cycle

SK Hynix is ​​betting that the memory cycle is dead. He proves it by doing just what always killed him.

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SK Hynix debuted on the Nasdaq with a rise of 13% last Friday, after placing $26.5 billion in the largest IPO of a foreign company in the history of the United States. And that money does not go to dividends or buybacks. He is going to build more factories. What has happened. The South Korean has sold 177.9 million ADRs at $149 eachwith a premium of 2.9% over its price in Seoul, something unusual in this type of placement (they usually come out at a discount to attract buyers). Demand has multiplied the available supply by seven. On the first day of trading, the title reached $170. With this operation, SK Hynix becomes the second South Korean company to exceed $1 trillion in capitalizationafter Samsung. In the last twelve months its stock has risen more than 630% in its home market, Seoul. Why is it important. The memory sector has been trapped in the same pattern since the nineties: Excess demand. Huge investments in capacity. Oversupply And price collapse. It has happened in 1997, in 2001 and in 2008. This time SK Hynix defends that AI has broken that pattern forever, that the demand for high-performance memory has no foreseeable ceiling. And to demonstrate it, it does the only thing that lit the fuse in the three previous crises: pouring billions into expanding factories just when margins are at historic highs. In figures: SK Hynix controls just over half of the global memory market HBMwhich NVIDIA GPUs need to train AI models. Its operating margin for the first quarter of 2026 was 72%, with a net margin of 77%. Together with Samsung, it has committed more than $500 billion to two new manufacturing complexes. The fund for extreme ultraviolet lithography equipment alone amounts to about $7.9 billion. The context. All this has a technical reason: the 16-layer HBM4. NVIDIA has asked SK Hynix, Samsung and Micron to have it ready before the end of 2026, when the previous 12-layer standard has not even entered mass production. Stacking 16 layers forces each wafer to be thinned to 30 micrometers, a third of a hair, with an almost zero margin of error: a single defect ruins the stack. SK Hynix has already shown a 48 GB module and plans to mass produce it this quarter. Samsung lags behind, with a yield per wafer of just 10% at the beginning of the year. Micron has preferred not to risk: it has already sold all of its HBM4 production from 2026 and postpones the jump to 16 layers until 2027. Whoever wins this race keeps the orders for the next NVIDIA GPU platform, where SK Hynix would already supply around 70% of the memory. Between the lines. The market says it believes in the end of the cycle, but it does not act as such. What you say vs what you do: In June, a simple comment from SK Hynix about slowing down part of its AI memory business led to the fifth-worst day in Kospi history. Micron, its reference in the United States, continues to grow a lot, but no longer at the rate of a few quarters ago. Yes, but. SK Hynix, Samsung and Micron together control more than 90% of the market and face a lawsuit for alleged price pact in the jump from standard DRAM to HBM. And all three are expanding capacity at the same time, with the Micron factory in New York without contributing real volume until 2028. When all this production arrives together, the sector will return to the usual question: what happens when supply catches up to demand. SK Hynix is ​​betting that, with AI, the answer is no longer the same. In Xataka | 0.3 nm chips have a definitive date: the IMEC laboratory has found a way to extend the life of silicon Featured image | Xataka

convert your M-30 to cycle and walk

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He Boulevard Periphérique It is a sort of Parisian M-30. The French city has, like Madrid, a ring road with a length of 35 kilometers. It was designed in 1958 to unclog traffic in the city center with a clear objective: it was faster to go around the city center at a sustained speed than to pass through the center of it. Both projects have grown with parallel lives. The Parisian highway was not completed until well into the 1970s and Madrid began construction of its own in that same decade. But, over time, they have experienced the same problems. Quickly, the highway was absorbed by the city itselfcreating a kind of urban highway. This has caused a series of issues. The first is pollution, both from vehicle emissions and the noise generated. But also social problems with architectural walls that make pedestrian or bicycle passage difficult and that break the internal cohesion of the city. Madrid has solved part of this problem with Madrid Ríoburying a part of it and, now, covering the Sales step. In Paris they have encountered a similar situation. The Boulevard Périphéric was built on the remains of the old Thiers wall, a defensive fortification completed in 1844 that at the beginning of the 20th century was totally useless and made it difficult for those who lived outside the wall to enter the city. What they didn’t imagine is that They were about to create a new wall. The city has been debating for years what to do with this bypass. Measures have already been taken to try to reduce traffic. The latest proposal involves converting it into a real boulevard, with its trees, its pedestrian crossings and its bike lanes. A new mayor’s office, an old project During Anne Hidalgo’s mayoralty, the city has taken various measures to reduce traffic in the city center, calm the passage of vehicles and penalize those who reach the heart of Paris by car. Thus, a project has been implemented to multiply the number of bike lanes, reduce the trips that pass through the interior of the city and punish those who arrive with an SUV to the Eiffel Tower itself. Hidalgo has taken over from Emmanuel Grégoire, who has managed to maintain control of the city in the hands of the socialists. And now a new melon opens: What to do with the Parisian M-30? Under Hidalgo’s mandate, the highway had already taken the first steps toward becoming a true boulevard. So, speed has been reduced to 50 km/h but the traffic jam is so serious that most drivers said they couldn’t notice the difference. But the intention of the new Government is to go further. The new mayor has not hidden At no time does he want to go deeper into the path designed by Hidalgo, reducing the volume of vehicles circulating through the city. And, above all, converting the current ring road into an urban boulevard. That is: transform the road into a road limited to 30 km/h, create a bicycle lane that runs along the entire length and leave space for pedestrians. It is a project for which Parisian environmental parties are also betting which, in addition, support the creation of traffic-signalized zebra crossings, instead of raising pedestrian crossings with bridges. This “changes everything because the road is a circular highway, and from the moment it is broken (the traffic lights are installed), it is no longer the same model,” their representatives point out. Reconverting the image of Boulevard Périphéric is an old ambition of the environmentalist and socialist parties since they have been talking for more than a decade about the chaotic traffic that is experienced every day in Paris but also about the social gap that exists between those who live inside and outside it. Already in 2015, Guardian dedicated an article to the problems generated by this urban highway. The intention of the new Government team is to have the project completed before the end of its mandate. That is to say, in the first years of the next decade, Paris has changed the morphology of this space completely. However, since The Figaro They warn that bureaucracy can play against them and that everything would get stuck if the police force issues an unfavorable opinion on the measure. Photo | Romain DC on Wikimedia and Johan Mouchet In Xataka | The cities with the worst rush hour in the world, explained in these graphs

Build the first closed cycle nuclear reactor

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Vladimir Putin has announced what he calls the “first nuclear energy system in the world with a closed fuel cycle”, a technology that promises to reuse up to 95% of nuclear fuel. If it materializes by 2030, as stated by the Russian president, Russia would dodge two of the greatest challenges of current nuclear centrals: the Radioactive waste management and the possible exhaustion of uranium reserves. Uranium? What do you want that. In the Moscow Global Atomic Forum, and before the presence of figures such as Rafael Grossi, director of the OIEA, Putin described the Russian reactor of closed cycle as a “truly revolutionary development” that, in his words, “will eliminate the problem of uranium supply.” The centerpiece of the ambitious Poryv project (“advance” in Russian) is a rapid reactor refrigerated by lead called Brest -od-300, which is being Building in Severska city in the Siberian region of Tomsk. In the same complex, called Odek, Russia will also build the modules for the spongery and reprocessing of the irradiated fuel. 95% recoverable. In addition to using molten lead instead of water as refrigerant, the Brest-O-300 reactor is designed to operate with uranium-reputony nitruro as fuel. It is its in situ integration with the sponge and reprocessing modules that will allow closing the nuclear fuel cycle. According to official statements, this system It will allow 95% of the spent fuel to reusea technically consistent figure with the external reprocess processes, where most of the fuel used (uranium and plutonium) ends up being recovered. The remaining 3-5% corresponds to fission products and minor actinids, which remain high radioactivity residues. It is not a new technology. Countries like France and Russia itself Nuclear fuel already reproces at an industrial scale. And Japan intends to join the club with the Rokkash Plant. However, the Russian project is a pioneer in its attempt to create a fully integrated complex where a fast reactor operates in symbiosis with its own fuel manufacturing and recycling facilities in the same place. If Russia meets its deadlines, you could have The first complex of this type in operation. And to support him, he has established an International Research Center in the Uliánovsk region (the MBIR International Research Center in Dimitrovgragra), inviting scientists around the world to collaborate in what Putin has called a “new era in nuclear energy.” But is uranium running out? Putin’s justification for this strong investment is a future with uranium shortage. During his speech, he cited OECD estimates that suggested a possible exhaustion of uranium resources by 2090, or even before: as soon as in the 2060s. However, the “Red Book” of the OEA does not speak of an exhaustion of uranium, but of An increase in demandwhich could produce tensions in the supply between 2080 and 2110 if significant investments are not made before for the opening of new mines. Russia’s plan It is a strategic bet. If you achieve the closed cycle reactor for the 2030s, we could witness a new way of understanding nuclear energy, and a world with limited resources in which Russia has managed to outdo the rest. Image | ROSATOM In Xataka | France was not prepared for such an extreme climate or to run out of uranium: its energy model cross, and Europe feels it

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