Super Micro Begins Vera Rubin AI Rack Shipments as Shares Slip 3%

ASML Holding won broader customer commitments for its roughly $400 million High-NA EUV machines, even as its U.S. shares fell about 1.8% to $1,713.41 in Thursday morning trading. Intel is already using High-NA in volume production on selected chip layers, Samsung plans to bring the technology into DRAM production in 2028, and TSMC targets advanced chip production from 2030. ASML says its EXE:5200B can print features 1.7 times smaller than its current NXE systems in a single exposure, potentially sparing customers costly manufacturing steps. The catch is price: chipmakers need enough output and yield gains to earn back the cost of each machine, and ASML needs those gains to turn early commitments into lasting demand. At $1,713.41, the shares sit 35.5% above the roughly $1,260 GF Value estimate, a premium that puts pressure on High-NA to deliver on the factory floor.

CLSA's Bhavtosh Vajpayee said the AI semiconductor cycle will not peak in 2028, calling that expectation "utterly wrong" and projecting the current chip shortage will persist until roughly 2030. Speaking to CNBC on Wednesday, Vajpayee said demand for GPUs and custom AI chips currently exceeds supply by about 73%, and he expects upstream semiconductor and hardware companies to benefit as the shortage worsens alongside expanding AI infrastructure spending. He also noted that large semiconductor companies trade at lower valuation multiples than many other parts of the AI ecosystem. Vajpayee highlighted Meta's Muse as a notable recent development for making AI agent creation easier through simple language commands, and said similar advances should emerge in China, where companies including Alibaba are developing smaller AI models. He pointed to Apple as particularly important because smartphones already sit at the center of consumers' daily lives and could become the primary gateway for accessing AI services, while CLSA sees clearer opportunities in AI hardware suppliers than among model developers, where he said it remains too early to determine the eventual winners.

BlackRock chief investment officer of global fixed income Rick Rieder said the sharp rise in bond yields is not a crisis but an eye opener, warning that rollover financing risk and a frozen housing market are now real concerns. Rieder told Yahoo Finance that he has rotated some of his interest rate portfolios into shorter exposure, moving out of interest-rate-sensitive holdings like mortgages and into credit, and that he now views equities as a minus. He said he likes semiconductors, compute and memory because he can see the backlogs, but is running a more moderate equity position and buying call upside convexity as volatility has come down. Rieder said the Federal Reserve will likely hike again, arguing the overnight funds rate does little for inflation while every 100 basis points of tightening costs the US government somewhere between $130 and $150 billion. He added that the 10-year Treasury yield could drift higher, noting that when the 10-year hits 5% the one-year forward return averages 9.5%, and that his PIN ETF now yields 7.2% with less than three years of interest rate duration. The interview followed a week in which Meta unveiled new smart glasses and the Meta Charm holdable at Meta Connect, and McDonald's laid out $8.5 billion in capital expenditure at its investor day while its president said 84% of households with GLP-1 users visit McDonald's.