Compass Briefings

Jihan Wu's second act is bigger than Bitmain ever was

For most of bitcoin's history, the miners bought their machines from someone else. Bitmain in Beijing. MicroBT in Shenzhen. Canaan in Hangzhou. A small handful of Chinese fabless designers controlled the ASICs, and every listed miner in North America...

SpaceX's IPO sends capital spilling into RKLB, ASTS and LUNR

SpaceX's IPO closed as the largest in history, putting a $1.75 trillion price tag on what Elon Musk built from a converted warehouse in Hawthorne, California. For a certain kind of investor, that number is the story. For everyone else, it's the start...

Micron locked in $100 billion in floor-price memory contracts through 2030

Sanjay Mehrotra opened Micron Technology's (NASDAQ:MU) Q3 2026 earnings call by announcing a $25 billion data center revenue quarter. That's an annualized run rate above $100 billion from a single business segment. A few years ago, Micron was the com...

NAND prices are up 80% and the market hasn't noticed

In October 1984, a 28-year-old engineer named Eli Harari filed a patent for something he called System Flash. The idea was simple in hindsight and almost heretical at the time. Take the floating-gate transistor that EEPROM chips used to store a singl...

Micron's $100 billion in locked contracts changes the memory cycle math

Sanjay Mehrotra announced a $25 billion data center revenue quarter on Tuesday night. Let that context sit for a moment: a single quarter, a single segment, $25 billion. Annualized, that's a run rate above $100 billion from data centers alone. For a ...

Jabil's third hyperscaler win is bigger than the earnings beat

Jabil Inc. (NYSE:JBL) posted Q3 fiscal 2026 numbers that most investors will read as a clean beat and move on. Revenue of $8.8 billion, up 12% year over year. Core EPS up 24%. Free cash flow guidance raised. CEO Mike Destor ran the prepared remarks a...

Uranium's supply gap is bigger than the market thinks

In 1954, Lewis Strauss, then chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, told a room of science writers that electricity from nuclear fission would one day be 'too cheap to meter.' He was mocked for it, and rightly so, but read the speech carefully and...

Jabil just landed its third hyperscaler and the market shrugged

Jabil (NYSE:JBL) reported Q3 2026 earnings this week and buried the lede so effectively that most of the coverage missed it entirely. Revenue came in at $8.8 billion, up 12% year-over-year. Core EPS up 24%. Free cash flow guidance raised. Solid numbe...

SpaceX's IPO makes RKLB, ASTS, and LUNR look cheap

The largest IPO in history closed last week, and the number that keeps rattling around in my head isn't $1.75 trillion. It's the gap between that number and the rest of the public space sector combined. SpaceX going public doesn't just validate one ...

The fintech hiding inside a 128-year-old North Carolina bank

When Silicon Valley Bank collapsed over a weekend in March 2023, the conventional wisdom said it was the end of an era. The bank that financed half of US venture capital was gone. Founders panicked. The Fed scrambled. And on the following Monday morn...

SpaceX's IPO could reprice RKLB, ASTS and LUNR overnight

SpaceX going public is the most anticipated IPO in a generation, and the number being thrown around, $1.75 trillion, is so large that most investors don't know what to do with it. So they'll do what they always do: buy the thing they recognize, watch...

Veeva's Austro acquisition is a closed loop most missed

Peter Gassner is not a CEO who performs excitement on earnings calls. He's an engineer who gets specific when he believes something. So when he started talking through Falcon's output metrics on yesterday's Q1 FY2027 call, documents per flat, safety ...

Astera Labs and the connectivity tax on every AI rack

There's a story Jensen Huang likes to tell about the early days of Nvidia, when nobody believed graphics chips would matter outside of video games. He tells it because it makes a clean arc, garage company to four-trillion-dollar colossus, and because...

Brookfield is building the Apollo machine and the market hasn't priced it in

Bruce Flatt has been doing this long enough to know that the best trades don't feel exciting when you're making them. They feel obvious in hindsight. On Wednesday's earnings call, Flatt opened with a real estate trade that most managers would have l...

BN is building the Apollo model at larger scale

Bruce Flatt has been running the same play for thirty years. Buy hard assets when everyone else is selling, hold them through the noise, and let the cash flows compound. It works. The 2 Manhattan West mortgage he cited on today's earnings call, $1.9 ...

Take-Two Interactive's troubled slate is hiding a generational buying opportunity

In 2018, a Bitcoin miner was something you could fit in a shipping container behind a hydro dam in Quebec. The economics were brutal and beautiful at the same time. Buy machines from Bitmain, plug them into the cheapest power on earth, hope the price...

GTA VI's spending wave reaches further than TTWO

Strauss Zelnick has been in this business long enough to know when to say nothing useful and make it sound like everything. On Take-Two Interactive's (NASDAQ:TTWO) Q4 call, he got asked the obvious question: won't GTA VI cannibalize your other title...

GTA VI could lift more than Take-Two

There's a moment on every earnings call that matters more than the numbers. For Take-Two Interactive (NASDAQ:TTWO), it came when CEO Strauss Zelnick was asked about GTA VI's sales trajectory. He paused for 4.7 seconds before finishing the sentence. T...

Scale AI's $14B deal signals where the real AI money is moving

In 2012, a Stanford grad student named Fei-Fei Li published a paper that almost nobody outside academia read. It was about a database called ImageNet. Fourteen million labelled images, sorted by hand, scraped from the web and tagged by underpaid work...

NVIDIA's $20 billion CPU bet puts Intel and AMD on notice

There's a moment on every great earnings call where the CEO says something that sounds routine but is actually a declaration of war. Jensen Huang had one of those moments on Tuesday. NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) posted $82 billion in revenue, up...

The $400B Wiring Problem That Solar Can't Solve Alone

In 2009, a solar panel cost roughly $2.10 per watt. Today that number sits around $0.20. The learning curve did its job. Panels became commodities. Installers raced to the bottom on price. And the world celebrated because solar had finally beaten fos...

SpaceX's $1.75 trillion IPO could reprice RKLB, ASTS and LUNR

In the summer of 2004, Google went public at a $23 billion valuation. The IPO was chaotic, the bankers hated the Dutch auction format, and most serious investors thought the price was absurd. Within three years, Google had a $200 billion market cap. ...

The HVAC company hiding a semiconductor secret

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, a company best known for making commercial heating and cooling equipment is now one of the most interesting reads in the data center boom. AAON, Inc. (NASDAQ:AAON) just posted 42.5% revenue growth year-over-year. By most measures,...

The $64B Sensor Gap the Pentagon Can't Close Fast Enough

In February 2024, a Houthi anti-ship ballistic missile streaked toward a commercial vessel in the Red Sea. The USS Carney fired two SM-2 interceptors. Each one costs roughly $2.1 million. The missile it was trying to destroy? Estimates put its cost b...

IQE's $100M InP backlog is a window into AI's hidden supply crunch

In the fall of 2023, a materials scientist at a mid-tier transceiver company in Shenzhen got a phone call that changed his week. His procurement team had been trying to lock down a supply agreement for indium phosphide wafers (the semiconductor subst...

The Bitcoin Miners Building Data Centers for a Post-Mining World

In the summer of 2021, a wave of bitcoin miners fled China after Beijing banned crypto mining overnight. Hundreds of thousands of machines needed new homes. The exodus rewired the geography of an entire industry. Texas, Georgia, and the Nordics becam...

CommScope is wiring the AI boom while trading like it's 2019

In 1976, a small team of engineers in Hickory, North Carolina, started making coaxial cable for the nascent cable television industry. Their timing was perfect. Cable TV was about to wire America's living rooms, and somebody had to make the stuff tha...

Quantum computing's funding shift changes the investment math

In 1947, a transistor the size of a pencil eraser sat on a lab bench at Bell Labs. William Shockley looked at it and saw the future. His colleagues saw a curiosity. The transistor would go on to eat the vacuum tube, eat the mainframe monopoly, eat an...

NVIDIA, Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet are repricing the AI ceiling

Last week was one of those rare stretches where you sit back after Friday's close and think: the map just changed. Five of the biggest companies on earth reported earnings within days of each other. Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA), NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA), Alphabe...

Cockpit upgrades on 30-year-old military jets are a gold mine

In February 1998, a Cessna 402 slammed into a hillside outside Cali, Colombia. Investigators found the altimeter had been misread. The pilot was experienced. The instruments were not lying, exactly. They were just old, round, and hard to parse in the...

NVDA, MSFT, GOOG, AMZN, TSLA all said the same thing

Last week was the most concentrated display of corporate firepower in recent memory. Five of the biggest technology companies on earth reported earnings within days of each other, and the message across all five was basically identical: the AI spendi...

SkyWater Technology is winning defense contracts nobody handed it

In the winter of 2021, a group of engineers in Bloomington, Minnesota stood in a fabrication plant that most of the semiconductor world had written off. The facility, originally built by Control Data Corporation in the 1980s and later operated by Cyp...

Bitcoin miners found a better use for all that electricity

In the summer of 2021, China banned cryptocurrency mining overnight. Tens of thousands of machines went dark across Sichuan, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia. Hashrate (the total computing power securing Bitcoin's network) fell by more than half in weeks...

CommScope is the AI infrastructure bet hiding in plain sight

In September 2023, a single fiber-optic cable fault in a northern Virginia data center campus knocked a major financial services firm offline for eleven hours. The outage cost an estimated $9 million in lost trading revenue. Nobody wrote about the ca...

Rigetti's fridge problem and the constraint gating all of quantum computing

In 1911, a Dutch physicist named Heike Kamerlingh Onnes cooled mercury to minus 269 degrees Celsius and watched its electrical resistance vanish entirely. He had discovered superconductivity. It took another century for that discovery to become the f...

The $900M company arming jets the Pentagon forgot about

In 1987, a U.S. Air Force pilot flying a C-130 Hercules transport over the Pacific noticed something odd about his instrument panel. Half the gauges were steam-driven, mechanical dials connected to pitot tubes and gyroscopes, designs barely changed s...

POET Technologies makes the optical chip every robot will need

Three weeks ago, a mid-tier Japanese automaker placed the largest single order for custom inference chips in its history. The chips weren't for cars. They were for the 1,400 robotic arms it plans to install across two plants by early 2027, each one r...

AI's biggest five all reported. Here's what the tone revealed.

Something shifted last week. Not in the numbers (though the numbers were extraordinary) but in the tone. The five biggest AI-adjacent companies on earth reported earnings within days of each other, and every single one of them sounded like a man who'...

NVIDIA's Groq bet could be the next Mellanox

There's a moment on every great earnings call when the company stops reporting results and starts describing a different kind of future. Jensen Huang hit that moment about twelve minutes in, and he never really came back. NVIDIA's Q4 numbers are alm...

NVIDIA says compute isn't a cost. It's a revenue machine.

There's a moment on every great earnings call when the CEO stops reporting numbers and starts describing a different world. Jensen Huang had that moment last week, and most analysts missed it. NVIDIA's Q4 numbers were extraordinary on their face, wi...

NVIDIA's $62B quarter is the least interesting part of its earnings

There's a moment in every market cycle when one company stops reporting earnings and starts reciting scripture. NVIDIA hit that moment last week. Jensen Huang walked analysts through $62 billion in data center revenue (up 75% year-over-year) and the...

NVIDIA's $10B Anthropic bet changes what you actually own

There's a moment on every great earnings call where the CEO stops reporting and starts evangelizing. Jensen Huang hit that moment about four minutes in and never came back down. NVIDIA's Q4 numbers are almost beside the point now. Data center revenu...

Five earnings reports, one AI trade hiding in plain sight

Last week was the closest thing markets get to a State of the Union for the American tech economy. Tesla, NVIDIA, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft all reported within days of each other. Taken one at a time, each was impressive. Taken together, they t...

Google just told you the ROI is real. Listen.

Let me tell you what actually happened last week on Wall Street, because the headlines got it wrong. Four of the most powerful companies on earth (Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Apple) reported earnings within 72 hours of each other. The financial p...

Google's $462 billion cloud backlog is a number worth sitting with

Let me tell you what happened last week that most people completely missed. While the financial press was busy writing the same AWS-vs-Azure horse race story they've been writing since 2019, Alphabet's CFO Anat Ashkenazi sat down at a microphone and...

Middle East Mayhem + Warby Parker's 32% confidence score: The canary or the false alarm?

“I'd be remiss not to mention the mahyem in the Middle East right now. Absolute shit-show. It's going to cause havoc in the market, and things like the...”

The Week in Numbers Confidence is cracking. This week's earnings calls averaged a concerning 44/100 on our confidence metric, with three major retailers and healthcare plays delivering defensive tones and tempered guidance that should worry anyone h...