🍪 TWiC: TurboQuant, AGI CPU, GF Sues Tower, CPU Price Hikes, 400G SiPho, AAOI, ++

In the Mar 27, 2026 newsletter, several semiconductor and photonics shifts converged. TurboQuant — Google Research’s KV‑cache compression paper that had been on arXiv for about a year — resurfaced and spooked memory investors, contributing to a sharp pullback even as Micron reported FQ2 revenue of $8.05B, a record 75% gross margin, and FQ3 guidance of $8.8B. Arm unveiled its first in‑house Arm AGI CPU built on TSMC 3nm with 136 Neoverse V3 cores and a 300 W TDP; Arm described rack densities of 8,160 cores (air) and >45,000 cores (liquid) and projected $15B in AGI CPU revenue within five years, with Meta as an anchor customer. Supply stress is visible elsewhere: Intel and AMD raised CPU prices ~10–15% YTD and lead times widened to as much as six months. In photonics, Tower Semiconductor and Coherent demonstrated 400 Gbps/lane (420 Gb/s PAM4) on Tower’s silicon‑photonic process using Coherent InP CW lasers, potentially delaying the need for TFLN modulators; days later GlobalFoundries sued Tower over 11 patents, seeking import bans and prompting share price moves (Tower −7.5%, GF −4.6%). Applied Optoelectronics secured a $53M 800G order (Q2→mid‑Q3) after a $200M+ 1.6T win. Separately, helium spot prices surged over 50% after attacks on Qatar’s Ras Laffan (≈17% LNG capacity hit), spotlighting a material risk for lithography, ion implantation, and leak detection in fabs.