Three semiconductor trends worth watching:
1. Legacy node capacity is about to become the real constraint. Everyone's been obsessing over cutting-edge chips, but mature process nodes are where the squeeze happens next year. This isn't glamorous—it's the unsexy infrastructure that makes everything else possible.
2. Data center buildouts are accelerating hard. We're talking near-doubling of annual capacity additions. Translation: optical networking is moving from niche to necessity. The pipes need to get a lot bigger.
3. The GPU dominance story is already shifting. AI labs are pivoting toward custom ASICs (XPUs). Rough math: ASIC-to-GPU ratio goes from 1:1 in 2026 to nearly 2:1 by 2028. That's a meaningful rotation in where the real compute dollars flow.
This isn't about hype cycles. It's about infrastructure bottlenecks, capex allocation, and who's building the picks and shovels for the next phase.
1. Legacy node capacity is about to become the real constraint. Everyone's been obsessing over cutting-edge chips, but mature process nodes are where the squeeze happens next year. This isn't glamorous—it's the unsexy infrastructure that makes everything else possible.
2. Data center buildouts are accelerating hard. We're talking near-doubling of annual capacity additions. Translation: optical networking is moving from niche to necessity. The pipes need to get a lot bigger.
3. The GPU dominance story is already shifting. AI labs are pivoting toward custom ASICs (XPUs). Rough math: ASIC-to-GPU ratio goes from 1:1 in 2026 to nearly 2:1 by 2028. That's a meaningful rotation in where the real compute dollars flow.
This isn't about hype cycles. It's about infrastructure bottlenecks, capex allocation, and who's building the picks and shovels for the next phase.