Skylab Intelligence @skylabintel

Seagate shipped 40% more storage capacity for data centers Seagate’s nearline drives are built to store exabytes of data in data centers. The storage capacity it shipped in these drives rose 39.8% in its fiscal year ended July 3, 2026. Capacity shipped, fiscal 2026 versus fiscal 2025: • Nearline drives: 695 million terabytes, up from 497 million. • Other hard drives: 94 million terabytes, down from 98 million. Western Digital also sold 25% more storage capacity over its fiscal year ended July 3. Its average selling price per unit of storage rose 8%. Seagate’s factory list puts recording heads in Minnesota and Northern Ireland, magnetic disks in Singapore, and drive assembly in Thailand and China. Thailand’s broader storage unit exports to the US reached US$888.2M in July 2026, up 168% from a year earlier. $STX Seagate | $WDC Western Digital

KLA grew 12% while its China sales barely moved KLA sells machines that find defects during chip manufacturing. Its revenue grew 12% in the year ended June 2026 even though sales to China were almost flat. Revenue outside China rose 17.5%. Annual revenue by customer location: • North America: US$1.76B, up 29.0%. • Korea: US$1.83B, up 26.2%. • Taiwan: US$3.64B, up 13.7%. • China: US$4.05B, up 0.1%. KLA linked Korean growth to spending on high-bandwidth memory and advanced DRAM. In Taiwan, customers invested more in advanced chipmaking and packaging. KLA builds its equipment across the US, Singapore, Israel, China and Europe. $KLAC KLA

Taiwan's King Slide started in 1986 making furniture hardware. Now they make sliding rails for server racks, plus hardware that keeps their cables organized. Their August sales grew 344% y/y. August sales reached NT$6.47B (about US$202M). Monthly company sales jumped from about US$140M in June to US$199M in July, then held near that level in August. $2059.TW King Slide

August sales grew across four Taiwan PCB and substrate makers Unimicron, Tripod, Nan Ya PCB and Kinsus supply circuit boards and chip substrates, which connect chips and other components inside electronic equipment. All four reported August 2026 sales at least 40% higher than a year earlier. August company sales, with growth versus August 2025: • Unimicron: NT$17.75B, about US$554M, up 56.3%. • Tripod: NT$10.22B, about US$319M, up 65.5%. • Nan Ya PCB: NT$5.35B, about US$167M, up 40.6%. • Kinsus: NT$4.81B, about US$150M, up 40.6%. $3037.TW Unimicron | $3044.TW Tripod | $8046.TW Nan Ya PCB | $3189.TW Kinsus

The Daily DRAM | September 24, 2026 (as of Asia close) TLDR: DDR5 rises for a fourth straight session as 16Gb DDR4 falls again. DDR5 16Gb (4800 / 5600): $57.667 | +0.29% DDR4 16Gb (3200): $83.784 | -0.70% DDR4 8Gb (3200): $46.107 | +0.47% Since Friday, DDR5 is up 2.98% while 16Gb DDR4 is down 2.29%, narrowing the gap between them to $26.12 per chip from $29.75. 8Gb DDR4 recovered yesterday's dip and now sits slightly above Friday's close. $MU Micron | $SKHY SK hynix | $2408.TW Nanya

@skeptrune Higgsfield MCP with Claude Code or Codex can be a very powerful tool. You never really need to visit the Higgsfield UI at all

Kioxia starts Kitakami Fab3 site work, targeting fiscal 2029 operations TLDR: NAND flash maker Kioxia began site work for Kitakami Fab3 in August 2026, with operations targeted for fiscal 2029. At the separate Fab2 building, Kioxia and SanDisk had already begun tenth-generation flash production in July 2026. The partners anticipate investing more than US$31B through 2032 across both Yokkaichi and Kitakami. That combined plan depends on Japanese government support and covers more than Fab3 alone. $KXIAY $SNDK

China’s August chip import bill rose 84% China imported US$65.82B of integrated circuits in August, up 83.6% from a year earlier. The number of chips rose 6.7%, so spending grew much faster than the chip count. Other August imports also grew: • Computer parts: US$10.71B, up 466.3% year on year. • Diodes and other semiconductor devices: US$2.43B, up 15.7% year on year. China's buildout is intensifying but a significant percentage of the imports are for commodity and consumer use cases, not just AI.

Japan’s NAND export value rose about 383% in July from a year earlier. The reported number of exported items increased 3.9% (price hikes driving revenue) July 2026, compared with July 2025: • Export value: ¥185.4B, roughly US$1.14B, up about 383% in yen terms. • Reported quantity: 24.3 million items, up 3.9%. • Yen per exported item: up about 365%. Separately, Sandisk attributed roughly two-thirds of its revenue growth from the previous quarter to higher prices and one-third to volume in the quarter ended July 3, 2026. $285A.T Kioxia | $SNDK Sandisk

@paurooteri Pauroo-san, don't you think inventory for 300mm needs to grow significantly in order to service logic, nand and hbm requirements? We see price hikes coming within the next 1-2 quarters but seems the current large inventories are for commodity/200mm wafers only.

Chipmaking has a container business hiding in plain sight. Taiwan's Gudeng makes the carriers used to move and store photomasks, silicon wafers and advanced-packaging panels. Its product range includes EUV reticle pods and wafer carriers called FOUPs. The company’s revenue growth is accelerating: • January–June 2026: +22.3% YoY. • July–August 2026: +60.3% YoY. • August alone: +49.9% YoY. These are specialized handling products used around the manufacturing process. The photomask carries the pattern used to make the chip; the wafer moves through the fab; packaging adds another handling job downstream. A useful name to track alongside the headline equipment makers and WFE complex: a supplier working across several of the steps between their machines. $3680.TWO Gudeng

For more insights on August data out of Korea, check out our previous post and substack article on memory exports in August. x.com/skylabintel/st…

Skylab Intelligence @skylabintel

a week ago

1/6 The memory supercycle rolls on in Korea. Memory exports reached $33.11B in August 2026. +18.2% m/m | +289.3% y/y Up $5.10B from July and $24.60B from a year earlier. Four charts on DRAM, multichip/HBM, NAND, SSDs and export destinations. Source: Korean Export Data.

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Korea exported US$34.1B of semiconductors in the first 20 calendar days of September. That was 259.4% above the same calendar window last year. The first 20 days of August reached US$26.0B. These are preliminary exports across semiconductors. They give an early view of how much chip business is crossing the border, in a country home to Samsung Electronics ($005930.KS) and SK hynix ($SKHY). September is already running well ahead of August's same calendar window. The full-month result is still to come.

FormFactor identifies HBM test requirements above 80,000 probes per device TLDR: High-bandwidth memory (HBM) stacks memory chips above a base chip. FormFactor says more sophisticated logic, custom interfaces and controllers moving into that base chip are making testing more demanding. In its August 28, 2026 technical disclosure, FormFactor identified emerging HBM and custom-HBM requirements: • More than 80,000 probes contacting one device. • Testing above 5 GHz. • A wafer chuck, the platform holding the wafer, hotter than 125°C. The contacts must stay aligned and electrically stable as materials heat up and expand. $FORM FormFactor

UMC’s factory utilization reached 85% in the second quarter August company sales reached NT$25.04B, about US$782M, up 30.7% from a year earlier. Management cited stronger demand for power-management chips, sensors and microcontrollers. In its July 29 outlook, UMC expected factory utilization to exceed 90% in the third quarter. TLDR: UMC makes chips that regulate power and control devices, along with sensors. Its second-quarter 2026 wafer shipments rose 10.6% from the first quarter, while factory utilization reached 85%. $UMC United Microelectronics

The Daily DRAM | September 23, 2026 (as of Asia close) DDR5 rises for a third session while both DDR4 benchmarks fall. DDR5 16Gb (4800 / 5600): $57.500 | +0.58% DDR4 16Gb (3200): $84.375 | -0.15% DDR4 8Gb (3200): $45.893 | -0.31% Since Friday, DDR5 is up 2.68% while 16Gb DDR4 is down 1.60%. The price gap between them has narrowed to $26.88 per chip from $29.75. $MU Micron | $SKHY SK hynix | $2408.TW Nanya

@aleabitoreddit @degenlurker_ We recently shared research on the Taiwanese memory boom (ESMT, Nanya, Winbond, Macronix) that you might like x.com/skylabintel/st…

Skylab Intelligence @skylabintel

5 days ago

Summer 2026 gave $MU, $SNDK and $SKHY shareholders whiplash. Meanwhile, Taiwan’s smaller memory players kept reaching new highs. Now Taiwan’s memory growth is showing up in equipment orders, new fabs and more packaging & testing capacity. We followed the money. Full deep

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The companies delivering power inside data centers are growing. August company sales: • Delta: NT$64.59B, about US$2.02B, up 34.9% year over year. • LITEON: NT$19.59B, about US$612M, up 25.2%. Both are developing systems for more power-hungry AI racks. Their product roadmaps include 800-volt direct-current power equipment, which cuts the number of times electricity must be converted before reaching the chips. A server buildout creates work for the equipment feeding the chips, as well as the chips themselves. $2308.TW Delta Electronics | $2301.TW LITEON

Korea’s NAND chips and finished flash-storage devices have very different export maps. August 2026: NAND chips: US$2.86B exported. China took 81.1%, or US$2.32B. SSDs, eSSDs and flash-storage devices: US$5.98B exported. The US took 67.4%, or US$4.03B. One category is a component. The other is a storage product built around memory, with a controller and the hardware needed to use it. That distinction matters when following Samsung and SK hynix and how component sales are still very strong in China despite YMTC's growth, and finished SSDs are largely heading to the US for hyperscaler deployments. $005930.KS Samsung Electronics | $SKHY

Japan's IC-parts and substrate exports to Costa Rica have virtually disappeared. The Asian routes are expanding. May–July 2026 export value, year over year: • Costa Rica: −100%. • Malaysia: +74.3%. • Vietnam: +142.6%. Now put Intel ($INTC) beside that map. Its annual report says Costa Rican assembly-and-test operations are being consolidated into larger sites in Malaysia and Vietnam, with completion expected by the end of 2026. Our read: the route changes are consistent with a manufacturing relocation showing up in the upstream supply chain. Following the parts can reveal how the factory map is changing.