flip the tape-state lever at step 5 to watch the gate reroute each name
Capacity-contract-visibility gate splits the AI and chip tape 1 Hyperscaler AI capex the demand source at the head 2 Nvidia merchant GPU AMD MI-series Custom ASICs co-designed w/ Broadcom · Marvell accelerator design · three paths spine 3 HBM (Micron) downstream bottleneck 4 TSMC + CoWoS second bottleneck 5 Capacity-contract visibility gate booked supply vs momentum Core — holds bids booked supply + contracted revenue Hopes — de-rate priced for continuation 6 Nvidia Aug 26 print tests the demand floor Aug 26 test feeds back to the demand floor

Flat tape — the same demand strip hits every AI and chip name, and the gate splits them at once: booked supply holds its bid (core), momentum without a fresh contract de-rates (hopes). That divergence on one tape is the mixed day.