research Daily Intelligence Brief, July 23, 2026

AMD bets $5bn on Anthropic to challenge NVIDIA as Supermicro's quarterly orders top $60bn

Top Market Signals

AMD funds Anthropic to buy AMD chips

AMD (AMD US) will invest up to US$5bn in Anthropic and, in return, Anthropic will buy up to 2 gigawatts of AMD's newest Instinct MI450 accelerators, a deal that puts AMD directly against NVIDIA (NVDA US) for the largest AI training buildouts. The structure mirrors the circular financing NVIDIA struck with OpenAI: the chipmaker takes an equity stake in the model developer, and the model developer commits to years of chip purchases.

According to Central News Agency reporting on an AFP dispatch, Anthropic will also adopt AMD's Helios rack-scale system, the platform AMD built to compete with NVIDIA's Vera Rubin racks at the full-system level rather than the single-chip level. AMD chief executive Lisa Su framed the tie-up as combining Anthropic's position in frontier AI with AMD's high-performance computing stack, and said both sides want to speed mass adoption of AI.

The read-through is that a second large-scale accelerator lane now has committed funding behind it. Anthropic committing 2GW to MI450 gives AMD a reference customer at the scale that has so far belonged almost entirely to NVIDIA, and it lands the same week that Wall Street banks began trading pieces of a separate US$35bn financing package tied to Broadcom (AVGO US) and Anthropic infrastructure. The vendor set behind Anthropic's compute is broadening from one supplier to three.

Linked stocks: AMD US, NVDA US, AVGO US

Sources: 超微將投資Anthropic多達50億美元　挑戰輝達AI霸權, Bloomberg

Supermicro books US$60bn of orders in a quarter

Supermicro (SMCI US) pre-announced more than US$60bn of new orders in its fiscal fourth quarter, taking its year-end backlog to a record and lifting its shares more than 20% in early trading. A single quarter's bookings at roughly five times quarterly revenue point to AI-server demand still accelerating into the back half of the year. Orders are not revenue, though, and the company disclosed no dollar figure for the backlog itself.

The company also raised its 4QFY26 gross-margin guide to 15-17%, roughly double the 8.2-8.4% it guided in May, citing a better customer and product mix. Supermicro has spent recent quarters sacrificing margin to win share as it moves from server builder to full data-center solutions supplier, so a margin guide that doubles matters as much as the order figure. Revenue for the quarter is expected at the low end of the prior US$11bn to US$12.5bn range, against a US$11.67bn analyst average, with the full report due 11 August.

Taiwan's thermal and component suppliers move with Supermicro's ramp. Auras Technology (3324 TT) and Nidec Chaun-Choung (6230 TT) supply cooling parts that are standard on next-generation AI servers, with Auras citing volume shipments of integrated heat spreaders and a coolant-distribution-unit ramp; Uniform Industrial supplies DRAM connectors, and Nan Jun supplies server rails. Chief executive Charles Liang has said Supermicro will build a gigawatt-class AI data center with Elon Musk's SpaceX and xAI within a year, which is the demand these orders are being staged against.

Linked stocks: SMCI US, 3324 TT, 6230 TT, NVDA US

Sources: 美超微報佳音 台廠沾光 雙鴻、尼得科超眾、華泰等受惠, 美超微AI伺服器積壓訂單突破600億美元　市場重新評估接單與獲利能力

Wistron builds the first US-made GB300 board

Wistron (3231 TT) produced the first NVIDIA GB300 compute board made in the United States at its new D1 plant in Fort Worth, Texas, and has moved it into mass production. The milestone matters because it shifts NVIDIA rack assembly onto US soil at the board level, the step Washington has pushed for and the one that had stayed in Taiwan and Mexico until now.

The D1 factory cost close to US$700m (NT$22.7bn), covers about 324,000 square feet, and runs its first line building L6 motherboards. Chairman Simon Lin said the site will next produce boards for NVIDIA's Vera Rubin platform, and that a second plant, D2, is planned at twice D1's capacity, with D3 and D4 under evaluation. NVIDIA chief executive Jensen Huang co-hosted the opening and signed the first board, a public marker of how central Wistron's US capacity is to NVIDIA's onshoring plan.

Wistron closed limit-up at NT$164 and its server subsidiary Wiwynn (6669 TT) also closed limit-up at NT$5,500, on expectations that the US plant pulls more NVIDIA assembly work to Wistron. The plant is being run as a digital-twin smart factory using NVIDIA's own Omniverse and Metropolis tools, so the buildout doubles as a reference deployment for the software NVIDIA sells into industrial AI.

Linked stocks: 3231 TT, 6669 TT, NVDA US

Sources: 緯創「美國製造」 新廠投產 後續將導入Vera Rubin相關產品, 緯創7億美元德州D1廠 生產全美首片輝達GB300

Korea locks in memory capacity for 2030

Samsung Electronics (005930 KS) is planning four new fabs in Korea by 2030, two in Pyeongtaek and one each in Yongin and Gwangju, according to Korean media relayed by DigiTimes. The plan reads as Korea moving to defend its memory lead with committed capacity rather than product announcements, at a point in the cycle when DRAM and HBM pricing is running hot.

Samsung is also reported to be building a 50-tool die-to-wafer hybrid-bonding line at Pyeongtaek to make next-generation HBM and logic, targeting mass production around 2030, though talks with Besi over the required equipment modifications have reportedly stalled. Hybrid bonding is the packaging step that lets memory makers stack more DRAM dies at lower height, so it is the gating technology for the HBM roadmap past current stacks.

SK Hynix (000660 KS) is moving in parallel. It has reapproved a 7.1 trillion won (about US$4.8bn) expansion of its Cheongju P&T7 site and is pressing ahead with a separate US$5.8bn Korean plant expansion, the same week it denied a report that it would buy Intel's Ohio campus. Taiwan's DRAM names ran with the theme: Nanya Technology (2408 TT) hit limit-up intraday as Micron (MU US) and SK Hynix rallied more than 10% overnight.

Linked stocks: 005930 KS, 000660 KS, MU US

Sources: 三星擬2030年前新建4座晶圓廠　平澤、龍仁與光州投資加速, Google News, 三星擬打造50台混合鍵合量產線　Besi設備改造協商傳卡關

Washington accuses Moonshot of copying Anthropic

The White House accused China's Moonshot AI of large-scale distillation of Anthropic's Fable model, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said sanctions and Entity List designations remain on the table. Science and technology policy chief Michael Kratsios alleged that Moonshot acquired NVIDIA GB300 servers and accessed GB300s in Thailand to train its models, which would raise questions about US export-control compliance since Blackwell-generation parts are banned from sale to Chinese firms.

The dispute is the policy escalation of last week's Kimi K3 launch. Moonshot released K3 as a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight model that is comparable to GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.8 at roughly a third of the cost, a price point that has renewed the debate over whether US labs can justify frontier-scale capital spending. Distillation, where a smaller model learns from a larger one's outputs, is a routine training method, and some experts doubt K3 could have come mainly from Fable, which has only been public since 1 July.

NVIDIA's Jensen Huang took the opposite side of the ban debate. Asked whether US companies should be allowed to use Chinese AI models, he answered "absolutely," called the idea of China-linked backdoors a misconception, and argued that open models are made safer by being inspected and patched in the open rather than restricted at launch. For NVIDIA the stakes are direct: the same GB300 hardware at the center of the export-control allegation is the platform its China access depends on.

Linked stocks: NVDA US, AMD US, 2330 TT

Sources: TechCrunch, Tom's Hardware

先聲 First Word: Exclusives from Chinese-Language Sources

Kinsus wins NVIDIA server substrate orders

Kinsus Interconnect Technology (3189 TT) has secured orders for NVIDIA's latest server CPU and GPU substrates, lifting its projected CPU-substrate share toward 45% and GPU-substrate share to about 20%, with total ABF (Ajinomoto build-up film) substrate capacity set to grow roughly 25% next year. With ABF and BT substrate prices guided to rise more than 10% per quarter in the second half and the T-glass supply bottleneck easing as Nittobo adds capacity, analysts see Kinsus profit potentially doubling in 2027. Shares rose 6.7% to NT$796. (22 Jul 2026) Source: 熱門股》明年獲利看俏 景碩站回均線上

Gigabyte's industrial-PC unit heads to the emerging board

Gigabyte's (2376 TT) industrial-computer subsidiary, listed under the code 7939 TT, will debut on Taiwan's emerging board on 27 July after posting 2025 revenue of NT$1.86bn, net profit of NT$158m, and EPS of NT$9.69, a 23.4% five-year revenue compound growth rate. Its Edge AI Box and embedded platforms support NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin, Intel Core Ultra, and AMD Ryzen, positioning the unit for the shift of AI from cloud training to on-premise inference. (22 Jul 2026) Source: 技嘉小金雞技宸7/27登興櫃 訂單能見度高今年營運看增

ASE-backed Ainos builds an industrial smell dataset

Ainos, the AI-olfaction startup that ASE Technology (3711 TT) has invested in, said its AI Nose system has collected more than 613 million industrial odor data points, drawn mainly from semiconductor manufacturing sites. The company frames the dataset as a new sensing layer for physical AI, extending machine perception beyond vision into smell for fault detection on the fab floor. (22 Jul 2026) Source: Ainos集逾6.13億筆工業氣味資料　加速推動實體AI新感知層