2026-07-28 — Demand side widens: Anthropic joins, talent war escalates

• Anthropic asked SK Hynix for chip supply to build its own custom AI silicon, and separately struck supply agreements with both Samsung and SK Hynix — SK Group chair Chey Tae-won disclosed the ask at a San Francisco AI summit (Bloomberg, 07-25); Dario Amodei confirmed the Samsung + SK Hynix supply deals days later without giving terms (volume, components, or duration). Widens the squeeze’s demand side past hyperscalers to frontier AI labs themselves — SK Hynix also participated in Anthropic’s May Series H round. (Bloomberg · Digitimes) ⟨daily 2026-07-28⟩
• Samsung’s chip talent is defecting to SK Hynix over a bonus gap reported as wide as 100x — ~200 Samsung engineers have moved to SK Hynix since December (SK Hynix pays out 10% of operating profit as a profit-sharing pool, fattened by record HBM margins); Samsung won an 18-month injunction this month against two ex-employees joining SK Hynix, citing chips as protected “national core technology.” A labor-market echo of the same squeeze — the profit differential is now visibly reallocating headcount, not just capital. (MIT Technology Review) ⟨daily 2026-07-28⟩

2026-07-28 — Capacity-race backstory: the trio, plus a same-day shock

• The trio’s HBM race, mapped. Backward crawl on Samsung/SK Hynix/Micron finds SK Hynix still the incumbent (~55% HBM share, first to clear Nvidia’s HBM4 Vera Rubin qualification, commanding a reported 60-70% of that volume) but Samsung projected by UBS to overtake it on HBM bit-capacity share in 2027 (41% vs 39%) — Samsung’s first-ever lead — even though it’s still stuck at Nvidia’s “paid evaluation” stage for HBM4 as of 07-17, no confirmed volume order. Micron is #3 and the most exposed to Nvidia’s on-again-off-again favor (excluded from early Vera Rubin slots in Feb, reinstated by June) but posted the trio’s standout quarter (Q3 FY26: $41.5B revenue vs $9.3B a year ago, 84.6% gross margin) while running a $200B US buildout as the only US-based DRAM maker. ⟨crawl 2026-07-28⟩
• The “three-year HBM deficit” claim, sourced. It traces to SK Hynix’s own Q1 2026 earnings call (04-23) — CFO Kim Woo-hyun and VP Park Joon-deok guiding that demand will outpace supply for at least three years. Company guidance, not an outside analyst estimate — the CXMT-thread framing that repeated it (via a 07-27 Tech Times piece) draws from this same-origin figure, not a fresh source. DRAM’s 2026 YTD price trajectory stays genuinely unsettled across sources — the only claims that clear medium confidence are outcome-side (Samsung’s confirmed Q2 sequential DRAM +44%/NAND +53%; SK Hynix’s ~72-77% operating margins), not a clean industry percentage. ⟨crawl 2026-07-28⟩
• “Black Tuesday” — the squeeze gets a same-day shock. CXMT’s Shanghai STAR-market debut (07-27, +466% to ~$489B) triggered a 2026-07-28 Seoul selloff: KOSPI -10.84% with a circuit breaker, SK Hynix -14.65% — Korean financial press attributed it directly to investors “refocus[ing] on… China’s growing competitiveness in the memory… industries,” compounding a Wall Street chip selloff and Middle East tension. The sharpest, most immediate market pricing of CXMT-as-threat found in either this crawl or last week’s CXMT-focused one — worth checking whether it holds past SK Hynix’s 07-29 and Samsung’s 07-30 earnings prints, or gets partly reversed. ⟨crawl 2026-07-28⟩ Finding: artifacts/findings/memory-trio-2026-07-28.md

2026-07-23 — The supply side raises guidance too

• TSMC raised 2026 capex guidance to $60–64B plus an additional $100B Arizona investment; CEO C.C. Wei says demand robust “through 2029–2030” — the supply-side echo of the same squeeze. Chip stocks (incl. Nvidia, -2.2%) still slid Friday on profit-taking despite the beat. ⟨daily 2026-07-23⟩

2026-07-20 — Capital-side marker set

• CXMT set July 27 for an up-to-$9.8B Shanghai IPO — Asia’s largest 2026 listing, funding Chinese DRAM/HBM capacity into the squeeze (now tracked as cxmt-memory-ipo). (MarketScreener) ⟨daily 2026-07-20⟩

← Backstory

2026-06-25 — Consumer price echo

• Apple price hike attributed to the DRAM/NAND squeeze — The Neuron / Rundown AI led with it; we tracked the buildout but missed the demand-side cost echo (the gap that opened this thread). ⟨seed 2026-07-22⟩