Saturday, October 24, 2026

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Tower Semiconductor Deep Dive

Tower Semiconductor’s low-loss photonics chips halve lasers in 1.6T optical modules, supporting a $680 million annualized photonics run rate and customer wafer prepayments through 2027.

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$ORCL Spends More of Its Cash Flow on Capex Than $AMZN or $MSFT — Does the Backlog Justify the Stretch? We hold Oracle, so we pulled the numbers from our ABBX dashboard to check whether the contracted backlog supports the heavier spending. Capex intensity (last four quarters) Oracle spent about 161% of operating cash flow on capex (to 31 Aug 2026). Amazon was about 107% and Microsoft about 63% (both to 30 Jun 2026). Oracle put USD 75.7B into capex against USD 46.9B of operating cash flow. Debt and lease load Add borrowings, lease liabilities, and the undiscounted value of leases signed but not yet started. Purchase obligations are excluded for all three. - Oracle: about USD 457B, or 3.6x its USD 125B of borrowings. - Amazon: about 2.9x. - Microsoft: about 11x (its borrowings are small relative to lease commitments). Oracle stands out on size versus cash flow: roughly 9.7x trailing operating cash flow, versus 2.5x at Microsoft and 2.3x at Amazon. The backlog counterweight Oracle’s RPO (remaining performance obligations) is USD 664B — close to Microsoft’s USD 678B commercial RPO, while generating only about a quarter of Microsoft’s operating cash flow. RPO covers about 1.45x Oracle’s debt-plus-leases figure, versus 1.48x at Microsoft. Those contracts provide revenue visibility, though delivery still depends on margins and timing. Amazon’s USD 496B backlog is AWS-only, so it is not a clean comparison. ABBX capacity estimates show Oracle rising from about 4 GW to about 12.8 GW by 2029, Microsoft from 8.5 to 17 GW by 2030, and Amazon from 10.6 to 16 GW by 2028. That implies roughly USD 52B of RPO per planned GW for Oracle versus about USD 40B for Microsoft (rough scale comparison given different RPO scopes and time horizons). Our take The bigger risks at Oracle are timing, execution, and funding rather than a lack of demand. Oracle expects about 13% of its RPO to convert to revenue in the next 12 months while capex is being spent now. Its 12.8 GW figure is an ABBX estimate, not company guidance; it carries ABBX’s lowest confidence of the three, and grid approval is still pending at one or more sites. Oracle also sold USD 20B of stock in FQ1 FY27. We think the backlog justifies holding the position, but sized for funding risk. What we watch: RPO converting to revenue on schedule, new capacity coming online, and whether more equity is needed.

Margin Call

Petrobras’s Morpho-1 well revived hopes that Brazil’s Equatorial Margin can become a major new oil frontier after hydrocarbons were…

Our Views on CoreWeave

CoreWeave's financial statements point to a business model familiar to the authors after a closer review of the AI infrastructure company.

Capital Wars

CoreWeave’s $35 billion to $39 billion 2026 spending plan relies on debt as unsecured yields reach 15%, making its GPU cloud expansion a…

TCEHY · long

Tencent Holdings LTD

Tencent, valued near $500 billion, is a long idea built on its Chinese gaming, social-network and advertising franchises.

Putting bear cases to rest

Medpace authorized $1 billion of buybacks through 2028 after Q3 revenue rose 8.5% to $716 million; service revenue grew roughly 12% as…

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