u/mm_newsletter

Micron did $41.46B in revenue last quarter. The quarter before was $23.86B. Non-GAAP gross margin hit 84.9%, and they’re guiding for about 86% next quarter. That margin is nuts for a memory company.

Source: Micron fiscal Q3 2026

Micron says HBM3E takes about three times the wafer capacity of DDR5 for the same number of bits. HBM demand is soaking up capacity that would otherwise go to regular server, PC, phone memory.

They’ve also signed 16 supply agreements covering about 20% of DRAM volume and a third of NAND through 2030. The agreements include binding purchase commitments.

The old memory cycle can still bite here. New supply will come online eventually. If demand cools around the same time, prices get hit.

I’d want to see that 86% margin guide hold next quarter.

Coinbase had a rough Q2. Revenue fell 14% from the previous quarter to $1.22 billion. Transaction revenue dropped to $599 million and the company lost $359 million.

One slide was more interesting than the headline numbers. It showed AI agents using x402 to pay for data or services automatically. The server gives the agent a price, the agent pays from its wallet and the original request continues. No checkout page every time.

In the dataset Coinbase cited, more than 99% of monitored onchain agent commerce used USDC. More than 97% of transactions used x402 and over 90% of the stablecoin volume settled on Base.

That sounds impressive, but it’s a narrow dataset. It only covers activity Coinbase could identify on monitored public blockchains. It excludes regular cards, fiat payments and anything the dataset missed.

The protocol itself may never produce much revenue. The better case for Coinbase is what could grow around it: USDC balances, Base activity, wallets and developer tools.

There’s a catch. Coinbase helped create x402, but it doesn’t control the standard. The protocol now sits inside a Linux Foundation group. Stripe has its own machine-payments protocol and also supports x402. Other chains can process these payments too.

For now, x402 looks like an early lead rather than proven earnings. It gets more interesting if Coinbase starts showing real payment volume and revenue tied to USDC, Base or agent wallets.

Is anyone putting real value on x402 in a COIN thesis yet?

source: https://s27.q4cdn.com/397450999/files/doc_financials/2026/q2/Q2-26-Earnings-Deck.pdf

The quarter itself was strong. Revenue hit $805M, up 61% from last year. Ad revenue was $762M and free cash flow was $261M.

U.S. daily active users rose from 26.9 million in March 2022 to 53.2 million in June 2026. That is a 97.8% gain, or about 17.4% a year. But search traffic got less predictable later in the quarter. U.S. daily users slipped from 53.5M to 53.2M.

fiscal.ai

That decline is tiny. Search still sends a lot of logged-out people to Reddit though. If that traffic stays weak, user growth could get tougher even while the ad business looks fine.

Reddit is making more from the users it already has. U.S. revenue per user rose 51% from last year. The quarter wasn’t bad. The next U.S. user number just seems more important than another revenue beat.

AAOI and MRVL keep coming up because AI data centers need faster links between all those chips. Copper still carries plenty of the load. At higher speeds and longer distances it gets hotter and harder to use. That is where optics start to matter.

AAOI is the wild one. It makes transceivers, lasers and light engines. The company manufactures most of its laser chips in Texas. Revenue went from $217.6M in 2023 to $455.7M in 2025. It still lost $38.2M last year.

The customer mix is rough. Digicomm was 53.1% of 2025 revenue. Microsoft was another 28.8%. One buyer changing plans could do real damage.

Marvell is larger and covers more ground. Its latest quarter had $1.83B of data-center revenue, up 27% from a year ago. That was 76% of total revenue. It sells optics, Ethernet switches and custom XPU-related parts.

Size doesn’t remove the risk. Design wins can move around. Marvell also closed the Celestial AI and XConn acquisitions in February, so there’s integration work ahead.

AAOI could move harder if production ramps cleanly. One customer change could also wreck the setup.

Sources:

https://investors.ao-inc.com/node/16686/html

https://investor.marvell.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1023/marvell-technology-inc-reports-first-quarter-of-fiscal-year-2027-financial-results

AAOI and MRVL keep coming up because AI data centers need faster links between all those chips. Copper still carries plenty of the load. At higher speeds and longer distances it gets hotter and harder to use. That is where optics start to matter.

AAOI is the wild one. It makes transceivers, lasers and light engines. The company manufactures most of its laser chips in Texas. Revenue went from $217.6M in 2023 to $455.7M in 2025. It still lost $38.2M last year.

The customer mix is rough. Digicomm was 53.1% of 2025 revenue. Microsoft was another 28.8%. One buyer changing plans could do real damage.

Marvell is larger and covers more ground. Its latest quarter had $1.83B of data-center revenue, up 27% from a year ago. That was 76% of total revenue. It sells optics, Ethernet switches and custom XPU-related parts.

Size doesn’t remove the risk. Design wins can move around. Marvell also closed the Celestial AI and XConn acquisitions in February, so there’s integration work ahead.

AAOI could move harder if production ramps cleanly. One customer change could also wreck the setup.

Sources:

https://investors.ao-inc.com/node/16686/html

https://investor.marvell.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1023/marvell-technology-inc-reports-first-quarter-of-fiscal-year-2027-financial-results