The 5th China International Import Expo (CIIE) In Shanghai

Visitors watch a video of the "unboxing" of lithography machines at ASML's booth at the Fifth China International Import Expo. (CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images)

Chipping away

Shares of Europe’s second-biggest company are crashing on soft semiconductor demand

ASML’s third-quarter bookings were half of what analysts expected, and its share of business in China is coming under pressure.

Luke Kawa

10/15/24 12:18PM

Semiconductor-equipment supplier ASML accidentally released an underwhelming earnings report a day ahead of schedule, sending shares dropping by more than 15.6% — its biggest daily drop since 1998.

The key misstep, in the market’s eyes: the Dutch-based firm’s third-quarter order bookings were less than half of what Wall Street expected, coming in at just €2.6 billion, while its guidance for net sales in 2025 was also trimmed.

Ask anyone in business news and they’ll probably tell you this is The Most Important Company You’ve Never Heard Of — and if they don’t, we will.

ASML stands at a choke point for the semiconductor industry, upstream of the fabrication plants that make the end product. Simply, the company is the key facilitator for chipmakers to make chips. The company’s unique place in the semiconductor ecosystem — coupled with the fact that nearly half of its sales are to China — has attracted political scrutiny and export restrictions imposed by the US and Dutch governments. CFO Roger Dassen said that sales to China would account for roughly 20% of its total revenue next year, a substantial drop-off.

And outside of AI-linked demand, the appetite for semiconductors doesn’t look too strong.

“While there continue to be strong developments and upside potential in AI, other market segments are taking longer to recover,” said President and CEO Christophe Fouquet. “It now appears the recovery is more gradual than previously expected. This is expected to continue in 2025, which is leading to customer cautiousness.”

Matt Phillips15m

Micron jumps on report of surging memory chip prices

Micron, the US memory chip specialist, is up more than 4% in early trading Monday after a report that Samsung Electronics was temporarily pausing new pricing on contracts for the latest version of ubiquitous short-term computer memory: Dynamic Random Access Memory, or DRAM. The chip giant wants to see where the market settles after a recent spike in spot prices for memory chips driven by the AI boom.

DRAM and memory chips of all sorts have pricing power because of how much demand is outpacing supply. Last week, South Korean memory chip behemoth SK Hynix said it had already “sold out” all of its 2026 production.

Exclusive: Samsung delays DDR5 contract pricing to mid-November as spot prices triple

Luke Kawa41m

Nvidia gains as two new AI deals this morning underscore demand for its flagship chips

Nvidia is off to a hot start this week, up about 3% as of 9:40 a.m. ET, as the chip designer continues to be the beating heart at the center of two fresh AI deals announced on Monday morning.

IREN is going to be outfitting a Texas data center with Nvidia GPUs that will be purchased from Dell and utilized by Microsoft.
Amazon Web Services is providing OpenAI access to “hundreds of thousands” of Nvidia GPUs as part of a $38 billion deal for computing power.

Texas wants a piece of Wall Street

With its long-teased stock exchange, TXSE, winning SEC approval in September, the state is taking aim at a market long ruled by just two giants.

Hyunsoo Rim51m

Luke Kawa1h

Beyond Meat delays release of earnings as management tries to figure out how big of a write-down to take

“You don’t want to see how the sausage is made” is an expression that appears to apply to meat, faux meat, and faux meat accounting.

Shares of Beyond Meat are tumbling after management delayed the formal release of its quarterly results as they try to pin down exactly how big of a loss to take on assets that aren’t worth as much as they previously thought.

The plant-based meat company was slated to release its quarterly update on Tuesday after the market closes, but is postponing this report until November 11.

“As previously disclosed on Form 8-K filed on October 24, 2025, the Company expects to record a non-cash impairment charge for the three months ended September 27, 2025 related to certain of its long-lived assets. Although the Company expects this charge to be material, the Company is not yet able to reasonably quantify the amount, and requires additional time, resources and effort to finalize its assessment,” per the press release.

In that 8-K, the company said an accounting recoverability test “preliminarily indicated that the carrying amount of certain of its long-lived assets was not recoverable from the projected undiscounted future cash flows of the relevant asset group.”

In other words, an initial review showed that certain plants, property, and equipment won’t make the kind of money that their previously reported value implied, so that needs to be marked down in the form of a noncash impairment charge. The outstanding question is how big that charge will be.

Beyond Meat made that announcement along with the preliminary release of its Q3 results and some positive commentary on ongoing legal matters.

Luke Kawa2h

Cipher Mining soars after revealing a $5.5 billion deal with Amazon to provide AI data center capacity and power

Cipher Mining is soaring in premarket trading amid another massive deal announced this morning between a bitcoin miner turned data center company and a hyperscaler.

Along with its Q3 results, CIFR revealed a $5.5 billion, 15-year pact with Amazon to provide capacity and power for AI workloads. Cipher will deliver 300 megawatts’ worth of capacity in two phases next year, and expects to begin collecting rent for this deal in August 2026.

This is Cipher’s “first direct lease with a Tier 1 hyperscaler,” CEO Tyler Page said, and comes a little over a month after the firm booked a 10-year hosting agreement with AI cloud platform company Fluidstack, with Google amassing a 5.4% equity stake in Cipher as part of the transaction.

As for those Q3 results, Cipher posted adjusted diluted earnings per share of $0.10, far better than the expected 5.4-cent loss, on revenues of $72 million, which were shy of the $76.5 million consensus estimate.