The AI trade has left the hyperscalers in the dust. What will it take for that to change?

We are beginning to see the real weaknesses in these hyperscalers. Amazon , Alphabet , Microsoft and Meta Platforms may have the money, but they have run into a brick wall in this stock market. That brick wall is hardware. I should have realized how acute the shortage is when we saw how the memory chip stocks galloped to much higher stock prices. The shortage of chips, stemming from just a handful of players in the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) category — SK Hynix with roughly 60% share, followed by about 20% apiece for Samsung and Micron — is a bottleneck they have not been able to overcome. HBM is a specialized kind of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) crucial for AI computing. We know that because Apple had to own up to price increases , squeezed by the memory makers shifting more of their capacity to HBM from consumer-grade DRAM. The stocks of another class of memory chips — Sandisk , Western Digital and Seagate , which all focus on long-term data storage — seem to have no cap on them either. They are doing their best trying to deliver innovations . I wish they were expanding directly with new fabs, but that seems to be the wrong approach according to these storage companies. The opaque nature of the cost of these chips in a business-to-business context is undeniable. We can't open up online chats to find out. It just seems like one big black box. …