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Daily
Finance Minister Lee: chip boom "at least through 2027"; CXMT Q3 revenue up 7x, world No. 4 in DRAM; SOX down 8 straight sessions; CoreWeave AI-debt debate; KOSPI rebounds; September chip exports a record $60.3B; TSMC record Q3; China's 15W EUV limits. 9 reads for Oct 18.
Analysis
Samsung Electro-Mechanics has locked in KRW 3.9 trillion of long-term MLCC deals as one AI rack now needs up to 600,000 capacitors. VLSI maps the volumes, the price increases, and who controls supply.
Analysis
At SEDEX 2026 Samsung unveiled zHBM stacked on the GPU while SK hynix proposed HBF, a new flash tier between HBM and DRAM. Why the inference bottleneck moved from speed to distance — and what decides who wins the layer after HBM.
Analysis
The circular-deal problem is not fake demand. It is double-counted headlines, an unfinalized USD 100 billion pledge, and risk concentrated on one node. A four-structure teardown, and what it means for HBM.
Analysis
FuriosaAI rejected Meta's $800M offer in March 2025, became a unicorn with $246M raised, and began mass-producing its TSMC 5nm RNGD chip (FP8 512 TFLOPS, HBM3 48GB, 180W) in January 2026.
Analysis
On Oct 18, Korea's finance minister said the chip boom lasts through 2027. A Maeil Business column warns of a 2029 memory glut. Yet Samsung and SK hynix are expanding capacity aggressively. The economics of the capex bet at the cycle peak — and the Oct 28/29 earnings that will judge it.
Analysis
Samsung unveiled 400+ layer V-NAND and the world's smallest 256TB SSD. A 58% jump in bit density means structurally lower cost per GB. Offloading KV cache to SSD instead of stacking more HBM is now arithmetic, not story. The storage economics of NAND's rise as AI infrastructure's second margin pool.
Analysis
A senior Samsung official said the company is considering silicon photonics acquisitions, targeting photonic IC manufacturing from next year to challenge TSMC's COUPE. The next AI chip bottleneck is not compute but chip-to-chip I/O — and the war over who owns the optical I/O layer has begun.
Analysis
The equipment supercycle is getting longer — not from a demand bubble, but from duplicated capacity investment across a split supply chain and structural growth in mature/specialty processes. WFE high case: ~$153B (2026) to $278B (2030). Korea's four front-end equipment makers sit in its path.
Analysis
EUV bans are old news — the fight has moved to DUV immersion tools: 39% of ASML's Q3 2026 system sales, ~296 advanced scanners in China. The U.S. MATCH Act proposal targets maintenance services, not just sales. Numbers, technology, pro/con case, and fallout for Korean fabs in China.
Analysis
At OCP 2026, power delivery stole the show: Navitas showed a 24-kW 800V GaN board with NVIDIA targeting 97% efficiency, as 1-MW racks loom in 2027. VLSI maps the 800V rewire — copper, TCO, and who wins.
Analysis
Microsoft unveiled Maia 300, its third-generation custom AI chip, and plans to deploy over a million in 2027. The world's biggest GPU buyer is becoming a GPU competitor — and token economics, not FLOPS, is the new battleground.
VLSI Korea