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CEO Arrested, HBM4 Prices Triple & Broadcom's $60B Anthropic Bet
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
A California CEO faces charges over a $300M Nvidia H100 smuggling ring routed through Malaysia and Singapore — exposing critical gaps in US export controls. Plus: HBM4 pricing surges 3x, TSMC's CoWoS ramp targets 140K wafers/month, and Broadcom assembles a $60B financing package tied to Anthropic's chip roadmap.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
A California tech CEO was arrested last week, charged with running a three hundred million dollar scheme to smuggle Nvidia H100-equipped servers to China through Malaysia and Singapore. That's the lead.
The Lui arrest lands alongside a Bloomberg investigation that raises harder questions about Nvidia's own due diligence. The allegation is that hundreds of thousands of chips reached China through shadow market channels, and that Nvidia's screening process wasn't sufficient to stop it.
Shift from enforcement to supply chain, and a different kind of bottleneck is clarifying. TSMC has now given public guidance on CoWoS capacity, targeting a hundred and twenty thousand to a hundred and forty thousand wafers per month by twenty twenty-six.
Samsung is negotiating HBM4 memory pricing at four-point-five to four-point-nine dollars per gigabit for twenty twenty-six supply. Current HBM3E sits at around one-point-five dollars per gigabit.
On the capital side, Broadcom is assembling a sixty billion dollar financing package tied to Anthropic's custom AI chip roadmap. Blackstone is leading an eighteen billion dollar junior tranche, committing nine billion from its own funds.
One more move worth noting. ON Semiconductor is acquiring Synaptics in an all-cash deal revised down to five-point-seven billion dollars from an earlier seven billion dollar stock offer.
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