“Prior to yesterday's meltdown, I was coming to the conclusion that the theme this earnings season was: if you have capacity, you win. And if you don't have capacity, you get punished. AMD and Intel were the perfect examples. It really comes down to just having supply.”
The Circuit · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · November 2026
Context
The hosts had just gone through AMD's strong earnings and Intel's capacity stumbles. Goldberg generalizes that supply, not demand, is separating winners from losers in chips this quarter.
Transcript
…has. Like, you know, on paper, you know, the specs are competitive. I would argue AMD has the lead in a couple categories. That's not all there is to this, so it's more complicated, but certainly they have a very competitive technical platform, and they seem to be getting fans in the hyperscalers.
…they will have more share, like more sell more server CPUs than Intel next year. It's plausible that that plays out that way, which again is, I'm not going to say it's a full shift of tide. It's just a difference in capacity, execution, supply chain that AMD's been gearing up for for some time.
Yeah, I think, I mean, prior to yesterday's meltdown, I was coming to the conclusion that the theme this earnings season was: if you have capacity, you win. And if you don't have capacity, you get punished. And AMD and Intel were the perfect examples for that, where it really comes down to just having supply. And lots of companies don't, and they're struggling against that is absolutely a topic that has come up on every earnings call I've listened to. Management talks about it ahead of time, but they get asked many questions about it. How's your capacity? What have you signed in terms of long-term agreements? All of that stuff has come up again and again. I mean, we had Apple report this week, and even they have finally, finally signed, you know, they made $33 billion of purchase commitments in the quarter. Everybody's talking about it. Companies that have supply are doing well and those that don't are really struggling. And I, you know, and then sort of the next order of conversation you want to have about that was like who's really being taken by…
some of those stuff, like substrates, as we've talked about, are really hard. You either got this stuff in advance or you didn't. And you're not going to all of a sudden just get the supply. So it is a fascinating dynamic. But I think that's why I'll be curious if more companies in this chain do…
Yeah, and it was interesting. Arm, who also reported this week, they had mentioned this last quarter and the quarter before because they're now entering the chip businesses. So they've started to get a lot of supply chain questions. And they have said earlier in the year, they've said a few times…
there's, there's, there's one theme I want to hit broadly on a couple of these names that we were talking about. So obviously, we're also going to talk about Qualcomm in this, but AMD and ARM. You know, AMD's commentary was also, I think, super interesting, but this is also true of the commentary…
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