💰 Micron Has Too Much Cash

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Micron just set aside a record $35.16 billion to buy back its own stock.

That works out to about $100 for every person in America, all pointed at one ticker.

And the wildest part? Roughly $33 billion of it comes from a single quarter's cash.

The new buyback is the biggest Micron has ever authorised, and the number is built like a formula:

Whatever cash the AI boom dumped on Micron last quarter is heading back to shareholders.

That's a company that's either very confident or very bored. Probably the first one.

But there's a catch. Buybacks can't start until December 9, 2026.

Why the wait? Micron took CHIPS Act funding from Washington, and its repurchases have to follow those agreements.

Free government money, it turns out, comes with a calendar.

Micron shares have surged more than 240% this year, powered by AI's bottomless appetite for memory chips.

Every AI model needs somewhere to store what it's thinking. Micron sells the somewhere.

Even so, the stock is still below its June 25 peak of $1,255. The rocket has been hovering for a few months.

Buybacks shrink the share count, so each remaining share owns a slightly bigger slice of the profits.

They also send a signal: management thinks the stock is worth buying with its own cash, even after a 240% run.

Two things worth keeping in mind:

For now, though, Micron is making so much cash it's running out of places to put it.

Something has quietly changed in energy.

Supply tighter, demand steady.

LNG exporters, pipelines, infrastructure getting paid on volume.

With AI data centers climbing gas demand and export capacity expanding, cash flow grows.

This briefing breaks down steady producers, midstream players, export names quietly compounding while tech obsesses over headlines.

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SK Hynix just dropped 10% in a single day.

That's one of the biggest memory chipmakers on Earth getting marked down like a meal deal at 9pm.

The global chip selloff got worse, and the market found three things to panic about at once

Memory chips took the biggest beating. Samsung fell 7.4%, and both Korean giants sank to their lowest levels since August.

Over in Japan, SoftBank dropped 8.5%. When the world's loudest AI investor wobbles, everyone feels it.

In U.S. premarket trading, Intel led the casualties, down 5.7%.

The memory and storage crowd also bled:

The AI heavyweights got off lightly. Nvidia slipped 0.6%, Broadcom 0.9%, AMD 1%, Qualcomm 1.1%, Texas Instruments 1% and Marvell 2%.

The picks-and-shovels gang didn't escape either. CoreWeave, Nebius and Super Micro fell 1.3% to 1.7%, Cerebras slipped 0.5%, and chip equipment names ASML, Lam Research, Applied Materials and KLA dropped between 0.8% and 1.7%.

Basically, if it had "AI" anywhere near its investor deck, it was red.

Here's the part that really spooked memory investors.

A report said Chinese chipmaker ChangXin Memory Technologies made progress on a new memory architecture. The same one Samsung and SK Hynix are building.

For years, the Korean duo have run memory like a two-person dinner party. Now someone else is pulling up a chair.

More competition usually means one thing for memory makers: pressure on prices, and pressure on margins.

The spiciest quote of the day came from inside the house.

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan compared market sentiment to a casino. When the guy selling the chips says the tables are getting rowdy, people listen.

He also warned that paying for AI's massive infrastructure buildout will become a key challenge.

And that's where rates come in. Higher interest rates are squeezing debt-funded deals and clouding the outlook for IPOs that were red hot not long ago.

AI data centres are wildly expensive. A lot of them are built with borrowed money. When borrowing gets pricier, the maths gets uglier.

Look at who fell hardest. Memory and storage names got hit much harder than Nvidia. Memory is a cyclical business, and new competition hits it right in the pricing.

The bigger worry is funding. The AI boom runs on a steady flow of cheap capital. If that flow slows, the companies most reliant on debt and fresh investor cash feel it first.

If you own a tech ETF or chip fund, it's worth knowing how much of it leans on this one AI story. One trade can become your whole portfolio.

The UK government might be about to pocket £3.8 billion in bitcoin.

That's roughly £55 for every person in Britain. You won't be getting yours.

A London judge just tilted a huge crypto custody battle in the Treasury's favour. Here's what happened.

The Met Police are sitting on 61,000 bitcoin. It's the largest confirmed crypto seizure by law enforcement anywhere on Earth.

It traces back to Zhimin Qian, a Chinese national who ran a massive fraud on thousands of investors in China between 2014 and 2017, then fled to Britain.

She pleaded guilty and was jailed at Southwark Crown Court last year. The bitcoin stayed behind.

Since then, bitcoin has climbed to £62,384 a coin. Stolen money turned into a jackpot just by sitting in a wallet.

So who gets it: the victims, or the state?

That's the fight. On Monday, the High Court sided with the UK authorities on the first big question: which country's law applies.

The victims wanted English law. It's friendlier to them because it could let them argue the bitcoin is actually their property, making them owners instead of creditors waiting in a queue.

Their lawyers said the coins are held in the UK, so UK property law should rule.

Mr Justice Mark Turner backed the Crown Prosecution Service and picked Chinese law.

His reasoning in one line: "The relevant damage occurred in China." The money, the lies, the contracts, the losses. All Chinese.

The judge stressed this ruling doesn't decide who keeps the coins. But it makes the victims' path a lot steeper.

They now have to clear two hurdles:

Miss that, and the British state could keep much of the haul. A very nice sugar rush for the public finances.

Prosecutors have floated a redress scheme run from China to compensate victims instead. One victim was livid, saying the authorities had made a fortune off their money while offering them scraps of interest.

The case isn't moving to China, though. Unless an appeal flips it, a London court will hear expert evidence on Chinese law to settle things.

And that appeal is coming. Fieldfisher, the law firm representing the victims, says it's pursuing one.

Getting scammed is bad. Getting scammed across borders is worse. Which country's law applies can matter as much as what actually happened to you.

Recovery is painfully slow. This fraud ended nearly a decade ago and the victims still don't have a penny of the bitcoin.

Seized crypto keeps its upside. Whoever holds confiscated coins is effectively running a long bitcoin position, like it or not. Here, the state is up big.