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When designer Matt Strom-Awm was handed two different slide decks from two independent clients in different niches, he noticed one thing: the design was nearly identical.
Both decks opened with a cream-colored slide, gussied up with orange accents and oversized italic serifs, bullet points, rectangular grids, and, most damning, a third slide with a centered line pointing to “Our Move.” You could swap the logos and the founders themselves might not have known which deck belonged to whom.
The New Yorker just chronicled this phenomenon, which is powered by Claude Design, Anthropic’s AI design tool. The more the tool spreads, the more design clichés spread with it. Clichés such as beige backgrounds and warm serifs, both blanketing the internet so thoroughly that designers now flinch at color palettes they used to love.
Here’s why I’m telling you this in an investing newsletter: Wall Street just did the exact same thing to AI stocks.
Over the past few weeks, the market grabbed every company with an AI story – from memory makers and chip designers to quantum pioneers and search giants – and sold them as one undifferentiated blob. The VanEck Semiconductor ETF (SMH) and iShares Semiconductor ETF (SOXX) each gave back double-digits from recent highs as money fled the whole complex at once, no questions asked.
Yet, underneath those cream-colored charts, these are wildly different businesses with wildly different fundamentals. While the market was busy selling AI stocks, the individual companies were busy reporting some of the strongest numbers of the entire AI Boom.
For example, Micron (MU) delivered an earnings blowout for the ages. And Qualcomm (QCOM) extended its growth runway to the end of the decade.
The gap between a market treating AI as a monolith and businesses diverging underneath it is where fortunes are made. We walked through five stocks in Being Exponential, each with its own distinct story, and why I’d be a buyer of this weakness in every one of them.
Let’s dig in.
Micron Just Smashed the Bear Case
Start with Micron stock, because MU’s earnings report puts to rest just about every fear the bears have been peddling.
Quarterly revenues of $41.46 billion, up 74% sequentially and 346% year-over-year. Adjusted earnings of $25.11 per share, beating consensus by $4.62. A record-high gross margin of 84.9%. And then guidance above expectations – roughly $50 billion in revenue next quarter, about $31 in earnings per share, and gross margins expanding again toward 86%.
At this stage of the game, everyone expects a beat-and-raise. Micron smashed-and-raised. Even the crowd that came in expecting fireworks walked away impressed. MU stock ripped about 15% in after-hours trading toward record highs.
Now, why does this matter beyond one stock? Because Micron is the high-beta tip of the spear on the entire AI trade. Memory is where the “peak capex” and “peak spending” fears were supposed to show up first. Instead, we got confirmation that demand is booming and margins are expanding. The wobble in AI stocks was fundamentally incongruent with reality.
Bottom line on Micron stock: I’d buy this breakout. Take a look at the full episode below for more:
Qualcomm’s Story Just Changed
Next up: Qualcomm, which delivered a guidance boost built on major new business wins.
The company now says its AI data center silicon revenue will exceed $15 billion by fiscal 2029, with $5 billion arriving by fiscal 2027, and total non-handset revenue reaching $40 billion by 2029. Those targets are way above Wall Street consensus, and they’re bullish for two reasons:
- These are multi-year targets. Management is telling us 2027 will be great, and 2028 will be great, and 2029 will be great. Wall Street looks 12 months ahead – and if analysts keep seeing green shoots at the 12-month horizon, they keep buying today. This outlook plants green shoots stretching to the end of the decade.
- The story is shifting. For years, Qualcomm meant handsets. The new Qualcomm runs on data center chips, Edge AI, and Snapdragon. The open question was whether that new business could grow fast enough to offset sluggish handsets. This guide answers loudly, “yes… and then some.” A boring handset player is transforming into a hypergrowth AI infrastructure play. Like Micron, I’d buy the rebound in QCOM stock.
Cerebras: Read the Demand, Ignore the Noise
Then there’s Cerebras (CBRS), the recent IPO that reported earnings into the teeth of the selloff and got punished for it.
But separate the noise from the signal. Quarterly revenue came in around $192 million, up 93% year-over-year. Hardware revenue grew 60%. Cloud services revenue surged more than 160%. Management maintained its full-year revenue guide of roughly $860 million, or about 70% annual growth.
Those aren’t slowdown numbers, man. Yes, the IPO was richly valued. Yes, there are margin questions as the company invests aggressively. But think about the sequence here. Micron just confirmed the boom is raging. Qualcomm just confirmed visibility to 2029. If we’re that early in the cycle, aggressive investment is exactly what I want a young infrastructure company doing right now.
I’m less bullish here than on Micron or Qualcomm, but the post-earnings dip looks like opportunity, and I’m constructive on CBRS stock at current levels.
Washington Just Went All-In on Quantum
Meanwhile, the quantum computing breakout we flagged a few weeks back just got a booster rocket from Washington.
The White House signed executive orders to accelerate and broaden the U.S. government’s involvement in quantum computing – layered on top of a $2 billion investment spread across seven companies in the space. The signal is unmistakable: the federal government is throwing its full weight behind quantum development.
That’s rocket fuel for the whole sector – D-Wave Quantum (QBTS), Rigetti Computing (RGTI), the newly public names, all of them. But IonQ (IONQ) remains my favorite horse in this race. It’s the most commercially advanced player, it has the best leadership team in the industry, and its trapped-ion technology looks like the superior architecture for real-world commercial use.
AI selloff be damned… The micro fundamentals in quantum are outstanding.
Google: The Comeback Nobody Sees Coming
Finally, Alphabet (GOOGL), which is under pressure from the selloff, from talent departures to rival labs, and from a Gemini model that’s gone quiet in the frontier race while Claude and ChatGPT grab headlines.
But remember: this race is a marathon, and we’re in roughly the fourth mile of 26. Everyone wrote off OpenAI six months ago; it punched back into a leadership position. Everyone wrote off Google two years ago when chatbots were supposedly going to obsolete search; that never happened. Counting out a company with Google’s talent density and distribution in mile four is a mistake I’ve watched investors make over and over.
When Gemini takes its next big step forward – and it will – the market will rediscover this story fast. With GOOGL stock sitting at a compelling technical and fundamental level, I like the dip-buy here.
The Verdict
Across all five names, we’re seeing shares under pressure and fundamentals strengthening underneath. That gap paves the way for estimates to move higher, and higher estimates set the stage for stocks to surge. Just like 1962, the tape is panicking while the technology curve keeps bending upward.
So I’d be a buyer of weakness in the semiconductor complex, the AI complex, and the broader technology complex. The music is still playing, folks. This is noise. The long-term view remains intact.
Catch more AI stock breakdowns – plus the macro picture behind them – by subscribing to Being Exponential with Luke Lango.
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