TSM Reddit Mentions | ChartExchange

I have three long term holds.
**ASE Technology (ASX)**
A Taiwanese company that is the market leader in outsourced semiconductor packaging and testing.
Semiconductor process nodes can't shrink too much more before we get into issues, which is why many companies are not focusing as much on die-shrinks to increase performance but instead more advanced packaging. You see this with the increased use in 2.5 and 3D packaging, chiplets, SiP and the like. This trend is across the electronics industry, from auto manufacturers, the main CPU and GPU designers we all know, as well as SOCs used in cell phones, and combined CPU/GPU SOCs designed by big cloud providers used for AI training.
The company is well diversified within the industry, and is the main player in their space, so isn't reliant on the current AI hype train to succeed. They have lower margins than TSMC however they have a significantly lower PE and PEG ratios and pay a 3% dividend which I reinvest. They are investing heavily into new equipment and factories to support the latest and highest margin technologies that they work with, but are still diversified across pretty much all semiconductor packaging beyond just the high end.
The company doesn't get a lot of hype, and isn't captured by a lot of semiconductor ETFs, so while it absolutely is positive impact on the AI hype cycle, they are much less likely to be severely hurt by a bubble popping the hype cycle compared to NVIDIA or TSM, especially with their diversification.
**Secondly, since we need to power the datacenters**:
**First Solar(FSLR)**
Basically zero debt, 0.57 PEG, and 28% profit margin with a huge backlog and new factories coming online this year.
They make most of their panels in America and despite that and their large margins they were the first solar company to achieve sub $1/watt pricing over a decade ago.
Their panels don't use silicon and instead use a different semiconductor (CdTe) that allows an efficient thin film deposited on glass ( vs sliced silicon crystals) meaning they use less material, and this semiconductor is both significantly better at maintaining efficiency in high heat environments and cheaper to produce.
They focus exclusively on grid scale solar projects and contracts, so their revenues are more predictable and less sensitive to interest rates than rooftop solar.
Current government policy can't change the fact that utility scale solar is by far the cheapest and fastest way to add electricity to the grid in a time when fossil fuels are set to become more expensive due to both increased exports and domestic demand, and nuclear projects, even SMRs take significantly longer and cost significantly more.
**Lastly, I think Celestica(CLS) is still fairly valued as a growth play.**
They are an advanced electronics manufacturer and large manufacturer of high speed network switches that are used in hyperscaler datacenters.
Every server rack, and at multiple connections upstream has a switch, and networking is very important for ML workloads because large amounts of data needs to be sent between different servers quite quickly. They are the market leader in 800G switches which is the cutting edge right now.
And while this is a good portion of their business, they also do healthcare technology,rack integration, general electronics design and offer services to better automate factories, which is important if we are going to bring manufacturing back.
There are dozens of cloud companies, most of whom are unlikely to last til 2030, but Celestica will last, and every cloud company uses something made by them. They even make components and contracted out design and manufacturing for companies like Juniper and Dell.
They beat last quarter earnings expectations by 50%, have a 30% ROE, and are expected to grow their EPS by 28% each year over the next five years. It's my largest holding by far.
All of these are positioned to grow with whatever Cloud/Datacenter providers win out, whether AMD, Nvidia, or custom SOCs dominate compute, and are diversified enough to not go bankrupt if this turns out to be all hype.