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This is where the money is actually spent. TSMC manufactures for the companies in Semiconductor Design, ASML makes the lithography machines it cannot operate without, and Applied Materials supplies much of the rest of the process. It is the most capital-intensive part of the industry and by far the most concentrated — at the leading edge each of these three has very few real substitutes, which is the single most important fact about the whole supply chain.

6 reports — $1,794 at the single-study price. All of them included with PRO.

Memory is the part of the chain where price, not volume, does the work. Micron, Samsung and SK hynix sell a commodity whose contract price moves in double-digit steps between quarters, so the same shipped bit is worth very different amounts three months apart — and high-bandwidth memory has turned that cycle into a supply negotiation with the people building AI accelerators. Read the three together and the cycle is visible in a way no single one of them shows.

3 reports — $897 at the single-study price. All of them included with PRO.

Two ways of selling the same night's stay. Booking is the incumbent marketplace, with the larger supply and the older economics; Airbnb built its supply from nothing and has spent years turning it into something closer to a brand. They are the cleanest comparison in travel — the businesses look alike and are run on very different assumptions.

2 reports — $598 at the single-study price. All of them included with PRO.

Hardware is judged twice: on the thing sold, and on what the customer buys next. Apple's devices carry a services business that is now the more interesting half; Dell's carry an enterprise relationship and, lately, AI server demand arriving at very different margins from the rest. Both are studies in what a hardware company is actually worth.

2 reports — $598 at the single-study price. All of them included with PRO.