Limitless: An AI Podcast

Samsung’s brain-melting profits are clear evidence of the growing role of memory chips in the AI supply chain, with a focus on DRAM, NAND, and high bandwidth memory. 

Today we explore how Samsung and SK Hynix have gained pricing power as HBM demand strains factory capacity and pushes up costs for consumer devices.

We also cover the market reaction to recent earnings, including share declines even after Samsung reported record profits and beat estimates. We look ahead to the limited number of memory suppliers, slow capacity expansion, and the upcoming U.S. listing of SK Hynix.

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Samsung’s Memory Windfall
1:32 AI Memory Power Shift
3:42 DRAM, NAND, and HBM
5:13 The Black Hole for Memory
6:40 Bubble or Supercycle?
7:38 Consumer Costs Surge
10:19 Prices Keep Climbing
11:43 Why Supply Can’t Catch Up
13:04 Memory Hits Consumers
14:14 How Long Can It Last?
15:09 Supply Still Tightly Constrained
16:25 Cheaper Memory, More AI
17:10 Stocks Hit a Bear Market
18:44 Sell-The-News Shock
19:56 Lessons from Past Cycles
21:16 SK Hynix Goes Onshore
23:13 IPO Demand Explodes
24:29 Long-Term Outlook Holds

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RESOURCES

Josh: https://x.com/JoshKale

Ejaaz: https://x.com/cryptopunk7213

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Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:
https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Josh works with Anthropic as a contractor. All views expressed are his own and do not represent Anthropic, its leadership, or its affiliates. Nothing in this episode is investment advice.

Creators and Guests

Host
Ejaaz Ahamadeen
Host
Josh Kale

What is Limitless: An AI Podcast?

Exploring the frontiers of Technology and AI

Josh:
Samsung just became the most profitable company in the world,

Josh:
but nobody actually understands what they make.

Josh:
I feel like when I think about Samsung, I think smartphones or computers,

Josh:
but the reality is is that almost 96% of their company's profits come from a

Josh:
single entity and that's memory.

Josh:
And when we think about memory, we've talked about this in the past,

Josh:
there are three main providers.

Josh:
Two of those three just so happen to exist in Korea.

Josh:
So what are two of the most profitable companies doing in the same country and

Josh:
what are they doing to unlock all this value? And then what are the implications

Josh:
of this across the entire market. That's what we're going to get into today

Josh:
on this episode. EJS, what's going on with Samsung?

Josh:
How is this even possible? I feel like Samsung was the company that people buy

Josh:
Android phones from, not the most valuable company, profitable company,

Josh:
I should say, in the world.

Ejaaz:
Yeah, no, I remember as a kid, a bunch of my friends had Samsung phones,

Ejaaz:
and that's all I knew them for. So when I heard the name come up repeatedly

Ejaaz:
over the last year and a half or two years, I was kind of like,

Ejaaz:
okay, what is this company doing different now?

Ejaaz:
Firstly, some of the headline numbers. um samsung recorded their quarterly profit q2

Ejaaz:
at 58.5 billion dollars now this was surprising to many analysts because they were expecting it to be

Ejaaz:
55 so you know they overachieved by around three billion dollars but the larger

Ejaaz:
headline reasoning behind this is they absolutely crushed nvidia who only came

Ejaaz:
in at a measly 53 billion dollars now

Josh:
Obviously my god.

Ejaaz:
It's a crazy chart so so

Ejaaz:
Obviously, I'm jesting, but the point I'm trying to make here is,

Ejaaz:
why has Samsung been able to achieve so much profit?

Ejaaz:
You mentioned earlier that 94% of their profit over the last year and a half

Ejaaz:
has come from one single department in their company, and that is AI memory.

Ejaaz:
Samsung is currently the number

Ejaaz:
two largest provider of something known as HBM, high bandwidth memory.

Ejaaz:
In order to understand why this is such a useful commodity, every single GPU

Ejaaz:
that NVIDIA sells, every single TPU that Google makes, any type of AI chip or

Ejaaz:
AI hardware, quite frankly, requires a ton of memory.

Ejaaz:
And emphasis on the word ton, because typically, consumer devices,

Ejaaz:
your laptop, your computers require just kind of like a standard,

Ejaaz:
pretty predictable amount of memory.

Ejaaz:
But AI memory in particular has been quite exponential. Sure.

Ejaaz:
So Samsung is one of three major providers.

Ejaaz:
And because they own a relative monopoly on this industry, they've been able

Ejaaz:
to hike prices up massively. Now,

Ejaaz:
I know I'm throwing out big numbers here, but to help you understand why this

Ejaaz:
is such a gargantuan amount of money to make over three months,

Ejaaz:
we're roughly talking about $650 million per day or $27 million per hour.

Ejaaz:
So this is more money than the most valuable company in the world makes,

Ejaaz:
yet Samsung isn't the most valuable company in the world.

Ejaaz:
And in Korea, right next to it in the number two position is SK Hynix,

Ejaaz:
which is relatively their sister company, or not their sister company,

Ejaaz:
but their sister company in terms of memory, who is the number one AI memory provider.

Ejaaz:
So there's some really unique moats being formed in Korea.

Ejaaz:
And it's weird because typically in the West, you largely have the monopolies

Ejaaz:
intact. And now we're seeing it in Asia, specifically Korea.

Josh:
Another fun fact is if you actually scroll up to the top of this artifact,

Josh:
we distilled it down to seconds.

Josh:
That's $7,500 per second that this company makes, which is remarkable because

Josh:
going back down to that other chart, I mean, we see the little bar on the bottom

Josh:
here that shows Samsung Q2 2025 at $3.4 billion.

Josh:
For those of you who are a little confused about years, 2025 was last year.

Josh:
That was a year ago, they were making $3.4 billion, and now they've surpassed

Josh:
NVIDIA at $58.5. So what on earth is going on? What is going on with this memory?

Josh:
And I think the essence is, like you mentioned, EJ, every computer needs two

Josh:
things. It needs the workbench, which is the memory, and then it needs the filing

Josh:
cabinet, which is the And there's only three companies that make virtually all of this.

Josh:
Each company kind of has their specialty,

Josh:
There's DRAM first, which we commonly reference as the workbench.

Josh:
It's the RAM inside of your gaming PC. So if you've ever built a gaming PC or

Josh:
if you've ever been on Newegg shopping around, you'll recognize this term called DDR5.

Josh:
That's the fast memory. That's the temporary RAM, a lot of people call it.

Josh:
And it gets wiped when you turn off your computer. Then there's NAND,

Josh:
which is more closer to like the filing cabinet. It's your SSD.

Josh:
So if you have an iPhone, chances are you have NAND flash inside of your iPhone.

Josh:
That is a little bit slower, but much cheaper per gigabyte.

Josh:
And then there's HBM, high bandwidth memory, which is the AI stuff.

Josh:
And that's the reason for everything taking place right now.

Josh:
And those DRAM chips, we've described this before, they're basically stacked

Josh:
up and they're 12 to 16 stories high, kind of like a skyscraper of memory.

Josh:
And it uses this incredibly complicated thing.

Josh:
Now, SK Hynix, one of these two companies we've mentioned, they own about 60%

Josh:
of the entire HBM market.

Josh:
So any AI chip that gets built, chances are it's gone through them.

Josh:
And that's why so much of this monopoly has started to form.

Josh:
And that's why so much of these profit margins has begun to expand is because

Josh:
there are three companies in charge of this bottleneck that controls the entirety

Josh:
of the AI market. And you could see here kind of a visual of what this looks

Josh:
like. DRAM next to NAND, next to HBM.

Josh:
And Samsung and SK INIX in particular just so happen to both be the Korean superstars

Josh:
that are making this this reality possible right now.

Ejaaz:
If there's a single sentence that I think would describe why...

Ejaaz:
I guess people are so bullish on these companies. AI is basically a black hole

Ejaaz:
for memory in general, more so than any other consumer or enterprise tech wave that we've seen before.

Ejaaz:
So to give you an idea, when you write a prompt and you submit that,

Ejaaz:
every single AI model, ChatGPT, Claude, doesn't matter, references or rereads

Ejaaz:
the entire model weights.

Ejaaz:
Now, the model weights are what these companies are spending billions and billions

Ejaaz:
of dollars to build, to build a better intelligent model.

Ejaaz:
It rereads it every single time. So you need a lot of memory.

Ejaaz:
And every model, by the way, kind of 10 to 20 X is the requirement of memory

Ejaaz:
needed to build that model. Now, at the scale that they're building these models,

Ejaaz:
15 trillion parameter models, 20 trillion parameter models, whatever that might

Ejaaz:
be, that is going to keep going up. So there's a black hole for memory there.

Ejaaz:
The craziest part is that's not even the largest part.

Ejaaz:
When you talk to your chatbot, when it remembers things about you,

Ejaaz:
when you ask it to remind yourself of the thing that you spoke about in a different

Ejaaz:
conversation, that's all temporary storage, which is on the NAND flash side of things.

Ejaaz:
And that is equally important. So the overall effect of this is more memory

Ejaaz:
required from all three of these companies that were, well, these two companies,

Ejaaz:
mainly Samsung and SK Hynix, but also from the likes of Micron in the US.

Ejaaz:
And that's why it is pretty crazy to say that memory is no longer a commodity.

Ejaaz:
And I think this is an important point because typically, or critics will point

Ejaaz:
out, an AI memory bubble is a bubble and it will eventually pop.

Ejaaz:
And the reason why they're saying that is justified on historical facts,

Ejaaz:
which is AI memory has gone in boom and bust cycles constantly over the last couple of decades.

Ejaaz:
In fact, three years ago, SK Hynix was doing so badly that they almost got bought

Ejaaz:
by, Josh, can you guess the company?

Josh:
No, don't tell me, Sam, Sam.

Josh:
Micron. Oh, my God. Imagine Micron owned SK Hynix.

Ejaaz:
They came this close because it was the pico bottom of the memory cycle.

Ejaaz:
They couldn't sell memory. They had overinvested in this thing called high bandwidth

Ejaaz:
memory, and they never knew if they were going to sell enough units.

Ejaaz:
And Micron almost purchased them. But they doubled down, and they didn't sell.

Ejaaz:
And now they, as of this week, were the number one most valuable company in

Ejaaz:
Korea. But Samsung eclipsed them with their recent profit earnings. It's pretty insane.

Josh:
That's unbelievable. And there's this really crazy thing. If you go down back

Josh:
to the visualization right underneath that, we have the wafer math of how this

Josh:
actually works because HBM is the AI memory. You need HBM.

Josh:
And it's really demanding and it actually destroys a lot of other consumption

Josh:
ability because according to this, one gigabyte of HBM consumes the factory

Josh:
capacity of roughly four gigabytes of regular DRAM.

Josh:
So every wafer that becomes AI memory is a wafer that never becomes laptop or phone memory.

Josh:
And that's why we're starting to see prices from a lot of these consumer-grade

Josh:
products going up. Like for the first time ever, Apple just increased their

Josh:
products across the board on the laptops, probably on the iPhone this year.

Josh:
Why does that happen? It's because HBM is consuming four times the amount of

Josh:
memory consumption per gigabyte than traditional memory otherwise would.

Josh:
And as a result, this creates pretty hefty margins.

Josh:
And we have this pretty cool chart to reflect just how good these margins are,

Josh:
because again, when you have a monopoly, you set the pricing,

Josh:
you determine how much money you actually stand to make.

Josh:
And we have it compared relative to other industries. So in a grocery store,

Josh:
for every $100 of chips sold, they...

Josh:
Collect about three of that as profit. Very slim margin on the grocery stores.

Josh:
CarMaker is a little bit better at $7.

Josh:
Apple, which is the traditional tech margin when you sell hardware, is about 30%.

Josh:
Samsung is 52 and SK Hynix is 72, meaning $72 of every $100 sold goes to their top line.

Josh:
It goes right to the balance sheet they're able to use and spend that on R&D

Josh:
and profit. So they have this tremendous amounts of profit margins that they're able to play with.

Josh:
And I think that's what's making them clearly so profitable.

Josh:
And Samsung's memory workers are getting bonuses now worth six times their annual

Josh:
salary, which is really incredible to see. EJ, as we were talking about this before the show, how...

Josh:
Generally speaking, Koreans like to gamble a little bit more than the average person.

Josh:
And if you are a Korean who is interested in gambling and also interested in

Josh:
just making a tremendous amount of money, if you either bet on SK Hynix or you

Josh:
start working at SK Hynix, you either got a six times multiple on your investment

Josh:
or a six times multiple on your salary as a bonus.

Josh:
And this just seems like this unbelievable gift to the country of Korea. Oh my gosh.

Ejaaz:
Here's a fun fact. The luxury sales market has tripled over the last four months

Ejaaz:
in Korea specifically because everyone's getting rich off of SK Hynix.

Ejaaz:
I saw a story about folks over in Taiwan who are borrowing up to $60,000 from

Ejaaz:
their bank at crazy interest rates just to buy TSMC.

Ejaaz:
The point is, there are crazy things happening in the AI markets in Asia specifically,

Ejaaz:
and Korea is no different.

Ejaaz:
It's interesting you raise the point around margins. I was looking at the price

Ejaaz:
increase or the cost of memory that SK Hynix and Samsung have been selling over the last six months.

Ejaaz:
Now, in Q1, they hiked their prices up 90%.

Ejaaz:
Just imagine that for a second. Just consider that. Imagine buying something

Ejaaz:
that you use regularly in your phone, in your computer, and suddenly the price

Ejaaz:
of it doubles purely because one component of your device has gone up almost 100%.

Ejaaz:
But it gets worse. In Q2, it went up a further 50% to 60%. That's why Samsung

Ejaaz:
just reported the best earnings ever, 19x better than last year.

Ejaaz:
And more money, by the way, than they've made in the last 40 years.

Ejaaz:
They've made in one single year. So the point I'm trying to make is...

Ejaaz:
These prices have been hiked up pretty aggressively.

Ejaaz:
And so your question might be, well, it's not going to go up any higher.

Ejaaz:
Well, Samsung announced or are going to announce in their quarterly earnings

Ejaaz:
that they're going to hike it up another 20% in Q3. So the point is simple.

Ejaaz:
Memory is extremely scarce.

Ejaaz:
There are three companies in the world that can produce this memory that is required for AI.

Ejaaz:
Two-thirds of them reside in Korea. And Samsung and SK Inux hold a monopoly

Ejaaz:
for something called high bandwidth memory specifically, and they can price it however way you want.

Ejaaz:
Now, you may look at me and listen to this and say, well, why can't we just

Ejaaz:
create more memory? Why can't there be other companies that do this?

Ejaaz:
It is a very closely customized process.

Ejaaz:
These companies, SK Hynix, the CEO of SK Hynix, hangs out with Jensen almost

Ejaaz:
every other month or every other two weeks, actually, to try and figure out

Ejaaz:
how best to create memory for the chips that they're building.

Ejaaz:
All these other hyperscalers are doing the exact same thing.

Ejaaz:
They're begging. Remember, there was a story we spoke about a few months ago,

Ejaaz:
Josh, where Google and Microsoft had flown their execs over to Korea to convince

Ejaaz:
them to sell them more capacity.

Ejaaz:
They even offered to pay a couple hundred millions of dollars to pay for their

Ejaaz:
equipment that is required to expand their fabs.

Ejaaz:
It is absolutely insane what's going on. And you're right as a skeptic,

Ejaaz:
if you're listening to this and you are a skeptic, to think, you know what?

Ejaaz:
This is a bubble, it's going to pop soon. But also, if you look at the fundamentals,

Ejaaz:
like companies such as Micron and SK Hynix, the PE ratios are still astoundingly

Ejaaz:
low because they don't have enough supply. Atoms can't get moved.

Josh:
So hearing this price increase, it kind of makes me happy for you,

Josh:
happy for the investors, glad everyone's making money.

Josh:
But I think about the impact that it has on my life and the actual consumer

Josh:
because this is starting to trickle down into the real market and it is affecting

Josh:
me in a way that is pretty annoying.

Josh:
When we look at the price comparisons of what things cost today as a consumer

Josh:
because of this demand crunch, the numbers are pretty brutal.

Josh:
Just to get a 32 gigabyte kit of RAM, which is traditionally not that expensive

Josh:
in a small component in a computer, it's two to three times more expensive this

Josh:
year than it was last year.

Josh:
And now if you want to build a PC, over a third of the cost of that computer is just the memory.

Josh:
And the same thing is true with a lot of Apple products, like we mentioned.

Josh:
The MacBook Air now has increased $200. It went from $1,100 to $1,300.

Josh:
The MacBook Pro, even more.

Josh:
If you bought a MacBook Pro just a couple weeks ago, it was $1,700.

Josh:
And that same MacBook Pro today is now $2,000. client.

Josh:
Same with MacStudio, which has increased $1,300 because why do people buy MacStudios?

Josh:
Well, they buy them to run local inference on their machines.

Josh:
They have a tremendous amount of memory.

Josh:
That memory is costing a lot more. Now it went from $4,000 to $5,300.

Josh:
And the same with their low-cost MacBook Neo, increasing $100.

Josh:
So the price of everything is continuing to.

Josh:
There's probably some pretty strong forces that be to convince you to maybe

Josh:
keep your phone for another quarter or two or another year or two or another

Josh:
cycle because these prices are just going up, up, up.

Josh:
Now, the question I have for you, E-Jazz, is, is this going to continue and

Josh:
how long will this continue? Can they afford to just continue to move these

Josh:
prices up and up and up and just expect everyone else to absorb that price?

Josh:
Or is there a moment where they're going to have to start cutting those margins

Josh:
a little bit because the market's just fully tapped out? They cannot afford

Josh:
to continue to spend this high on memory.

Ejaaz:
There are many different ways to analyze this. There are frameworks.

Ejaaz:
There are Wall Street traders that are like spending hours and hours trying

Ejaaz:
to research this and figure out, hmm, will this memory demand keep going up?

Ejaaz:
There's only one proxy that measures that.

Ejaaz:
Are more people using AI?

Ejaaz:
What does that curve look like? If you believe, as you're listening to this,

Ejaaz:
that more people will be using AI, spinning up multiple AI agents per person

Ejaaz:
and increasingly use it across work, leisure, and whatever they do in their day-to-day life,

Ejaaz:
then you are betting that memory demand increases exponentially.

Ejaaz:
But then you might be wondering, well, what if they produce enough supply to

Ejaaz:
meet that demand over the next year?

Ejaaz:
Well, number one, you're not going to get that supply coming on board until

Ejaaz:
2030. These chip fabs take so long to build.

Ejaaz:
They are meticulously designed, and they are hard to flood the supply right now.

Ejaaz:
Now, typically in a boom and bust cycle, you could overflood the supply because

Ejaaz:
you can only make so many mobile phones.

Ejaaz:
Apple and Samsung, ironically, were the ones making these mobile phones.

Ejaaz:
So you can kind of predict the consumer hardware, you can't do that in the GPU

Ejaaz:
game because so many people want that.

Ejaaz:
So it depends on if that demand outpaces the supply of memory.

Ejaaz:
And right now it's looking like it's three to five X over the next couple of

Ejaaz:
years over the actual supply. So technically we're gonna be constrained.

Ejaaz:
The other perspective I have on this is we will look for alternatives in terms

Ejaaz:
of memory suppliers in China. And Apple's been doing this. They're shopping

Ejaaz:
around this company called CXMT in China.

Ejaaz:
That produces similar DRAM and HBM. But here's the sticker.

Ejaaz:
They're oversold to the Chinese AI labs, and they also don't have any supply.

Ejaaz:
So Apple is trying to strong arm them and the US government to allow them to

Ejaaz:
buy from a competitor in China.

Ejaaz:
And the final point is, what if we create a new model architecture that doesn't

Ejaaz:
require as much memory? Now, the skeptic will jump at that, and they'll say,

Ejaaz:
hey, memory demand is going to crash. Prices are going to crash.

Ejaaz:
Like this is the bubble popping. I would argue the opposite.

Ejaaz:
If memory becomes cheaper, guess what?

Ejaaz:
More use cases get unlocked, more AI agents get run, and the world economically

Ejaaz:
becomes way more productive. So does that sound bullish to you?

Ejaaz:
Yeah, I guess so. I'm a permable on the memory zone.

Josh:
Yeah, we've been so bullish. And for a good reason, like Micron's up,

Josh:
what, two and a half times a year today.

Ejaaz:
Dude, we made the call at the end of last year. It's up 150%.

Josh:
We've been on it. I will say the Illuminous portfolio has been doing absolutely

Josh:
incredible over the last 12 months. Like everything that we have predicted to

Josh:
varying degrees has done pretty well.

Josh:
But now I have to ask the question. And it's like, okay, SanDisk up six and

Josh:
a half times, Micron up two and a half times, SK Hynix two and a half times,

Josh:
Samsung 1.5 multiple year to day.

Josh:
All these companies have done incredibly well, but just recently,

Josh:
all of those companies are down more than 20% from their recent highs in the stock market.

Josh:
Which, if we're speaking technically, that is a bear market.

Josh:
So we're technically in a memory bear market right now, which doesn't feel like

Josh:
it based on what we're talking about.

Josh:
And the weird paradox here is that like Samsung just announced their earnings

Josh:
earlier this week and in fact they beat estimates which was unbelievable they

Josh:
had this record earnings report that's how we found out that they're more profitable

Josh:
than nvidia and yet the stock sold off.

Josh:
Nine percent in a single session and sk hynix fell off 15 in a single session

Josh:
so these stocks got crushed and there's this interesting thing at play where

Josh:
like okay these memory companies are saying that they have record earnings they're

Josh:
going to continue to increase prices they have

Josh:
increased amount of sales coming down the pipeline they're going to fulfill

Josh:
all this demand and yet the market is saying, whoa, we got to slow down.

Josh:
We are taking this down 20%. Now, there are some things that may have smoothed the market here.

Josh:
Meta has hinted at capping their AI capex, not that they've built anything fun

Josh:
with it anyway, but they've kind of hinted that they want to lower the capex.

Josh:
And I guess that's where we're sitting now is that this weird point of uncertainty

Josh:
where the company is just saying, hey, guys, we're all good on this end.

Josh:
We have incredible margins. We have an incredible business. There's tremendous amount of demand.

Josh:
But the stock market's saying, whoa, hold on there. We've gotten up a lot.

Josh:
We might have to check you. There's some unknown unknowns that are coming down

Josh:
the pipe that they're not entirely sure about.

Ejaaz:
Can I give you my honest and boring take as to why the markets are crashing?

Josh:
Tell me, why are we down 20% right now?

Ejaaz:
We just came to the end of pretty much quarterly earnings.

Ejaaz:
And this is just a sell the news event. I think there are a lot of funds around

Ejaaz:
the world that are levered up on these stocks, and they kind of want to get in at a better price.

Ejaaz:
Now, if you're listening to this

Ejaaz:
and you're thinking, Ejaz, you sound delusional, fair play. Maybe I am.

Ejaaz:
But I think that if you're any kind of a long-term investor in AI,

Ejaaz:
it is so strikingly obvious that we're going to need memory.

Ejaaz:
And if you've done any kind of in-depth research around how to produce that

Ejaaz:
memory, you're going to need these three companies, right?

Ejaaz:
That's the way that it sits right now. And I think people are getting concerned.

Ejaaz:
People are getting worried. They're wondering how on earth can we make this

Ejaaz:
much money over the same stocks month after month after month?

Ejaaz:
How can the profit margins can't keep going up, but they kind of can keep going

Ejaaz:
up as long as memory supply is underpriced or underpaced for AI demand.

Ejaaz:
And that's currently what we're saying before. And we've never seen this before.

Ejaaz:
That's the whole point. Like these companies are more in demand than they have ever been.

Ejaaz:
Now, a fun fact is like with every cycle, there is a boom and a bust and eventually

Ejaaz:
there will be a bust, I believe.

Ejaaz:
But that's only at a point where these fabs start oversupplying the entire market.

Ejaaz:
And at the last pico bottom, when memory was super cheap, do you guys want to

Ejaaz:
guess which company or companies were aggressively pushing their prices even

Ejaaz:
lower to buy as much memory as they can?

Ejaaz:
Oh, who's that? When the shoe was on the other foot. It was Apple.

Ejaaz:
It was Apple. Apple had the monopoly on SK Hynix and Samsung and forced them

Ejaaz:
to sell DRAM and HBM for the cheapest prices possible.

Ejaaz:
So the point I'm trying to make is this might seem super aggressive.

Ejaaz:
Samsung, SK Hynix, hiking up prices.

Ejaaz:
They're just doing what other companies did in a capital efficient market.

Ejaaz:
And that's what we're seeing right now. I think this will be a nothing burger

Ejaaz:
in a couple of months time. That's my bet.

Josh:
Yeah. And you have to imagine like there probably is some scar tissue.

Josh:
Like you mentioned, we have never seen this before in terms of demand,

Josh:
but we have seen this before in terms of price, where these

Josh:
kind of memory super cycles do happen, the last one being in 2017 to 2018,

Josh:
where Micron peaked at about four to five times price to earnings ratio,

Josh:
and then proceeded to fall 60% while their earnings were still rising,

Josh:
similar to what we have now.

Josh:
So I think people are just a little concerned, a little scared.

Josh:
This is probably a short-term outlook, longer term, like you mentioned,

Josh:
things are looking pretty solid.

Josh:
In fact, coming up, we have a test of this, and a pretty big one,

Josh:
because SK Hynix, as we mentioned earlier, is a Korean company, but not for long.

Josh:
On July 10th, they're being listed on the NASDAQ under the ticker SKNY,

Josh:
raising about $30 billion.

Josh:
So this feels like a really pivotal moment in the memory world of how the American

Josh:
market is going to perceive SK Hynix bringing their listing onshore.

Josh:
And we're gonna see kind of how the market reacts. And this is an interesting

Josh:
one. Ejaz, I'm curious for your take. Like, is this something you're planning

Josh:
to participate in and invest in? Like, we have a sneaky IPO here.

Ejaaz:
Yeah. In short, yes. I'm bullish on memory. I own Micron.

Ejaaz:
I own DRAM, which is kind of like a basket that owns each of these top memory

Ejaaz:
companies individually. Like, if you're a US citizen, you can't necessarily

Ejaaz:
get access to SK Hynix or Korean stocks in general.

Ejaaz:
But you can do it through these kind of like basket things. DRAM is one.

Ejaaz:
But yeah, I'll be buying SK Hynix when they do IPO here in the US.

Ejaaz:
As I've been waiting for it. Fun fact.

Ejaaz:
Guess where I think $2 to $3 billion of this $28 billion ADR is coming from?

Josh:
Leopold Ashenbrenner. That guy's back at it again.

Josh:
This dude does not miss. Our last episode which we recorded on him,

Josh:
which you should go look at. It has like 120,000 views now on YouTube.

Josh:
It talks about how his portfolio made no sense. He's like, why are you shorting

Josh:
NVIDIA as your largest position? Well, it turns out NVIDIA is down 20% since

Josh:
recording that. Who would have thought?

Josh:
And now he is participating in SK Hynix as the IPO, as one of the largest seed

Josh:
investors in this entire thing. So, like, the dude is on it.

Josh:
I mean, as much as people push back against his decisions, he has really not missed.

Josh:
He's killed it. Yeah, he's done such an amazing job.

Ejaaz:
Yeah, he has one of the, his ears are closest to the ground in terms of what

Ejaaz:
is actually going on in the Frontier AI Labs.

Ejaaz:
And it's so funny because you know some might say there's some questionable

Ejaaz:
practices going on but I remember

Ejaaz:
I think a few a month ago he announced major investments through his fund in

Ejaaz:
some of these Australian neoclouds and then they signed a major partnership

Ejaaz:
with some of the Frontier LAP so if you are blindly kind of like following this

Ejaaz:
guy I would urge you to be careful but it's promising

Ejaaz:
a question you asked earlier is we're gonna see this as a real test in the market

Ejaaz:
in in the West at least as to whether the memory trade is over or whether it is in demand.

Ejaaz:
This round, this SK Hynix IPO, which is launching in a day's time,

Ejaaz:
if you're listening to this right now, is currently rumored to be 4x oversubscribed.

Ejaaz:
There is insatiable amount of demand for memory stocks in general,

Ejaaz:
and that comes from capital institutions, but it also comes from retail as well.

Ejaaz:
But you can't get that amount of money without having institutionals that have

Ejaaz:
thought long and hard about this, pension funds, etc., that are buying this

Ejaaz:
and holding for a while in play.

Ejaaz:
So that's what we're seeing right now, and I think that this is going to be

Ejaaz:
a pretty huge success. I think these stock declines over the last couple of

Ejaaz:
days is a nothing burger. I think it's just a new quarterly earnings and hedge

Ejaaz:
funds are doing their thing, they're trading their outgoes.

Josh:
Yeah, that's probably right. And if we go back to the artifact,

Josh:
there's a super cycle or sell signal, which I think is probably a decent place

Josh:
to wrap up this episode in deciding like, hey, where is everything going here?

Josh:
And I think the reality that we've kind of converged on, I would say between

Josh:
the two of us, let me know if I'm wrong, is that longer term.

Josh:
Things are looking great. There is no limit to the amount of memory demand that's happening.

Josh:
There are a very small subset of companies that are capable of building this

Josh:
type of memory, and there is not a very clear path for new entrants to actually

Josh:
come and make a meaningful impact on their business.

Josh:
So as long as this demand continues to rise, which we assume it will due to

Josh:
just the sheer demand volume of AI and tokens, that is looking good.

Josh:
On the short term, people are a little bit afraid. They're a little unsure and

Josh:
uncertain because there's been such a large run-up and because there's probably

Josh:
some scar tissue from these previous boom and bust cycles when it comes to the memory companies.

Josh:
So there is a lot of uncertainty, but this makes sense to me.

Josh:
And we've seen this over and over again in the market where there are a lot

Josh:
of knee-jerk reactions that are incorrect and over-determined.

Josh:
And the reality is that if you have a slightly longer time frame,

Josh:
a slightly longer time scale, then you can be right eventually.

Josh:
And perhaps you're not right in the next month or two if you bought it a month

Josh:
ago you're looking pretty dumb right now you're probably feeling like oh man

Josh:
i bought the wrong company but i think the reality is is that six months 12

Josh:
months 18 months 24 months in the future

Josh:
um these things are still going to continue to be pretty strong businesses and

Josh:
i think that's probably the reality we could leave it at.

Ejaaz:
I agree. I'm curious what the folks listening to this think.

Ejaaz:
I know AI memory isn't the sexist of topics to talk about, but it has increasingly

Ejaaz:
become the most important component to this AI infrastructure capex spend race.

Ejaaz:
It is the most costliest and priciest item that is driving up all the prices of your consumer goods.

Ejaaz:
What are your thoughts? Do you think we are overly optimistic?

Ejaaz:
Do you think that memory profit margins are going to keep going up?

Ejaaz:
Do you think memory stock prices are going to keep going up?

Ejaaz:
Or do you think this is an insatiable bubble that is eventually going to burst

Ejaaz:
and we are all currently delusional and Josh and Ijaz are marking the top?

Ejaaz:
Curious to hear from you guys on what you think.

Ejaaz:
Thank you so much for listening to this episode. We are trying to cover different

Ejaaz:
types of companies that just aren't based in the West and also kind of explain

Ejaaz:
how and why they're important and how you guys can maybe potentially get exposure

Ejaaz:
if you were interested in doing so.

Ejaaz:
We're always excited about talking about these topics, but if there's anything

Ejaaz:
that we've missed recently and you want to hear more about, let us know.

Ejaaz:
We've noticed that a lot of Capital Markets episodes that we've been making

Ejaaz:
have been super interesting and engaging by you guys. We love the comments.

Ejaaz:
Wherever you're listening to us, Spotify, YouTube, Apple, let us know what your

Ejaaz:
thoughts are. Give us a rating. Give us a thumbs up and tell your friends about it as well.

Ejaaz:
And I think the final thing to say is Limitless is in the market for partners

Ejaaz:
that we want to team up with.

Ejaaz:
And we want to talk about your product and your feature. If there's something

Ejaaz:
that might be interesting that you think Josh and Nijaz might like,

Ejaaz:
or if you know of someone that has something that they might want to publicize, let us know.

Ejaaz:
We are in the market. We have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands

Ejaaz:
of people every single month that listen to us.

Ejaaz:
And we would love to promote and talk about your product. But aside from that, I think that's it.

Josh:
Yeah, it's almost like you've had 200 episodes of practice on that sign-off.

Josh:
That was pretty good. No notes, no additions. Thank you all for watching as always.

Josh:
Very much appreciated. Share with a friend if you think they would enjoy.

Josh:
And as always, we will see you guys in the next episode. Next one is the roundup.

Josh:
We got a big week coming for the roundup. My God, we have a couple of new models

Josh:
coming down the pipe. We got it. Yeah.

Josh:
Just a couple. Yeah, just a good one. It's a good one. You're going to want

Josh:
to tune in. That's dropping on Friday. We got a newsletter coming out as well.

Josh:
And we'll see you guys on that episode. Thank you so much for watching.

Ejaaz:
See you guys. Peace.