{"text":[[{"start":6.1,"text":"This week, as the second quarter came to a close, the semiconductor takeover of the stock market felt just about complete."}],[{"start":13.3,"text":"Memory chipmaker Micron joined the trillion-dollar club, after a 730 per cent surge in its stock price in the space of a year. And with the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index rising 90 per cent over the past three months, the momentum in the AI boom swung back to chips."}],[{"start":30.7,"text":"Is this peak semiconductors? Memory, in particular, is a notoriously cyclical industry. After the Fomo that helped fuel the latest furious rally, the market experienced a predictable bout of nerves last week. But even if chip cycles aren’t forever, it’s hard to call an end to this one quite yet."}],[{"start":51.349999999999994,"text":"The strong second-quarter chip rally has capped tech’s new dominance of Wall Street. With SpaceX going public, the list of the 10 most valuable US public companies is entirely made up of tech companies for the first time. Of those, three are semiconductor specialists. But with chips a key ingredient in AI, the other seven are also now all designing their own chips."}],[{"start":73.94999999999999,"text":"Perhaps counter-intuitively, this infatuation with chips has come just as much of the attention in the AI world was moving away from infrastructure and towards the models and applications needed to turn all the new computing power into something valuable for the tech industry’s end customers. But one has led to the other. The success of coding agents such as Anthropic’s Claude Code has created a jump in demand for tokens — the basic output of large language models — and added to the demand for infrastructure."}],[{"start":103.29999999999998,"text":"One of the clearest signs of this has been the spate of deals reached by Elon Musk’s xAI to rent out spare capacity in its data centres. In recent weeks, Anthropic, Google and start-up Reflection AI have agreed to pay a total of around $2.3bn a month — or $28bn a year."}],[{"start":123.84999999999998,"text":"This looks like a big return on Musk’s data centre investments. As of March this year, xAI’s total capital spending over its lifetime totalled $26.5bn. Even with more investment before the deals come fully into effect, this points to very rapid payback and helps to explain why all the AI companies are scrambling to build, with much of the money earmarked for chips."}],[{"start":148.39999999999998,"text":"Predictably, this surge in demand has already prompted a huge increase in supply, both of planned chipmaking capacity and newly minted chip stocks. One sign is the $600bn that memory chipmakers Samsung and SK Hynix said this week they plan to invest in Korea. Another is the $29bn that SK Hynix hopes to raise when its American depositary receipts begin trading in the US next week."}],[{"start":177.29999999999998,"text":"Michael Burry, the short seller famous for predicting the subprime mortgage crisis, pointed to the Korean investment as a good reason for increasing his bet against AI. But with this new production capacity taking two or three years to come online, relief from the memory squeeze won’t come quickly. "}],[{"start":193.7,"text":"Also, some of the biggest chip buyers are already looking past the next potential down cycle, suggesting its effects may be more muted. Micron said last week that it had agreed a number of long-term deals, including five-year supply contracts with some of its biggest customers that would put a floor under its prices when and if things turn down."}],[{"start":216.35,"text":"Further out, there are questions about whether the chip industry’s supply chain will be able to meet the growing demand. ASML, which makes machines essential to advanced chipmaking, and TSMC, which does most of the manufacturing, are potentially serious bottlenecks."}],[{"start":232.25,"text":"TSMC has said it will boost its capital spending by as much as 37 per cent this year, as it did in 2025. But those increases follow two years of retrenchment and would leave 2026 capex only around 50 per cent higher than 2022."}],[{"start":249.6,"text":"Contrast that with the biggest buyers of AI chips. Seven of the largest data centre operators are planning to spend an astounding $848bn this year, at least five times what they spent in 2022, according to a calculation by the newsletter Exponential View."}],[{"start":266.95,"text":"If the tech companies are right and demand for AI takes off from here, the chip squeeze looks far from over. But with semiconductor stocks running up so far, so fast, investors are still likely to find plenty to be anxious about."}],[{"start":288.59999999999997,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1783070477_2224.mp3"}