Welcome to Staten News — where the chips are sold out, the memory is unaffordable, and the only thing AI can't buy this week is a friendly governor in Texas.
Gina Hinojosa beat Greg Abbott on Tuesday night and she wants an immediate moratorium on new data centers in Texas, lasting until the legislature can meet. James Talarico beat Ken Paxton for the U.S. Senate seat in Texas. Both want to end the tax exemptions for the sector.
That's the state Bloom Energy projects will account for nearly 30% of U.S. electricity demand for AI by 2028.
🗳️ The Build-Out Just Got a Political Opponent
Texas isn't alone. AFP reports Georgia's new governor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, supports a temporary statewide pause and wants large customers covering the infrastructure costs they create. Ohio's Amy Acton plans a tougher framework for the build-out. Alphabet, among others, has data centers planned in Texas.
And this wasn't some fringe issue. In a CNBC voter poll, 56% of voters called data centers a crucial or major factor in their vote. Tech and crypto money tried hard to change the outcome: crypto, AI and online gambling interests poured more than $377 million into races, and Elon Musk was the cycle's largest individual donor.
Come January, Democrats have subpoena power. Rep. Greg Casar says AI CEOs "should be called to testify under oath." Rep. Robert Garcia, the presumptive next Oversight chair, gave tech firms a two-word memo: "Lawyer up."
Don't overread it. A federal AI law still has to get past a Trump veto, and Democrats aren't unified on what a pause would even look like. The real risk sits at the state level, where a governor and a utility commission can slow a project without Congress doing a thing. Patrick Munnelly at Tickmill argues the push raises the bar for investment rather than breaking the AI trend. Fair. Higher bar still means fewer projects clear it.
🚀 Meanwhile, Demand Kept Right On Going
The funny part is the timing. Hours before the map finished turning blue, the companies selling the picks and shovels posted numbers that made the estimates look silly.
Arista reported revenue of $3.66 billion, up 58%, and guided the fourth quarter to $3.9 billion to $4.0 billion against the $3.60 billion analysts had. The stock rose about 12% after hours. Super Micro did $19.95 billion in sales against a $17.35 billion estimate and forecast fiscal 2027 sales of $72 billion to $82 billion, comfortably above the $69.17 billion consensus. Up more than 9%, after dropping 23% over the prior month.
AMD, you already know about if you read Finance today. Its lead Helios customers include Anthropic, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and Oracle, and Lisa Su now expects total revenue to grow more than 80% in 2027.
That's the whole trade now. Demand is not the constraint. Permission is.
🍎 Apple Is Paying the AI Tax
John Ternus ran his first earnings call as CEO and spent a chunk of it on a problem Apple doesn't control. Ternus called the memory situation "unprecedented." Apple expects higher memory costs this quarter and expects prices to keep rising after that.
So the December gross margin guide came in at 45% to 46%, with Siri AI ramp costs on top. The results themselves were fine: revenue up 12% to $114.5 billion, iPhone up 17% to $57.6 billion, Mac at $10.8 billion. iPad slipped to $6.2 billion from $7 billion. Mac and iPad will stay supply-constrained this quarter, mainly because of memory, and the iPhone Duo has no timeline for catching up to demand.
Look at what that does to Friday. The touchscreen OLED MacBook Pro ships with a $400 premium, into a market where Apple is already short on the parts. Price increases in June and September have only offset some of the pressure.
Apple also plans usage limits on server-side Siri AI, with expanded access for sale. Pricing hasn't been announced. Translation: Siri just got a meter.
💸 A $115 Billion Bet on Light
Marvell agreed to buy Lumentum in an all-stock deal valued at about $115 billion on an enterprise basis. Each Lumentum share becomes 4.5 Marvell shares, and Marvell holders end up with about 67% of the company. CEO Matt Murphy's pitch is that AI infrastructure is shifting "toward optical connectivity," and Marvell projects more than $1 billion in annual cost savings.
The market's response was brutal. Marvell dropped about 12.7% and Lumentum about 18.6% on Monday, because the premium is paid in stock and both of them got repriced together.
Closing is targeted for the first half of 2028. That's a long time to hold a deal open in a Washington that just got more interested in everything AI touches. And honestly? If the optical thesis is right, Marvell looks smart in 2029. If it isn't, more than a year of deal limbo sits on top of a stock that already lost an eighth of its value.
📅 What's Next
Today: Qualcomm, Arm and Datadog report
Friday: Touchscreen MacBook Pro ships
Next Tuesday: CoreWeave reports, down about 41% in a month with short interest above 21% of its float
January: The new Congress is seated and the hearing requests start
This is the week AI hardware proved it can sell everything it makes and found out it may need a permit to plug it in. CoreWeave reports next Tuesday, and nobody on that call will be asking about anything else.
Sources: AFP via France 24, CNBC Election Takeaways, MacRumors Apple Call Takeaways, CNBC After-Hours Movers
— The Bandicoots 💻⚡