Investing Experts · Sep 27, 2026 · 32m · 15m saved
With Sara Awad, Analyst at Tech Contrarians
Micron guided to 86% gross margins last quarter after printing 84.6%, Sara Awad said, which by her count gives it the highest gross margins in the chip sector, above Nvidia's own peak.
Much of the market has treated memory makers as AI winners because of their high-bandwidth memory, the chips stacked beside AI processors. Awad said the margin gains came from ordinary memory instead, and that prices there may already have peaked, with Micron reporting on September 30.
"Memory is still cyclical. It's crazy to think that margins are just gonna go up endlessly from here."
Sara Awad, an analyst at Tech Contrarians, on Investing Experts. She runs the Tech Contrarians investing group on Seeking Alpha, where her team holds one-on-one calls with individual investors about the technology they own, and she was back on the show for the first time since August.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 32 minutes of audio, 17 minutes of reading.
Here are the 11 calls that matter.
Key Takeaways
The AI "slowdown" sell-off reversed within a week, and Awad reads the market as still more greedy than fearful
She does not expect the bubble to pop until 2027
Chip guidance is rising on price, not on units sold, and higher component costs are shrinking PC and smartphone demand
Analog chipmakers face their highest risk early next year, after a year of customers ordering ahead
Nvidia and Broadcom guided a year out for the first time, while the AI labs they fund talked about slowing down
Micron's gross margin guide is the number she is watching, and she said the market will not forgive a guide that does not expand again
TrendForce sees DRAM prices rising 13–18% in Q3, against roughly 50–60% in Q2
The AI labs are cutting prices while their chip commitments top $1.2T
Anthropic's Opus 5.5 costs 40% less to run than Opus 5, she said
Ordinary memory, not HBM, has been carrying memory makers' margins, and monthly sales from smaller memory makers slowed in August
She would trade the chip sector rather than buy and hold it into year-end, and names Arm as the CPU maker to watch for AI agents
Local opposition to data centers could become a regulatory risk next year
1. The Slowdown Weekend
The host asked what had changed in technology since Awad's August appearance. She started with the weekend on which AI leaders called for a slowdown.
Three AI leaders agreed on a slowdown
She said Anthropic's Dario Amodei said the industry needs to pace the frontier of AI development, and that Sam Altman and Elon Musk agreed.
"I don't think you really see these three agree on something very often." — Sara Awad
The headlines had been building for weeks
Before that weekend, she said, there were headlines about the Hugging Face incident involving OpenAI and other incidents that came out back to back, some of which had happened earlier in the year and were only recently disclosed. She gave the Gemini hacks as an example: they happened in May but were only talked about this month. A 27-year-old researcher also resigned from Anthropic and spoke about existential risks from AI.
"The Monday after that weekend markets sold off." — Sara Awad
Her read: follow who benefits
She said her group told its members that big technology companies do not develop a conscience overnight and that the talk did not signal a real slowdown in the near term. The question to ask, she said, is who benefits from that kind of conversation.
A week later, chip stocks rallied
The Monday after the sell-off, which she called Red Monday, chip stocks rallied on Meta's release of Muse and its news on agentic AI, meaning AI systems that act for the user. That came despite UN speeches, the resignation, mounting credit risk, inflation, rising bond yields and the US-Iran war.
"So I think that goes to say that we're still in a market that's more greedy than fearful." — Sara Awad
"Because I don't think the bubble is gonna pop this year. I think that's still a 2027 conversation." — Sara Awad
She said the bubble will not pop all at once. She expects a reset in the chip supply chain in the fourth quarter, as component prices that rose this year move back toward what end demand supports.
