# Research run 2026-08-25T02:56 UTC ## Market summary Asia is trading cautiously but not panicking on Tuesday morning: the Nikkei is flat at ~65,510, the Hang Seng is off 0.2% at ~25,480, the ASX 200 is up 0.5% on Woodside and Coles results, while the Kospi is the outlier, down ~2% at ~6,560 as SK hynix falls 4.5% after its union rejected a wage deal and chip names de-risk ahead of Nvidia. Wall Street closed lower on Monday (S&P 500 -0.3% to 7,653, Nasdaq -0.8% to 25,980) with semis and Sandisk (-6.5%) leading the decline as Iran headlines and rising Broadcom credit-risk chatter weighed; overnight US futures are flat (S&P e-mini ~7,670, Nasdaq 100 +0.1%). For our list the near-term events are Siemens Energy's supervisory board meeting today on a possible break-up (no announcement yet as of Asia morning), July PCE inflation on Wednesday, Nvidia's print after Wednesday's close (consensus EPS ~$2.10; read-through for SK hynix, Astera, Teradyne, Broadcom), Marvell on Thursday, and Powell at Jackson Hole on Friday, with the Bank of Korea also meeting this week. ## Watchlist - ALAB:US Astera Labs - accumulate (medium) - Astera Labs sells the connectivity silicon (PCIe/CXL retimers, Scorpio fabric switches, Ethernet) that ties GPUs and XPUs together inside AI racks; Q2 2026 revenue was $392M (+104% YoY, +27% QoQ) with eight straight EPS beats, and Scorpio switches become the largest product line in Q3, a quarter early. Shares are ~45% below their 52-week high, offering exposure to scale-up networking, the fastest-growing layer of AI infrastructure. - AVGO:US Broadcom - accumulate (medium) - Broadcom is the leading custom AI accelerator (XPU) and AI networking supplier to hyperscalers, guiding Q3 FY26 AI semiconductor revenue to ~$16B (>200% YoY) and total revenue to $29.4B (+84%), with a stated path to >$100B of AI revenue in 2027. The stock is ~23% below its June high after the July semiconductor selloff, giving a better entry into a franchise with multi-year committed custom-silicon programs plus a sticky VMware software annuity. - SKHY:US SK hynix - accumulate (medium) - SK hynix supplies more than half of the world's HBM and just posted record Q2 2026 results: revenue KRW 79.3T (+257% YoY) and operating income KRW 60.5T (+557% YoY) at a 76% operating margin, with HBM4 mass shipments ramping in H2. On Aug 19 it accelerated a KRW 40T buyback-and-cancel program (24.07M shares, 3.3% of the count, executed over ~3 months from Aug 20) and lifted its shareholder-return target to over 50% of FCF, backed by ~KRW 69T of net cash; it is also weighing a first Japanese memory fab (Miyagi), and the July 2026 Nasdaq ADR broadens the investor base. - 3750:HK CATL - buy (high) - CATL is the world's largest battery maker (~40% global EV battery share) and the clear leader in grid storage: H1 2026 revenue rose 55% to RMB 277B and net profit 42% to RMB 43.3B, with energy storage revenue up 88% to RMB 53B (nearly 20% of sales) as global storage deployments surge. It raised ~$5B in Hong Kong in April, announced a large buyback in July, Moody's moved its A3 outlook to positive in August, and on Aug 25 it agreed to pay RMB 2.56B (~$370M) for a 24.9% stake in Qiyuan Green Power, China's largest heavy-truck battery-swapping operator (1,600+ stations in 208 cities), making CATL the largest shareholder and the dominant player in commercial-vehicle swapping. The stock is little changed at ~HK$632 (-1% on Aug 25), ~20% below its 52-week high, with scale, cost and chemistry (sodium-ion, LFP) advantages competitors cannot match. - BE:US Bloom Energy - accumulate (medium) - Bloom's solid-oxide fuel cells have become a mainstream on-site power solution for AI data centers that cannot wait years for grid interconnects: Q2 2026 revenue jumped 166% to $1.07B with a 33% gross margin, and full-year guidance was raised to $3.9-4.2B revenue and $800-900M non-GAAP operating income. A 2.8 GW Oracle agreement and the Nebius Vineland win show the customer base broadening to hyperscalers and neoclouds, and the stock is ~40% off its 52-week high. - ENR:DE Siemens Energy - accumulate (medium) - Siemens Energy is Europe's answer to GE Vernova: gas turbines, grid technologies (transformers, HVDC, switchgear) and wind. Fiscal Q3 2026 (June quarter) orders hit a record EUR 17.9B (book-to-bill 1.57), revenue grew 18.5% comparable to EUR 11.4B, profit before special items more than tripled to EUR 1.62B, pre-tax free cash flow rose to EUR 2.3B and the order backlog reached EUR 162B, with the Grid Technologies backlog alone at a record EUR 51B on transformer demand from US data centers; FY26 guidance was confirmed toward the upper end of the 10-12% margin range and Siemens Gamesa posted its first positive quarter in 15. Bloomberg reported on Aug 24 that the company has engaged Goldman Sachs to sell a stake in the steam-turbine business, the first concrete portfolio move ahead of today's supervisory board meeting on a possible spin-off, and the CEO said the data-center power boom will last. Shares fell 3.0% to EUR 148.74 on Aug 24 as the EUR 1B buyback concluded, ~23% below the 52-week high. - GEV:US GE Vernova - accumulate (high) - GE Vernova is the key bottleneck supplier of gas turbines and grid equipment for the AI power buildout: Q2 2026 orders rose 88% organically to $24.2B, total backlog is ~$176B, the gas turbine backlog reached 116 GW (targeting 125 GW under contract by year-end), and H1 free cash flow of $5.1B already exceeded all of 2025. Capacity is being scaled from 20 GW/yr today to 24 GW in 2028 and 30 GW in 2030 with pricing power rising; the stock is ~21% below its 52-week high after a Q2 EPS miss. - HOOD:US Robinhood Markets - accumulate (medium) - Robinhood posted record Q2 2026 revenue of $1.31B (+32% YoY) with a 57% adjusted EBITDA margin and $573M net income, while Gold subscribers hit 4.8M and margin, credit card and banking balances all set records. It is compounding into a full-stack retail financial platform (brokerage, crypto, banking, prediction markets, tokenization via Rothera/WonderFi), and the Clarity Act plus the crypto rally are near-term tailwinds; shares are ~30% off their 52-week high. - MELI:US MercadoLibre - accumulate (medium) - MercadoLibre is Latin America's dominant e-commerce, logistics and fintech platform. Q2 2026 revenue grew 49.8% to $10.17B, its fastest growth in four years and 30th straight quarter above 30%, unique active buyers rose to 89M (+18M YoY), the Mercado Pago credit book grew 75% to $16.4B with a deliberate shift to lower-risk borrowers, and adjusted EPS of $9.19 beat consensus. The stock fell to ~$1,813 after the print on margin compression and has recovered to ~$1,948, still ~24% below its 52-week high, giving an entry into a non-US Internet compounder with a logistics-plus-payments moat comparable to Sea's. - NET:US Cloudflare - buy (high) - Cloudflare's growth is re-accelerating on AI: Q2 2026 revenue rose 36% to $696M, dollar-based net retention improved 6 points to 120%, large customers grew 27% to 4,698, and full-year guidance was lifted to $2.86-2.87B. Its global edge network is the natural control point for agentic and bot traffic (non-human traffic now >50%), and Workers/AI inference give it a second growth engine beyond security and CDN. - SE:US Sea Limited - buy (high) - Sea grew Q2 2026 revenue 48% to $7.8B with all three engines firing: Shopee GMV +28% to $38.3B (ad revenue +70%, eight straight quarters of sequential growth), Monee fintech revenue +59% with an $11.1B loan book (+62%) at 1.0% NPLs, and Garena gaming still growing. The stock is ~40% below its 52-week high at ~$116 while consensus targets sit near $155, an unusual growth-at-a-discount setup for a Southeast Asian platform with a widening logistics and payments moat. - SPOT:US Spotify Technology - accumulate (medium) - Spotify crossed 300M Premium subscribers in Q2 2026 (MAU +12% to 777M) with revenue +14% to EUR 4.8B, a record 33.4% gross margin and EUR 655M operating income, and just added $1.5B to its buyback. Pricing power, audiobooks/video podcasts and AI features (Personal Podcasts) plus the Reserved ticketing product extend the monetization runway on a subscriber base no rival can match. - 6861:JP Keyence Corp - buy (high) - Keyence is the picks-and-shovels supplier of machine vision, sensors and measurement systems for factory automation and the emerging humanoid/robotics supply chain; fiscal Q1 (June 2026 quarter) sales rose 33% to JPY 347B and net income 51% to JPY 139B, with overseas sales +39% (Asia +50%, Americas +31%). Operating margins above 50%, a 95% equity ratio and a direct-sales model with no factories give it one of the most durable moats in industrial tech; shares hit an all-time high in mid-August and have since pulled back ~7% to ~JPY 80,900 (flat on Aug 25 morning, no company news overnight) with the global tech selloff, a better entry. - ASML:US ASML Holding - buy (high) - ASML is the sole supplier of EUV lithography and raised 2026 guidance for the second time to EUR 43-45B of sales at a 54-56% gross margin after a Q2 beat (EUR 9.3B sales, EUR 2.9B net income). Management says EUV capacity for 2027 is essentially fully booked with significant 2028 orders already in hand while it adds ~30% EUV capacity in 2027, giving rare multi-year revenue visibility in semicap. - TER:US Teradyne - accumulate (medium) - Teradyne is the leading supplier of automated test equipment for AI compute and HBM silicon and, via Universal Robots and MiR, the largest Western pure-play in collaborative and mobile robots. Q2 2026 revenue more than doubled to $1.33B (+104% YoY) with gross margin up to 59.8%, operating income up nearly 5x to $441M and EPS of $2.38 vs $0.49 a year ago, while robotics grew 33% to ~$100M; AI-related demand is now roughly 70% of revenue. Shares are ~25% below their 52-week high after the semis selloff, adding physical-AI and semi-test exposure the list lacks. ## Bellwether changes - added h100_rental: $2.53/hr index; 1-yr contract $2.35 (Mar-26) vs $1.70 (Oct-25); spot ~$4 (up, bullish) - added b200_rental: $5.50-6.80/hr at neoclouds (RunPod $5.98-6.79, Lambda $6.69); ~$5 in Jan-26 (up, bullish) - added hopper_residual: 2020-vintage GPUs contracted to 2029 'at full freight'; MSFT servers 2-6 yrs, Meta 5.5 yrs (no 2026 stretch) (flat, bullish) - added dc_cost_per_gw: ~$47B/GW Vera Rubin (≈$32B racks + ≈$15B shell/power/cooling); ~$1.3B/yr electricity (up, neutral) - added memory_prices: +13-18% QoQ 3Q26 (after +93-98% 1Q26, +58-63% 2Q26); DDR5 16Gb spot $54.17 (up, bullish) - added power_bottleneck: 474 GW ERCOT requests (~90% data centers); GE Vernova turbine backlog 116 GW; ~5-7 yr lead times (up, bullish) - added capex_vs_backlog: 2026 capex ≈ $1.0T (102% of cloud revenue); backlog ≈ $2.4T (MSFT $678B +84%, ORCL $638B +363%, GOOG Cloud $514B, AWS $496B) (up, neutral) - added neocloud_credit: Jul-26 $2.6B loan at SOFR+550, 97 OID, 10.44% YTM (talk +425-450); CDS ~855bp; Apr-26 notes 9.75% (up, bearish) - added nvidia_dc: DC rev $75.2B +92% YoY (Q1 FY27); GAAP GM 74.9%; Q2 guide $91B, GM 75%; top-3 direct customers 54% of revenue (up, neutral) ## Notes Added the AI bubble bellwether indicator set (9 indicators) from a dedicated research pass over SEC filings, IR releases, Silicon Data / SemiAnalysis GPU rental indexes, TrendForce memory pricing, ERCOT / GE Vernova power data and neocloud credit pricing.
Nothing here is financial advice. Holdings and opinions are my own; the "agent" sections are written by an automated research skill and may be wrong. Built 2026-08-25 03:30 UTC.