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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.

TSEM $19B
CV's Substack 9 clicks

From X

@StableBread

Fajasy on X

In November 2025, BWX Technologies $BWXT sold $1.25B of 0% convertible notes due November 2030 and used $830.8M of the proceeds to repay its old credit facility. The conversion price is $262.51/share, 80.2% above $145.70, and $131.9M of capped calls offset dilution up to $396.24/share. Dilution has been minimal so far. Diluted shares have held at ~92M since 2023, helped by small buybacks ($30M in 2025). But stock comp rose to $20.1M in H1 2026 from $13.7M a year earlier, although it’s still only 1.1% of revenue, up from 0.9%. Management also said on the Q2 call it doesn’t plan buybacks in 2026, despite $347.6M left on the authorization, so nothing will offset the new shares. Even after paying ~$200M for Precision Components Group (PCG) on July 1, $BWXT’s leverage is within its 2-3x target: → Debt: $2.05B ($400M of 4.125% notes due June 2028, $400M of 4.125% notes due April 2029, and the $1.25B convert). → Cash and liquidity: $400M of cash and $1.7B of total liquidity, including an undrawn $1.25B revolver running to November 2030. → Leverage: 2.7x net debt to TTM adjusted EBITDA, or $1.65B of net debt on $602.1M of EBITDA. The $750M from selling its medical isotope business would cut leverage to 1.5x. → Ratings: Fitch BBB (investment grade) since September 2026; S&P BB+ and Moody’s Ba1, one notch below. → Other obligations: $152.0M of underfunded pension and retiree benefit plans. Net debt has hovered between $1.0B and $1.5B since 2023. $BWXT pays a dividend of $0.27/quarter ($1.08/year, a 0.7% yield), raised from $0.25 in February 2026. The company expects $5.5B of capital to deploy through 2030 at 2-3x leverage, with $3.5B left after capex and dividends. That’s what CFO Mike Fitzgerald said at $BWXT’s Investor Day on September 29, 2026, and he also put organic growth first for the $3.5B. But he said $BWXT is “not anchored to the same size of transactions” it has done before, and the deck lists “Disciplined Acquisitions” among the revenue drivers behind the 2030 targets. In other words, $BWXT has the track record and, once the medical sale closes, the balance sheet to go after its 2030 targets.
@convequity

Convequity on X

We think Google's ($GOOGL) TPU volumes alone could add roughly $11 billion to $14 billion a year to Broadcom ($AVGO) revenue on our illustrative estimates, and Anthropic and OpenAI are a larger opportunity on top. April supply-chain estimates put Google's TPU demand at 4.2 million to 4.5 million units in 2026, rising above 6 million units in 2027. We allow for MediaTek's allocation to rise from around 600,000 units in 2026 to 1 million units in 2027 and assume Broadcom supplies the remainder. At the 6 million-unit level in 2027, that leaves Broadcom with roughly 1.1 million to 1.4 million additional chips compared with 2026. At an illustrative $10,000 of revenue per chip, that would add $11 billion to $14 billion in annual revenue from higher volumes alone. The actual increase will depend on which designs ship and their selling prices. Our working estimates put Anthropic's demand for Broadcom-supplied TPUs at around 1 gigawatt in 2026, rising to 5 gigawatts in 2027. OpenAI's separate custom-chip program has demand estimated at 1.3 gigawatts in 2027 and 5 gigawatts in 2028. Anthropic's TPU purchases overlap with the Google TPU opportunity, so we count those sales once. Together, the Anthropic and OpenAI estimates point to around 10 gigawatts of demand by 2028. Assuming Broadcom earns $10 billion to $20 billion for each gigawatt supplied, that represents a $100 billion to $200 billion revenue opportunity across those deployments.
@convequity

Convequity on X

We added to Tesla ($TSLA) as a long-term holding in physical AI through Optimus and Cybercab, and we keep the position small. Our view is that an affordable, capable Optimus could become an enormous product, extending Tesla's opportunity beyond its vehicle business. Tesla's batteries and its ability to coordinate difficult industrial supply chains add to that potential. The position stays small because reliability in real working environments, affordability and commercialization timing are unproven. Demonstrations alone do not establish that Optimus is ready for sustained use, and commercialization could take longer than investors expect. Reports that China was slowing humanoid-company IPO activity reinforce our concern that financial enthusiasm can advance faster than the underlying technology. A rumored Tesla facility in Ningbo, near Shanghai, could strengthen the industrial case if confirmed. Its proposed role is to coordinate Chinese suppliers and validate components for Optimus V3. The associated target of 50,000 Optimus units by year-end remains unconfirmed and ambitious, and we do not build our case around that volume. Our interest rests on the eventual product opportunity and Tesla's ability to solve production problems.
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Convequity on X

3D chips could create more room for specialist EDA startups. We are not convinced that more difficult chip design automatically translates into a large revenue windfall for $SNPS, $CDNS and Siemens. Fine-pitch stacking changes decisions that used to be made within one die. Put a circuit upstairs and its wires may get shorter, but its heat affects the circuit below. Placement, signal timing and power delivery have to be optimized together across the stack. That creates a reason for $AVGO and $NVDA to build custom tools around their architectures. Broadcom already describes a proprietary design flow built on industry-standard tools. Nvidia publishes its own research on assigning connections across tiers in 3D chips. Our inference is that the chip designers will keep some of the most differentiating optimization work in-house. A startup that solves a costly gap in cross-die planning or optimization could also win business without replacing an entire EDA suite. The incumbents still supply implementation, verification and manufacturing sign-off tools, and they are developing 3D capabilities themselves. Internal tooling is evidence that customers need more than the standard flow; it does not establish that incumbent spending falls. We see a more interesting startup opportunity where a tool can shorten repeated design iterations or improve the resulting chip enough to earn a separate budget. That is the part of the 3D transition we would investigate before assuming the largest EDA vendors capture most of the upside.zz

Investor Letters

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Margin Call

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

PBR $83B
Doomberg 9 clicks

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.

CRWV $30B
WHAT ARE WE DOING? “Contrarians At The Gate” 12 clicks

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…

CRWV $30B
Net Interest 11 clicks
TCEHY · long

Tencent Holdings LTD

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

TCEHY $449B
Value Investors Club

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…

MEDP $18B
Best Anchor Stocks 14 clicks

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