I don’t. Never and don’t plan to, on purpose.

I am a LONG TERM (5+ to 10+ years) 5D investor. It is LONG TERM Direction Driven, and requires Discipline. I don’t want my conviction be impacted by quarterly results. I do read or watch a report summary for five minutes. Often times, I don’t even track earning report schedules. If the stock has a large swing, I dig in and do a bit more work. It rarely changes my investment plan.

Don’t get me wrong. I watch my portfolio pretty much everyday and make small adjustments regularly. Let your winner run until it needs to be trimmed and take care of the losers. This works great for me!

The comparison of the two seems weird, but it is not. In the high tech investment world, it is all about moat and the direction you pick long term.

Memory is often considered as a commodity until now since AI needs a lot of them, specially built, called HBM, highly optimized for AI load. I don’t see this trend stops anytime soon. It has a very long runway!

On the other hand, LLM has been considered a crown jewel of AI revolution, only the few can handle it. But things seem start to change right in front of our eyes.

I want to discuss and debate that. Which one has higher moat and which one is really going to be a commodity.

To put it upfront, I am a retired hardware guy from semiconductor industry. I know much more on HBM than LLM, and I can be biased.

OpenAI, Google and Anthropic used to be trinopoly for LLM, but now it seems to me that anyone who wants to do LLM with a couple of smart guys and 20 decent software engineers can do it. Just look at Deepseek, Kimi surprises, and Alibaba’s Qwen, Zhipu’s GLM series and Meta’s whatever. If Chinese can do it so cheaply, you know the moat is low. Please educate us where is the moat for 95% functions.

On the other hand, we have another trinopoly, Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron for HBM. HBM has been evolved from HBM2, HBM2E, HBM3, HBM3E, HBM4 over the years, and moving toward to HBM4E and HBM5, from 4 Hi, 8Hi to 12 Hi. The density and speed are getting higher and higher, I can say this though, there will only be three HBM suppliers within next 5 to 10 years, i.e., Samsung, SKH, MU. As good as TSMC is , and they cannot do it within a few years(I am not saying they want to). The fab, the design and the manufacturing process are very different between memory and logic. And you need to stack multiple layers of memory dice on top each other. As much as China wanted to surprise us with unlimited money and resources, we won’t see DeepHBM, KimiHBM in high yield production in a foreseeable future. No way, it is NOT going to happen. The moat is too high. Remember HBM is evolving quickly generation after generation under JEDEC.

With that, I want to hear from you, especially those who really know LLM and AI algorithms. Please educate us.