Tech drags down stocks as semiconductors slip

Memory stocks are cratering on Monday after media reports indicating that Seagate Technology Holdings CEO Dave Mosley warned that it would “just take too long” to boost capacity to meet AI-fueled demand.

Micron, Sandisk, and Western Digital are down in addition to Seagate.

Another place to look to help explain the group’s sudden travails (lumping together flash, storage, and high-bandwidth): memory stocks have displayed an elevated level of momentum, and momentum stocks have generally come under acute pressure during sudden bond market sell-offs.

Mosley’s answer, delivered at a JPMorgan conference, is worth reading in full, as the summarized media reports miss some of the nuance (emphasis added):

“What our customers are driving us for right now is more exabytes. And we believe that the way to get the most exabytes is to take our talented teams and really go through these technology transitions. We're targeting mid-20s percent growth, which is enormous CAGR. And the only way we're going to get there is to be able to go through those technology transitions, if you will, to take a 3 terabyte per platter product to a 4 terabyte per platter to a 5 terabyte per platter year over year over year. And so that's really the way we're driving it. If we took the teams off and started building new factories or bringing up new machines, it would just take too long. You would end up more capacity, if you will, but then you'd slow the rate of growth on that technology. So back to your question directly, the wildcard really is in unit capacity for disk drives, which we again could be fairly flexible with once we package those heads and media. That gets down to more customer diversification and edge and edge AI and all those use cases, which I think could come someday. So we would take the heads and media that we have planned and divert them somewhere else should those applications take hold.

To grossly oversimplify Mosley’s answer, he’s saying that in a resource-constrained environment, technology improvements are the better way to meet demand than building out more capacity.

Reasonable folks can quibble about how negative these remarks really are for the industry.

On one hand, not getting over their skis on capex is something that, all else equal, would protect profitability over time and avoid the boom-bust cycles that have plagued the industry.

On the other hand, that gives more time for competitors (especially those from China) to try to step in and meet the market’s appetite for memory. To that end, Changxin Memory Technologies is posting massive growth as it readies for an IPO.

Shares of Lumentum and Coherent plunged Monday after Leopold Aschenbrenner, ex-OpenAI researcher turned investor, disclosed his Situational Awareness fund exited its holdings in those companies during the first quarter.

By the afternoon, Lumentum was down 11% and Coherent was down over 6%. The losses are relatively small compared to the over 120% and 80% gains the AI infrastructure companies had put up, respectively, since January.

The two companies are developers of phonetics and optical equipment, which help data centers and AI hyperscalers transmit data.

Aschenbrenner’s firm, Situational Awareness, is making major market ripples today, also sending shares of T1 Energy soaring on news he bought the stock.

He also made a bearish bet against Nvidia, which recently invested $4 billion ($2 billion each) into Lumentum and Coherent.

T1 Energy is soaring after a 13F filing released this morning showed Situational Awareness held a 3.6% position in the solar and battery storage company at the end of Q1.

The position makes the hedge fund one of the 10 biggest owners of T1, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Situational Awareness has become a closely followed fund because of how well it’s done in the AI era and who it’s run by: former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, who’s only in his mid-20s!

(In fact, there was much consternation across X on Friday that the fund’s 13F wasn’t released ahead of the weekend.)

Call volumes in T1 are absolutely exploding as traders look to play follow-the-Leopold: they’re running at 52,501 less than 90 minutes into the trading day, already a one-day record for the stock.