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The most recent leg of the AI trade has been characterized by weakness in the hyperscalers and dominance in the hardware beneficiaries of their ballooning capex, particularly the memory chip manufacturers. This is most evident in the remarkable earnings report of Micron Technologies (MU) yesterday, which despite already stratospheric expectations given its parabolic runup leading into the print, crushed with a triple beat again, with $41.46 billion in quarterly revenues (+345.72% y/y) and $28.24 billion in GAAP net income (+1398.30% y/y). Unless you've been living under a rock, you're probably well aware of how other US storage stocks--WDC, STX, and SNDK--have ripped this year as well. But for now, they aren't megacaps.
It was time for me to accommodate the script to get Samsung and SK Hynix onto this plot. Adding TSMC gave 15. I added ASML to give an even 16 for the plot. At some point when SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI have a few quarters of earnings history, I plan to include them.
As such, here are updated plots depicting net income comparison for the most significant publicly traded mega cap tech companies, sorted by market cap. The scale of the y-axis is the same for each subplot to allow a fair comparison of net income across companies.
Graphs were generated with Python Matplotlib. I've found that my data source (WRDS/Compustat) actually goes as far back as the early 1970s for INTC and AMD, with the caveat that data are limited for foreign stocks, particularly for the Korean stocks which required me to use the ticker on the Korea exchange (whereas TSMC and ASML have US-domiciled ADRs).
Market cap, trailing P/E, and last/next earnings date data are from Yahoo Finance (yfinance module). Note that yfinance does not process trailing P/E for the Korean stocks, but it's approximately 24 for both Korean stocks based on most recent earnings report.
Note that GAAP net income results in the following distortions:
- Unrealized investment gains from the likes of Anthropic (Google and Amazon), SpaceX (Google), and Intel (Nvidia)
- One-time non-cash tax charge (especially for Meta in October 2025) or non-cash tax benefits (especially for Tesla in December 2023)
- Goodwill impairment charges (particularly for Intel)
- Amortization from recent acquisitions (particularly for Broadcom and AMD)