Gavin Baker, CIO of Atreides Management made one of the most important and nuanced calls on memory stocks in recent months (Save this). His argument is that based on every memory cycle of the last 25 years, the setup today, prices elevated, sentiment high, supply ramping is textbook time to sell but he adds a critical exception. The one cycle in modern memory history where selling was catastrophically wrong was the mid-1990s, which @GavinSBaker calls the last true capacity cycle in memory. In that cycle, demand was structurally exploding as the internet era required entirely new computing infrastructure to be built from scratch, and memory had to scale with it in a way that had never happened before. His point is that AI may be that same kind of cycle and not a normal boom bust but a once in a generation capacity buildout where the underlying demand is structural, not cyclical. The reason this argument holds weight is the fundamental shift in what memory is in the AI era. Traditional DRAM was a pure commodity, identical specs, interchangeable suppliers, price determined entirely by supply and demand swings. HBM is the opposite because it is custom engineered to fit a specific customer's chip, co-designed between the memory maker and the GPU designer, with SK Hynix's Vice President literally describing it as shifting from a commodity to a customer-tailored custom business. A single Blackwell Ultra GPU now requires up to 288GB of HBM3E, a 3.6x increase over the H100 and major suppliers like SK Hynix and Micron have already sold out their entire HBM production capacity through the end of the year. Because HBM requires advanced packaging processes like CoWoS that can't be spun up overnight, the bottleneck isn't just wafer capacity but rather runs across the entire manufacturing stack. Bank of America projects the global HBM market grows 58% this year alone to $54.6 billion, and Nomura expects the broader memory sector to nearly double to $445 billion. This is exactly why we’re still tracking memory so closely at Milk Road. HBM is becoming less of a commodity and more of a critical custom component for AI, and we think that changes how this cycle should be valued. If you want to see what we’re actually buying and trading around this theme, come join us for just $1 using the link: link.milkroad.com/d8cj6v