CryptoQuant 🇺🇸🌱

$MU $SNDK $SKHY $NBIS Nomura’s memory team just put out a really interesting note on the AI scare, the numbers underneath are some of the strongest I’ve seen in this drawdown. Nomura sees AI going from 10GW of data center power in 2025 to 40GW by 2028, taking it from 17% of all data center power to 35%. The biggest slice of that 2028 number is heavy agents at 15GW, ahead of training at 10GW. In Nomura’s model, agents become the largest power user in AI within two years. US big tech alone goes from 10.2GW of AI capacity to 48.5GW over the same stretch, Nomura’s memory team just put out a note on the AI scare, and once you get past the headline worry, the numbers underneath are some of the strongest I’ve seen in this drawdown. Nomura sees AI going from 10GW of data center power in 2025 to 40GW by 2028, taking it from 17% of all data center power to 35%. The biggest slice of that 2028 number is heavy agents at 15GW, ahead of training at 10GW. In Nomura’s model, agents become the largest power user in AI within two years. US big tech alone goes from 10.2GW of AI capacity to 48.5GW over the same stretch, almost 5x. The cash is piling up where the chips are made. Nine semiconductor companies (Samsung, Hynix, Micron, Sandisk, Kioxia, TSMC, Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom) went from $27B of net cash in 1Q24 to $282B in 2Q26, and Nomura projects ~$2T by end-2028. The clouds buying all of it are printing too, with AWS at a 39% operating margin, Microsoft Intelligent Cloud at 41% and Google Cloud at 36%. Even Anthropic moved into adjusted operating profit in Q2, per Nomura. Memory stays supply constrained through at least 2028. Nomura’s targets are 670,000 KRW for Samsung (+207%) and 4.7M KRW for SK Hynix (+268%). Now the part the market sold on and I don't buy into: OpenAI and Anthropic’s combined revenue grew 49% q/q in Q3, down from 74% in Q2. At September’s run rate, Q4 lands at $29.7B and 2026 comes in short of the ~$100B the market expected. That “slowdown” scenario is still +291% y/y. Part of the dip is mechanical. OpenAI’s run rate got reframed because of how partner revenue is booked, Anthropic cut off distillation (5-7% of revenue), and summer slowed usage-based billing. Meta moving engineers off Claude Code onto its own tools sounds bad until you remember the tokens still get burned, just on Meta’s compute. OpenAI and Anthropic are only ~5GW of the ~29GW of AI capacity Nomura sees by end-2026. The 7 big operators, CoreWeave and Nebius included, go deeper into net debt through 2028. That debt is the chipmakers’ revenue. CoreWeave, the name everyone is scared of, is 4.4% of capacity and 1.7% of 2026 data center investment. Nomura sees limited systemic risk and calls the CXMT memory panic excessive. Every bearish line in this note ends up as someone’s GPU, HBM or optics order. So invest in the entire buildout and win either way. Bullish ⚡️