# The Memory Selloff and AMD's Helios Ramp Amid 900 Billion in AI CapEx - Semiconductor Podcast Briefing - Week of August 7, 2026 > How the podcast tape wrestled with the memory selloff, AMD's Helios ramp, and roughly 900 billion dollars of hyperscaler AI capex for the week of July 29 to August 7, 2026. ## Semiconductor Podcast Briefing ### Week of July 29 to August 7, 2026: The Memory Selloff and AMD's Helios Ramp Amid 900 Billion in AI CapEx --- This week, the podcasts were consumed by one strange puzzle: the biggest memory-chip makers on earth just posted the best numbers in their history, and their stocks fell anyway. SK Hynix made more money in one quarter than in the prior five years combined and dropped double digits. Underneath that were the two questions everyone is circling: is the AI spending boom real demand or a financial house of cards, and has the chip cycle already hit its peak? Here is what the shows actually said, who said it, and why it matters. --- ## TL;DR: Things That Mattered This Week - **The "memory selloff" was the story.** SK Hynix reported record results, revenue up more than 350% and profit margins that, bizarrely, exceeded 100% of revenue, yet the Korean market fell roughly 30% over four weeks and SK Hynix itself dropped 10–12%. On *Limitless* (Jul 30), analyst Ejaz called it "the worst stock market crash in quite some time," and argued it is a huge overreaction. - **"RAMageddon" is now a real-economy story.** Bloomberg's Nate Langson, on *Daily Tech News Show* (Jul 30), said raw memory chip prices are "as much as 10 times higher today than they were even like a year ago," Samsung posted a "250-fold surge in chip profits," and a hard drive that cost £200 last year now costs nearly £500. - **AMD delivered a blowout and still fell 8%.** Data center revenue doubled to a record $6.7 billion, but the stock sold off because the guide missed the "whisper" number and Elon Musk said SpaceX would build exclusively on Nvidia. CEO Lisa Su told *Squawk on the Street* (Aug 5) her data center business is growing "well over 100%" into 2027. - **Hyperscaler capex is now roughly $900 billion for 2026, with $1.5 trillion floated for 2027.** *Chip Stock Investor* (Aug 3) tallied nearly $580 billion of trailing-12-month spending across the big cloud players. - **The loudest bear case got louder.** On *Better Offline* (Aug 7), Ed Zitron cited Wells Fargo, Barclays and UBS notes estimating that ~70% of Microsoft, Google and Amazon's AI revenue comes from just two customers, OpenAI and Anthropic. - **Equipment makers were a bright spot.** Lam Research beat and raised hard, with guidance far above consensus, and its stock jumped ~6–8%. - **China loomed over everything.** A new Chinese memory maker, CXMT, IPO'd and popped ~500% in a day; China showed a home-grown lithography prototype; and the U.S. is preparing tariffs and a price floor on polysilicon. --- ## 1. AI chip demand and hyperscaler capex: the numbers are enormous, and the debate is now about durability, not existence **The spending tally.** On *Chip Stock Investor* (Aug 3), Nicholas and Kasey Rossolillo added up the cloud giants' capital spending: "nearly $580 billion spent over the last trailing 12 months across these companies," heading to "about 890 billion in total CapEx for 2026… let's just call it 900 billion." They believe it is "possibly headed towards 1.5 trillion in 2027." Their blunt caveat: > "This is obviously not a sustainable rate of capital expenditures. This is full on all out growth CapEx cycle in support of what these companies are saying is a very long backlog of compute." They noted the strain this is putting on the cloud giants: "A couple of these companies have now dipped into quarterly negative free cash flow… Amazon has joined Oracle." The reason they keep spending is on the revenue side, trailing cloud revenue is nearing $400 billion collectively (AWS over $148 billion, Microsoft's intelligent cloud $138 billion, Google Cloud nearly $78 billion and growing "80% plus year over year"). **A fund manager's view of the risk.** Alex Pollak, Chief Investment Officer of Loftus Peak, on *Equity Mates Investing Podcast* (Aug 6), put the sector spend at $800 billion for 2026, with "Google or Alphabet alone… expected to spend $250 billion," rising to a Goldman Sachs estimate of "$920 billion" in 2027 and a Morgan Stanley estimate of "$1.1 trillion." He flagged that across five companies (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and possibly one more) there is "$1.6 trillion… coming due in the next three to five years" for chips, buildings and power. His real worry is duration, not the present: > "Two years is my visibility period and I'm comfortable with that… I've got no difficulty with everything they're doing right now. It's all about duration." He also pointed at the bond market as the "adults in the room," noting Oracle's recently issued bonds are "trading at a 10% discount to their issue price" and that the cost of insuring them is "the highest level since the GFC." **The "capex illusion" nuance.** Thomas Chua of Steady Compounding, on *The Investing for Beginners Podcast* (Aug 6), made a subtle accounting point: a lot of this spending is parked in a balance-sheet line called "construction in progress," and while it sits there it isn't being depreciated, "which is why we still see margins increasing… tremendously for a lot of these hyperscalers." He also flagged that in note 10 of Alphabet's Q2 filing, long-term contractual commitments (largely power for data centers) "spike up to 700 over billion dollars." His risk ranking: Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and even Meta can absorb spare compute into their core businesses, but "new clouds" and Oracle are "levered up to their eyeballs" with no core business to fall back on. His favorite for discipline was TSMC: "he's not doing this price gouging… whereby you see some players within the chip industry are doing." **The bear in the room.** Ed Zitron, on *Better Offline* (Aug 7), delivered the week's most aggressive skeptic case, pointing to analyst notes from Wells Fargo, Barclays and UBS: > "70% of Microsoft's AI revenues are from either its revenue share of OpenAI's money, or OpenAI spending money to rent out compute from Azure." He argued Microsoft's underlying growth, stripping out OpenAI's $24.1 billion contribution, was "more like 9.24%" versus a reported 17.7%, and that "UBS estimated that next year, Anthropic and OpenAI's compute spend will be 48% of all Google Cloud revenues." His conclusion: demand "is not there for the over 300 gigawatts of data center capacity in planning," outside of those two loss-making labs. (Worth holding alongside the bull data above, this is the sharpest dissent of the week.) --- ## 2. AMD's Helios launch and earnings: a strong quarter that the market punished AMD dominated the week's chip-specific coverage. The mechanics, from Zaid Admani on *The Rundown* (Aug 5): revenue "jumped 50% from a year ago to $11.5 billion," adjusted earnings of "$1.66 per share," and "data center revenue more than doubled to a record $6.7 billion. The data center business now makes up 58% of AMD's total revenue. A year ago, it was 42%." Yet the stock fell more than 8%. Two reasons: - **The whisper number.** AMD guided current-quarter revenue to about $13 billion, above the $12.5 billion estimate: "but the whisper estimate was as high as $14 billion… when your stock has more than doubled this year, beating the estimates isn't enough." - **The Musk gut-punch.** On SpaceX's earnings call, running at the same time, Elon Musk said SpaceX "plans to build their AI infrastructure exclusively with NVIDIA's Blackwell chips… just a few months ago, Elon said that SpaceX and Tesla would keep buying chips from both NVIDIA and AMD." **Lisa Su pushed back directly.** In a CNBC interview on *Squawk on the Street* (Aug 5), AMD's CEO reframed the growth outlook and gently corrected the analysts: > "We do see our data center business growing well over 100% as we go into 2027. And those are just very large numbers when you think about the base that we're on top of." She raised AMD's market forecast again ("we see the market for overall computing and adaptive, high performance and adaptive computing going up to over $2 trillion as we go through 2030") and pointed to a genuinely new dynamic, a surge in CPU (not just GPU) demand: > "What we have seen in the AI market over the last, I would say, six or seven months is really an inflection in demand, and especially in the CPU market… as enterprises are using more of their workloads from what was experimentation into now production workloads, people need a lot more CPU compute as well as GPU compute." On the Musk defection, she stayed diplomatic: "you need the right compute for the right workload… we have extremely strong roadmap as we think about Helios and going forward to our MI500 series." Host Jim Cramer noted AMD is "up 142 percent this year. NVIDIA is up 13 percent." **The sell-side take.** Angelo Zeno of CFRA, on *Bloomberg Surveillance* (Aug 4), reiterated a strong buy and $600 price target ahead of the print, calling AMD his "top pick here over the next couple of years" as its Helios rack platform ramps in Q3 with "more of the upside going to be in Q4 and into Q1 of next year." But he was candid on the cycle: "we've kind of essentially kind of hit peak growth rates back in Q2. So you're going to see growth rates start to decelerate for the semi ecosystem over the next couple of quarters and years." --- ## 3. The memory selloff: record profits, collapsing stocks (the week's central puzzle) This was the most-discussed topic across the podcasts, so it gets the most space. **What happened.** SK Hynix reported historic numbers and the stock fell. On *The Rundown* (Jul 29), Zaid Admani: "revenues more than tripled to roughly $55 billion. And operating profit jumped more than six-fold to roughly $42 billion… Margins topped 80%… But somehow, they weren't good enough. Revenues in operating profit actually missed Wall Street estimates. And the stock fell nearly 10%." On *Squawk on the Street* (Jul 29), Jim Cramer put quarterly profit even higher, "they did make $64 billion in the quarter… which was more money than they had made in the last five years total," and "13 times what they made in the year ago quarter," with "DRAM ASPs up 30 quarter on quarter." **Why it fell anyway: the long-term contract wrinkle.** Cramer's explanation, from the same show: > "This was one of the most confusing conference calls I've ever been on… These are companies that are afraid that prices have gotten out of control. So what they do is they go to SK Hynix and they say, listen, we'd like to have a long-term agreement… And the analysts themselves weren't caught up. They were looking at the actual prices of DRAM and HBM… and they said, you didn't make anywhere near what the spot market is." In other words, SK Hynix's realized prices lagged the spot market because so much supply is locked into fixed-price, multi-year deals, and analysts modeled spot. **The bull rebuttal.** On *Limitless* (Jul 30), Ejaz laid out why he thinks the selloff is wrong. He noted SK Hynix "recorded more profit than they did revenue this last quarter… 118% net margins," revenue up 354% and profit up 555%, and explained the "miss" simply: SK Hynix is so focused on high-bandwidth memory (HBM) that "they have run out of supply. So they can't possibly sell anymore. So they're selling off on the best news ever, which is they've sold out their entire supply for this quarter." He argued the selloff was mechanical, leverage unwinding, and that the bottom is near: > "JP Morgan this morning reported that the leverage ETF drawdown, the liquidation specifically, is about 90% complete… we're probably nearish a point where it's going to reach its bottom." Cramer described the same leverage dynamic vividly: "there's a Korea 3X Hynix leveraged fund… it was at 36 on June 22nd. Now it's at 1." **The forward view from the company.** SK Hynix itself, per *The Rundown* (Jul 29), said "memory demand could continue to outpace supply through at least 2030," has "already signed multi-year supply agreements with around 10 customers and is preparing to ship their next generation HBM4E chips to NVIDIA in 2027." The bear counter, same show: capex is set "to rise at roughly 50% this year to at least $31 billion… raising fears that these memory companies could be building towards a supply glut. That's historically what happens in this business. When prices go up, memory makers overbuild and prices then come crashing down." **The contrarian valuation view.** Morgan Stanley's Mike Wilson, on *RiskReversal Pod* (Aug 7), argued Micron (with "a near monopoly as it relates to manufacturers here in the U.S. on high bandwidth memory") is fairly valued precisely because the market knows the good times are cyclical: "that's why the multiple's five times. Because the market fully understands that when it gets that crazy, you can't pay a full market multiple… here's a company now that's seeing gross margins they will never see again." He offered a useful frame on how much has already been repriced: "multiples have derated 30% for the hyperscalers… 15% for the S&P 500. Semiconductor stocks have derated by 50%." --- ## 4. "RAMageddon": memory pricing is bleeding into the real economy The memory shortage is no longer just a chip-stock story. On *Daily Tech News Show* (Jul 30), Bloomberg's Nate Langson walked through it: - Raw memory chip prices are "as much as 10 times higher today than they were even like a year ago, maybe 18 months ago." - Samsung "had a 250-fold surge in chip profits"; SK Hynix's profit is "up 550%." - Consumer hardware is getting hit: a 16-terabyte hard drive that cost "about 200 pounds" a year ago is "now almost 500 pounds." Memory maker Crucial stopped selling consumer RAM kits back in December because "demand is just way out of line with supply." - The irony that captures the moment: Samsung's phone division "for the first time in its history has basically had a loss… the company that makes the most cell phones in the world can't sell enough of them because the RAM is too expensive," even as it makes record profits selling that same RAM to data centers. Related color: on *Squawk on the Street* (Jul 31), Apple's Tim Cook reportedly called the memory shortage a "100-year flood." And on *The Morning Market Briefing* (Aug 7), the hosts flagged a possible relief valve ("There was a big headline out of NVIDIA yesterday saying they want to reduce the amount of memory in their chips") which they said "is going to bring Micron margins down" over time as capacity (SK Hynix's new $38 billion, plus SpaceX/Tesla's "TerraFab") comes online. --- ## 5. Chip equipment (WFE): the quiet winners Equipment makers were among the few names that beat and held. On *Schwab Network* (Jul 29), the Lam Research print: EPS of "$1.82" versus "$1.70" expected, revenue "$6.72 billion" versus "$6.68" expected, gross margins of "52 percent," and (the star) guidance of "$2.15" EPS (consensus $1.83) and "$8.1 billion" revenue (consensus $7.09 billion). CEO Tim Archer said Lam "delivered record revenue, operating margin, and EPS in the June quarter, driven by AI demand… and expects a third consecutive year of outperformance in 2026." The stock rose about 6–8%. On *The AI Investor Podcast* (Jul 30), the hosts made the broader equipment call: with TSMC raising capex and Intel "very optimistic about CapEx needs," they think 2028 wafer-fab-equipment spending is likely to land "like 25% higher" than current Street estimates. They singled out Lam as "one of the Meg 7 stocks for semiconductor equipment… if not the best operator in the space." (ASML also got a passing mention on *Limitless* as the maker of the "$300 million machines" that underpin the whole industry.) --- ## 6. Foundry and manufacturing: Intel's turnaround, TSMC's discipline On *The AI Investor Podcast* (Jul 30), the hosts were notably bullish on Intel's foundry ambitions: "volume production for the next process, 14A, on track for volume production in 2028." They read Intel's refusal to name anchor customers as rational, not weak: "there's no reason that these companies would want to be announced… what they need is wafer customers, and for 14A, that looks to be on track," with Google flagged as a possible customer. Intel's CPU prices were "up 48%," and the stock is up "134% year to date" despite a violent month. TSMC drew brief but positive mentions: an added "$100 billion investment in Arizona" with "second quarter profit up 77%" (*DHUnplugged*, Aug 5), plus Thomas Chua's praise (above) for its refusal to price-gouge. --- ## 7. Analog, auto and industrial semis: a small but real bright spot This corner drew less airtime, but *The Morning Market Briefing* (Aug 7) gave it a clear read: "Microchip is a harbinger in the semiconductor space. They're up 9% today. See a lot of strength in industrial and auto." The hosts, who own Analog Devices (ADI), said it "should do fairly well… as a result." A useful signal that the non-AI, cyclical end of semis (autos, industrials) may be turning up alongside the AI names. --- ## 8. China: the swing factor behind the whole selloff Three China threads ran through the week: - **A new memory giant appears.** On *Limitless* (Jul 30), Ejaz described CXMT's IPO: it "traded up 466% in one day… instantly the most valuable China-listed company ever… and they raised about $9 billion." CXMT is now "the world's number four DRAM maker," having gone "from a 1% market share to a nearly 10% market share" in about four years. His key point: China is "starved of memory" because Western demand soaks up SK Hynix, Samsung and Micron's output, so CXMT is filling a domestic hole, not yet flooding the West. - **The lithography scare.** Markets panicked on news that a Chinese company built a home-grown deep-ultraviolet (DUV) lithography prototype, but Ejaz called it "a nothing burger": China is targeting just "five" machines this year and "10" next, versus a fully-scaled global industry. On *The AI Investor Podcast*, the hosts framed it as a positive for equipment supplier ACM Research, which benefits as China combines DUV with advanced packaging to build a domestic supply chain. - **Trade policy escalates.** On *Tech Brew Ride Home* (Aug 4): "the U.S. is preparing to set a price floor and impose tariffs on polysilicon, a material critical to chips, later this month in a bid to counter China," following a national-security investigation. Beijing, in turn, is "drawing up potential responses," including possibly adding U.S. AI companies to restricted-entity lists. --- ## 9. Cyclicality: has the chip cycle already peaked? Two clear, opposing framings emerged: - **"Peak growth is behind us."** CFRA's Angelo Zeno (*Bloomberg Surveillance*, Aug 4): the sector "hit peak growth rates back in Q2," and "you're still in this kind of price discovery phase." Morgan Stanley's Mike Wilson (*RiskReversal*, Aug 7) framed the drawdown as healthy: semis have "derated by 50%… that gives me comfort that the market is well on to this," and called it "a very healthy correction… that is probably going to hold." - **"Nothing has fundamentally changed."** *Chip Stock Investor* (Aug 3) asked directly whether the cycle is still intact and answered: "The simple answer is no [nothing has changed]." Their view is the demand backlog is real and multi-year, even if the pace of capex is ultimately unsustainable. The financing plumbing under all of this is getting more baroque, which several shows flagged as the real risk. On *Tech Brew Ride Home* (Aug 4): Anthropic signed "a $10 billion deal for computing capacity in Norway from an NVIDIA-backed AI cloud startup called Volta Infra," while Nvidia is "in discussions to help OpenAI lease a $500 billion 10 gigawatt hub" in Ohio. Bloomberg has flagged these arrangements as "circular in nature… an increasingly interconnected web of dependencies… that risks magnifying losses if AI demand fails to live up to the lofty expectations." --- ## Earnings reactions this week | Company | Reaction | The takeaway (from the podcasts) | Source | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | SK Hynix | Down ~10–12% | Record results (rev +350%+, op profit ~$42B, 80%+ margins) but missed spot-based estimates; long-term contracts held realized prices below spot | *The Rundown* (Jul 29), *Squawk on the Street* (Jul 29) | | AMD | Down ~8% | Data center rev doubled to record $6.7B (58% of sales); guide beat estimate but missed $14B whisper; Musk's Nvidia-exclusive comment hurt | *The Rundown* (Aug 5), *Squawk on the Street* (Aug 5) | | Lam Research | Up ~6–8% | Beat and big raise: guide $2.15 EPS / $8.1B rev, both well above consensus; "record revenue" on AI demand | *Schwab Network* (Jul 29) | | Qualcomm | Down ~3.5% | EPS inline, revenue beat, but weak Q4 guide on component costs; raised non-handset target to $40B by FY29 (incl. $15B data center) | *Schwab Network* (Jul 29) | | Intel | Up then sharply down | 14A on track for 2028 volume production; CPU prices +48%; still +134% YTD despite the pullback | *The AI Investor Podcast* (Jul 30) | | Seagate | Up ~5% | Blowout: rev +48% to $3.6B, guide $7.30 EPS vs $5.85 expected; AI storage demand let it raise prices; +~400% over 12 months | *The Rundown* (Jul 29) | | SanDisk | (post-earnings) | Sales ~$9B (+372% YoY), EPS $39.25 vs $0.29 a year ago, on the memory shortage, though shares were down ~50% off the peak | *Best Stocks Now* (Aug 6), *Limitless* (Jul 30) | | Microchip | Up ~9% | Strength in industrial and auto, a signal the cyclical, non-AI end of semis may be turning up | *The Morning Market Briefing* (Aug 7) | --- ## What I'm watching next week - **Whether the memory selloff finds a bottom.** The bull case (*Limitless*) rests on JP Morgan's read that leverage-driven liquidation is "90% complete." If SK Hynix, Micron and SanDisk stabilize, that thesis gets a real test. - **Micron's memory margins.** Watch the follow-through on Nvidia's stated intent to use less memory per GPU, plus the new capacity from SK Hynix ($38B) and the SpaceX/Tesla "TerraFab": the setup for the classic memory-glut debate. - **Nvidia into its own print.** With AMD guiding data center "well over 100%" and SpaceX going Nvidia-exclusive, Nvidia's next update is the swing factor for the whole complex. Note the year-to-date divergence flagged this week: Nvidia +13%, AMD +142%. - **The polysilicon tariff decision,** expected "later this month," and any Chinese retaliation on U.S. AI firms, the first concrete trade escalation in a while. - **CXMT and Chinese memory supply.** Whether the new #4 DRAM maker stays focused on China's domestic shortage or starts pressuring Western pricing. - **The circular-financing question.** As Oracle bond spreads (highest since the GFC) and the Anthropic/OpenAI compute commitments pile up, watch whether the bond market (the "adults in the room") keeps funding the buildout on easy terms. --- ## Get the full transcripts on Matterfact This briefing was produced with Matterfact, which indexes the complete, full-text transcripts of 120M+ podcast episodes alongside SEC filings, earnings calls, and financial datasets. 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