Software cracked. Memory printed. Now what?

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AI & robotics investing — explained so you can actually act on it.

ISSUE 04 · FRIDAY 24 APRIL 2026 · R. LAURITSEN

THIS WEEK

Google split the AI chip on Wednesday — training on one side, inference on the other, with a multi-gigawatt TPU commitment from Anthropic nobody priced in. A day later, SK Hynix printed a 72% margin and warned the memory shortage runs to 2030. IBM and ServiceNow beat earnings and got demolished anyway. Three stories. One pattern: capital has stopped concentrating. It’s sorting. The question isn’t whether to own AI — it’s which piece.

Capital is sorting. Your job this weekend: pick a lane and test it.

WEEKLY SCOREBOARD

VIX = the “fear gauge.” Measures expected S&P 500 swings over the next 30 days. Above 20 = real anxiety. It’s crashed 44% in three weeks — the fifth-biggest drop in history.

TOP HEADLINES

→ Four stories. Three lanes. Match each one as you read — it speeds the Angle.

1. Google splits the chip and signs Anthropic for gigawatts.

At Cloud Next on Wednesday, Alphabet unveiled the TPU 8t (training) and TPU 8i (inference) — separate architectures, scaling to one million chips per cluster. Google claims 2.8× better training price-performance and 80% better inference price-performance vs the seventh-gen Ironwood. The real news was buried: Anthropic committed to multiple gigawatts of TPU capacity. OpenAI is also now on the customer list.

→ The custom-silicon story just stopped being theoretical. Google’s ecosystem expansion pulls Broadcom and Marvell up the stack alongside it.

2. SK Hynix prints $27B in net profit. The memory duopoly is pricing like it knows something.

Operating margin 72%. HBM share 57%. Profit growth +405% YoY. And Chairman Chey Tae-won said the quiet part out loud — HBM shortage extends to 2030, capacity gap above 20%. Samsung began shipping HBM4 in February; SK shipped HBM4 samples a year earlier and plans HBM4E samples in H2 2026.

→ The memory story is the AI infrastructure story nobody’s discounting enough.

3. Tesla drops a $25B bomb, and the market hates the math.

Capex raised from $20B just three months ago. Roughly 3× last year’s spend. CFO Vaibhav Taneja said free cash flow turns negative for the rest of the year. Musk is betting the money on AI chips, Cybercab production, Optimus lines, and six factories simultaneously.

→ Physical AI is no longer a pitch deck. It’s a line item. But the cost of admission just tripled — and Tesla at 320× trailing earnings is paying it out of operating cash.

4. Enterprise SaaS had its worst day in two years. The earnings were fine.

IBM beat by $0.10, reiterated guidance, fell 9%. ServiceNow beat top and bottom lines, gave in-line subscription growth, fell 17%. Salesforce −9%. Adobe −7%. Workday −9%. Oracle −6%. None of these results were bad.

→ Investors have decided AI is a cost for enterprise SaaS, not a growth lever. Until one of them shows AI-attributed ACV growth accelerating, the sector is guilty until proven innocent.

OUR INVESTING ANGLE

→ The classification call. This is the centrepiece of the issue — read slowly.

Everyone’s watching whether Nvidia holds $200. The smarter bet is watching where the capital around Nvidia is going.

For most of 2025, the AI trade was a single stack: buy Nvidia, buy the hyperscalers, hold the ETF. That trade worked until it didn’t, and this week was the first clean signal that “didn’t” is now the base case.

The thesis. AI capital is sorting into three lanes, and they’re pricing completely differently.

If you’re long the middle, you’re paying growth-stock prices for what the market is now treating as commodity software. Think CRM at 40×, NOW at 55×, IBM’s software business propping up a 2% dividend. Named losers, names that could genuinely crack further if Q2 prints another in-line quarter.

Companion deep dive: The Three Lanes of AI Capital →

THREE IDEAS TO RESEARCH THIS WEEKEND

→ One test per lane. Research the one you believe least — that’s where conviction gets built.

Not recommendations — starting points for your own research.

AI INVESTMENT FRAMEWORK

This is where each lane actually sits in a portfolio. Upstream gets the sizing. The middle gets the haircut. Downstream gets conditional weight — wait for the FANUC print before scaling. Not financial advice; research starting points.

Per-layer notes.

INFRASTRUCTURE AVGO is the story this week — Google + Anthropic + OpenAI on the TPU design list. MU is the HBM proxy. NVDA at $199 is fine; the issue is relative performance vs custom-silicon designers.

PLATFORMS GOOG broke out on TPU 8. MSFT flat on Copilot monetisation questions. AMZN Q1 call next week (1 May earnings).

APPLICATIONS Conviction cut. NOW at 55× after a beat-and-miss-guidance print is a category warning, not a stock warning.

PHYSICAL AI Tesla $25B capex is the catalyst; FANUC Q1 order book (mid-May) is the confirmation.

CYBERSECURITY Project Glasswing narrative intact but needs Q1 earnings (CRWD 27 May) to confirm revenue attach rates.

GLOBAL SAP at record high on Hannover Messe AI factory positioning. 9984.T strong on SpaceX/xAI upside.

What we’re watching.

YOUR MOVE

Three things to watch between now and June. Each tests one lane directly:

1. Samsung’s HBM4 Nvidia qualification, expected Q3. One headline breaks the memory duopoly premium. SK Hynix at 72% margin won’t survive that news intact. MU is the US proxy.

2. AVGO’s Google concentration disclosure, 5 June Q2 call. If Broadcom reveals any TPU design work moving to Marvell, the concentration premium unwinds inside a quarter.

3. FANUC’s Q1 order book, reported mid-May. Below 15% YoY growth = the Tesla-capex physical-AI narrative outran actual order flow. Above 20% = the downstream lane is real.

Research one. Not all three. One.

Pick the lane you believe least and spend an hour trying to falsify it — that’s where conviction gets built.

P.S. Three weeks ago I flagged the Japanese robotics discount — 28× vs 58× for US peers — and the BYD/Huawei industrial-robotics tripwire. Neither has fired yet. The gap’s narrowed slightly. Watch Tesla’s Optimus production update at the next all-hands.

Stay curious — and stay qualified.

— R. Lauritsen

Know someone building an AI position? Forward this — they’ll thank you by Friday.

QUICK GLOSSARY

iPROMPT SIGNALS · FrontWave Media Ltd · 24 APR 2026 Page of