Serenity, the small-cap-focused investor who tracks the upstream chokepoints feeding the AI buildout, spent Thursday connecting a run of supply-chain data points into a single message: the optical shortage is deepening, and the market still isn't pricing it.

Memory and the Korean proxy. He flagged strength in EWY, the iShares South Korea ETF he treats as a concentrated, leveraged bet on Samsung and SK Hynix. The move, he said, was driven by SK Hynix buybacks — a sign of how profitable the memory makers have become — and roughly 10-15% price hikes out of Samsung's foundry. Both feed his long-running "memory supercycle" thesis, in which AI-driven DRAM and NAND demand pushes prices and margins higher for years. He also noted a reported SK Hynix roadmap that links memory to a photonic interposer, which he reads as fresh evidence that optics is bleeding into memory packaging — expanding the addressable market for lasers, photonic chips and packaging suppliers.

"Absurd" optical weakness. The core of Serenity's day was a defense of the optical names that have lagged recently. He called the underperformance from AAOI to SIVE absurd given the demand visibility on offer. AAOI, his top US optical long, is a vertically integrated, made-in-America transceiver maker whose management he cites as unable to meet customer demand even three years out. SIVE — Sivers, the tiny Swedish maker of indium-phosphide (InP) light-source lasers that is his single highest-conviction position — has similarly guided to laser demand outstripping supply for the next three-to-five years. InP lasers are the light source for co-packaged optics (CPO), the approach of putting the optical engine right next to the switch or GPU to save power.

His argument: the industry is already bottlenecked at the laser level (EML for high-speed links, CW for silicon photonics) plus photodiodes, TIAs, DSPs and transceivers — and the real inflection, 1.6T links and CPO scale-out, hasn't even arrived. He pointed to Taiwanese component makers hitting limit-up on order visibility running through 2028, and to broader commentary that the entire optical supply chain faces shortages lasting years. He rounded out the picture with reported Chinese export delays on germanium, quartz materials and neodymium magnets to Taiwan, plus an ongoing high-end PCB drill and substrate shortage — all inputs he watches as second-order squeeze signals.

He also namechecked LITE (Lumentum), the large-cap incumbent tied to Google TPU optics that he uses as his quality benchmark, and MTSI (MACOM), the multi-billion-dollar laser and analog supplier he treats mainly as a valuation comp to argue his smaller picks are mispriced. Both, he said, have echoed the same shortage commentary.

IPO backdrop. On markets more broadly, Serenity welcomed leveraged traders rotating out of AI stocks and back into names like biotech and Hyperliquid, hoping it clears the way for a faster recovery in his sector. Wryly reacting to how robotics and space stocks moved around the Unitree and SPCX (SpaceX) debuts, he suggested he'd rather Anthropic stay private. His view on US listings remains that companies too often IPO at trillion-dollar valuations, leaving little upside for later buyers.

*This is derived commentary, not investment advice.*