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The cycle is confirmed. The stocks have front-run it. Here is what to own, what to watch, and what to avoid.

A process-IP oligopoly disguised as a commodity component. The cycle is confirmed. The stocks have front-run it.

Two adjacent passive bottlenecks. Four silicon cap names ranked, two listed LIC plays profiled head-to-head. The thesis is real; entry prices are not.

The pitch in one line: MEC sells a few hundred yen of chemistry per substrate panel, but it is the chemistry that lets PCB fabs hit the adhesion, dielectric-loss and laser-drill specs that AI servers, ABF substrates and 5G AiP modules now demand.

1. Physics-locked design-in (CTE mismatch between InP at 4.5 × 10⁻⁶/K and Cu at 16.5 × 10⁻⁶/K makes AlN structurally non-substitutable) 2. ¥9bn AI-related revenue at ~45% OP margin in FY3/25 growing toward ~50% of total OP by FY3/27 if 800G/1.6T ramps on schedule 3.

Revenue mix is opaque because the company doesn’t disclose segment margins cleanly, but the Thin Film segment is the one driving the recent multiple expansion — that is where ruthenium sputter targets sit.

The seven names span four distinct supply-chain layers feeding the 2nm/A14 GAA ramp at TSMC, Samsung and Intel.

Mitsui Kinzoku is a 75-year-old Japanese non-ferrous metals conglomerate that just got swept up in the AI infrastructure boom. The company smelts zinc and lead, recycles e-scrap, makes automotive door latches, refines catalysts — boring stuff at first glance.

A €115m revenue German laser-systems specialist that the market has rerated 5x in twelve months on a glass substrate option. Core business is shrinking, FY2025 closed at a net loss, Q1 2026 was worse, and consensus price targets sit at less than half the current quote.

Companion primer to [[ai-server-pcb-primer]] (PCB stack end-to-end) and [[packaging-glass-substrate-primer]] (glass-core disruption).

Two things happened in 2025 that quietly changed the shape of the AI infrastructure trade.

Bloom Energy makes the box that lets a hyperscaler put a 100 MW data center on a piece of land that does not yet have a grid connection.

Delta Electronics is the dominant supplier of power delivery systems for AI data centers. It holds an estimated 60% share of the AI server PSU market, is the only company globally offering integrated power delivery from 20,000V grid to 0.8V chip, and co-developed the 800V HVDC rack power shelf with…

The bear case rests on two premises: first, the stock is priced for perfection at ~83x TTM P/E and ~74x EV/EBIT — any deceleration in DDR5 adoption or inventory correction (as in 2023’s -38% revenue year) would compress the multiple sharply.

Intel supply chain and AI server component sub-theme > Five plays across OSAT/packaging (AMKR), foundry (UMC), Jintide server CPUs (6809.HK), and AI server power electronics (2308.TW and DELTA.BK) > All vault pages written 2026-04-26. Data as of April 26, 2026.

AT&S is the only scaled IC substrate manufacturer in Europe — a €3.4B market-cap company at the most critical inflection in its history. The Kulim, Malaysia campus (€1B invested, AMD-certified May 2025) is ramping toward €2.1–2.4B revenue in FY2026/27 vs.

The business model is hardware-plus-services: AEM sells capital equipment (handlers, test cells, thermal systems), consumables (test contactors, sockets), and ongoing support contracts to semiconductor manufacturers.

DET has become one of the most direct listed plays on the AI server power supply buildout outside the US.

Twelve names screened across burn-in, advanced packaging, foundry, and AI server power. The three best are not the obvious Intel pure-plays. They’re ONTO, ATS.VI, and PDFS, where the business model survives even if 18A slips. Five companies report April 27 to 30; no new money before those prints.

HBM is sold out through 2027 and SK Hynix posted 49 percent operating margins on it. NAND is undersupplied for the first time in a decade, with KV-cache offloading and 122 TB QLC drives adding a new demand tier that didn’t exist 18 months ago. Macronix becomes the only credible sub-32GB MLC supplier in the world after Samsung exits in October 2025. This is a multi-year up-cycle, not a quarter-to-quarter print.

Onto Innovation designs, manufactures, and supports process control equipment used by semiconductor manufacturers to detect defects, measure film thickness, and verify dimensional accuracy at every stage of chip fabrication and advanced packaging.

PDF Solutions provides software, analytics, and hardware tools that help semiconductor manufacturers improve manufacturing yield and product quality.

For most of semiconductor history, burn-in was a cost center in someone’s back office: necessary, unglamorous, and tightly managed.

A first-principles deep dive into DRAM, NAND, SRAM, NOR, HDD, SSD, and HBM, the AI memory hierarchy, and the listed players who profit from it. Written 2026-04-26.

Industry: Semiconductor burn-in and test services / burn-in equipment manufacturing.

Target price: analyst consensus $75 (below current). Bull case at $100+ if UCT 3.0 executes and WFE hits 20%+ growth. Bear case at $40-50 if H2 2026 inflection slips.

United Microelectronics is a pure-play semiconductor foundry — it manufactures chips designed by other companies on a contract basis, operating no product design of its own.

Before anything else, split the term. Most of the confusion comes from people (and model write-ups) smashing these together.

Befesa is the global leader in recycling hazardous steel dust (electric arc furnace dust) into zinc oxide, with a secondary business recycling aluminum salt slags.

Southeast Asia’s industrial sector runs on coal. Cement kilns, textile dyeing plants, food processing factories, and palm oil mills across Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines burn coal to generate the steam and process heat that powers their operations.

The world makes about 1.9 billion tons of steel every year. Roughly 29% of that steel now comes from electric arc furnaces that melt recycled scrap rather than smelting iron ore in blast furnaces.

Conviction is high because the catalyst is not a hope, it is infrastructure. The Phase 3+ shaft is sunk to 1,350 metres of 1,379 metres planned. The headframe, hoist house, bin house, and paste plant are in late-stage commissioning. 91% of the total growth-capital commitment has already been spent.

Written for Pink, April 2026, as the royalty and streaming complement to the Doug-filter screen of Canadian gold producers (AEM, AGI, EGO, WDO, LUG). FNV is the oldest, largest, and best-run royalty and streaming company in the world.

Eldorado Gold is a mid-tier gold producer headquartered in Vancouver. It mined 488,268 ounces of gold in 2025 across four operating mines in Canada, Türkiye, and Greece.

Lundin Gold owns and operates one mine: Fruta del Norte (FDN), an underground gold-silver operation in Ecuador’s Zamora-Chinchipe province. That’s the entire company. There is no Mine #2, no copper division, no royalty book, no smelter.

Written for Pink, April 2026. Triggered by Doug’s tip on a Canadian gold miner without Africa exposure. Goal: understand the value chain end-to-end, then screen the producers worth owning into the next leg of the gold cycle.

Two small defense-tech companies, both riding the same macro tailwind (U.S. military modernization, counter-UAS, space proliferation), but attacking it from completely different angles.