The Hottest IPO of 2026 Will Shock You

Summary

Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing

Episode: The Hottest IPO of 2026 Will Shock You
Date: July 27, 2026
Host: Travis Hoy (B), with analysts Lou Whiteman (A) and Tyler Crowe (C)

Episode Overview

This episode dives into a series of seismic financial developments impacting stock investors:

1. Major capital movements in AI infrastructure, specifically Nvidia’s staggering backstop of potential OpenAI projects.
2. The explosive IPO of CXMT, a rising Chinese memory maker that could disrupt the global memory chip market.
3. A potential comeback in large-scale M&A activity as regulatory climates shift, notably in media and transportation.

With their trademark candid, data-driven conversation, Travis, Lou, and Tyler assess the sustainability, risks, and unintended consequences of these phenomena for long-term investors.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Nvidia’s Massive OpenAI and Circular Funding Activity

[00:02–06:37]

• News Summary: Wall Street Journal reports Nvidia may guarantee $250B–$500B in financing for OpenAI’s new AI facility—plus separate, smaller startup deals.
• Scale and Skepticism:
  • “What’s a half trillion dollars between friends?” (Travis, 01:20)
  • Numbers are so large that “the numbers now almost seem like they’re just made up.” (Tyler, 01:24)
• Circular Funding Echoes Dot-Com Bubble:
  • Nvidia is now entangled in “circular accounting”—similar to the vendor financing that amplified risk in the 1990s telecom bubble.
  • “It’s not really a bubble until you start seeing debt involved.” (Travis, 04:37)
• Balance Sheets & Demand vs. the ’90s:
  • AI-related projects now have stronger balance sheets and more tangible demand (data centers have record-low vacancy).
  • Lou contrasts with ’90s fiber glut: “We weren’t building for what we need today.” (Lou, 03:18)
• Risks:
  • Much of the high-risk financing loops back to OpenAI, raising questions about sustainability and the real value of IOUs in the sector.
  • “They’re starting to look like [in] Dumb and Dumber where when they open it up, instead of a million dollars, it’s just a million IOUs.” (Tyler, 05:41)
  • Oracle’s stock dropped 63% after a huge IOU-driven deal with OpenAI.
• Investor Takeaway:
  • Watch for expansions of circular financing and how it could “turn into a bender,” but Nvidia’s position remains solid unless AI projections fall short.

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2. CXMT: The Hottest IPO of 2026 & Memory Market Shake-Up

[08:03–14:33]

• IPO Summary: Chinese DRAM maker CXMT, previously little-known, went public in China with a 500% surge in its first day. Now a major global player, potentially unseating Micron.
• Global Supply Chain Impacts:
  • “Memory is very, very commoditized over time…Should impact the supply…bad news for all of those other players.” (Lou, 08:41)
  • Trade barriers: CXMT classified by the Pentagon as a “Chinese military operation,” so major US buyers (like Apple) face uncertainty for future deals.
• Commoditization Parallels:
  • Tyler compares this to oil, gas, and other commodities: periodic overcapacity may crush pricing.
  • “Management teams…do tend to be pretty good at shooting themselves in the foot with overcapacity when things are a little too exuberant.” (Tyler, 10:21)
• Product Segmentation:
  • Currently, CXMT doesn’t make high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips for data centers—a saving grace for Micron/SK Hynix. But CXMT could catch up technologically in 2–3 years.
  • “Maybe it’s not that bad…because CXMT doesn’t really make a high bandwidth memory chip…Yet.” (Tyler, 10:39)
• Industry Arms Race:
  • While CXMT’s raise is about $10B, Micron plans to spend $250B over 10 years—pointing to a potential global overbuilding frenzy.
  • “It’s not just… going to be the Chinese silver capacity fault too because everyone else is doing this.” (Tyler, 12:38)
• Potential Upside:
  • More DRAM supply could lower electronics prices for consumers.
    • “There’s a reason Apple would like to do business with them because this is capacity now when you need it.” (Lou, 13:39)
  • Risk: top memory makers may abandon basic consumer products for the lucrative data center market, opening the door for CXMT to capture lost segments.
• Investment Implications:
  • “There is a lot of room for unintended consequences here that I think is worth watching.” (Lou, 14:24)

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3. Rumblings of Merger Mania in U.S. Markets

[16:12–20:41]

• Regulatory Shift:
  • Recent federal leniency has revived once-unthinkable mega-merger talks: Paramount/Warner, Norfolk Southern/Union Pacific (railroads), and even United/Delta (airlines).
  • “If we can do this now, it’ll be a lot harder for them to try to pull us apart…so it does feel like a getting while the getting’s good sort of vibe with M and A.” (Tyler, 18:16)
• Reality Check:
  • Lou advises caution: despite headlines, practical regulatory barriers (especially at the state level) persist.
  • Paramount/Warner “put that on hold for a year. That’s an eternity in corporate time. That is just misery.” (Lou, 18:46)
  • For CEOs: “You want certainty. You don’t just care about the DOJ.” (Lou, 20:03)
• Smaller Deals:
  • Tech “tack-on” acquisitions ($1–2B) may see an uptick, but DOJ attention is still high.
  • “I do think that…the states are sort of opening their mouths now too.” (Lou, 19:55)
• Investor Takeaway:
  • “I don’t think that this is a new golden age for M and A.” (Lou, 20:14)
  • The advisory: watch for volatility, unintended consequences, and how regulatory momentum really unfolds.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On the scale of Nvidia’s deals:

  • “What’s a half trillion dollars between friends?” (Travis Hoy, 01:20)

• Skepticism about the reality of financing:

  • “They’re starting to look like…the briefcase from Dumb and Dumber where when they open it up, instead of a million dollars, it’s just a million IOUs.” (Tyler Crowe, 05:41)

• Commoditization risk in memory markets:

  • “Management teams…do tend to be pretty good at shooting themselves in the foot with overcapacity when things are a little too exuberant.” (Tyler, 10:21)

• Sector-wide overbuilding risk:

  • “There is a lot of room for unintended consequences here that I think is worth watching.” (Lou, 14:24)

• On M&A atmosphere shift:

  • “If we can do this now, it’ll be a lot harder for them to try to pull us apart…so it does feel like a getting while the getting’s good sort of vibe with M and A.” (Tyler, 18:16)

• Lou on regulatory caution:

  • “I don’t think that this is a new golden age for M and A.” (Lou, 20:14)

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• 00:02–06:37: Nvidia’s megaplay with OpenAI and the echoes of 1990s vendor financing risk
• 08:03–14:33: CXMT IPO recap, memory market dynamics, and risks of overcapacity
• 16:12–20:41: The “merger mania” resurgence—fact vs. fiction in regulatory trends

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Tone and Style

The discussion is witty, analytical, and often skeptical—balancing excitement about business innovation with deep caution regarding the recycling of risky financial structures, supply-demand miscalculations, and regulatory uncertainties.

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For stock investors, this episode offers a crucial reality check on AI infrastructure euphoria, memory market disruption, and M&A fever—prompting listeners to look beyond headlines, question sustainability, and track the subtle shifts that can upend or create portfolio “hidden gems.”

Transcript

[A]

Foreign

[B]

Jensen Huang is making big deals. Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing starts now. Welcome to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. I'm Travis Hoy. I'm joined today by Lou Whiteman and Tyler Crowe. Guys, we're taking over the Monday show today, so this we. We can bring some heat. And over the weekend, we got some interesting news, Tyler, that Jensen Huang and in Nvidia again making potentially massive deals. This time, the reporting from the Wall Street Journal is that they are going to basically Backstop Potentially a $250 billion project. I even saw $500 billion thrown around that OpenAI would like to build. Somebody's got to guarantee those debt payments, those lease payments. And Nvidia apparently seems to have raised their hand.

[C]

Yeah, well, to the point. We're all kind of. Kind of having the substitute teacher energy today with the three of us doing the Monday show. The funny thing was, is I feel like that Wall Street Journal article kind of buried the lead too, because not only was Nvidia saying they're going to guarantee that $250 billion, that's just for the build out of the facility and had nothing to do with the chips. And then there was like. And it could potentially also be another 350 billion in chips on top of the equity stake that Nvidia has already invested.

[B]

What's a half trillion dollars between friends?

[C]

I mean, really, the numbers now almost seem like they're just made up. I'm about to go $11 billion or something like, for all these deals here. And again, this wasn't the only deal that was announced today. Nvidia is on a real heater here. On top of the OpenAI deals that were announced. It was obviously smaller because these were smaller companies, but Nvidia also decided to deal with Thinking machines, which was a new startup kind of coming out of Those, like the OpenAI genesis of people who started early on as well as I always mispronounce his last name. Ilya.

[B]

Ilya Sutskever.

[C]

Sutskever. A super micro safe, super intelligence, awful name, dude. Get a better name either way. Like, all three of these companies are just basically getting Nvidia money thrown at them right now. And so a lot of money going out the door. Really kind of, you know, we're going to touch on this. Like, that circular accounting thing is starting to come back up again, which does give some people who have been around a little bit longer some nervous feelings.

[B]

Lou, this reminds me a little bit about the discussions we've had about Eli Lilly. Hey, when the times are good, and you've got a high valuation, you've got cash. Try to build a remote around your business. Eli Lilly's buying other pharma companies and Nvidia's making sure their customers are staying afloat.

[A]

Yeah, I'm glad Tyler didn't say bender. They're not on a bender today, they're on a roll. Right, but maybe we'll see. It might turn into a bender. Here's the good news for Nvidia shareholders is that there's enough cash there. This is not a bad balance sheet. So the debate here is whether or not the stock works or the stock doesn't work. From here it's not, will the company fail? I don't think we have to worry about that. And look, there is a way that this all works out fine. The way is AI is everything we think it, it generates all the revenue that we've seen in projections. Revenue solves all issues. If all these companies can pay back all of this debt that they're taking on, Nvidia's got nothing to worry about. But obviously there's a lot of ways this doesn't work out. You know, Tyler mentioned the circular funding. The obvious comparison here is vendor financing in the 90s. I get the concerns, I get why that's scary. But let's just say balance sheets are a lot stronger than in the 90s. Back to what I said before about Nvidia and this feels like a different business environment. In the 90s we were financing fiber being laid that was 90% not being used or even more, we just, we were building excess capacity. We weren't building for what we need today.

[B]

Well, to be fair, we are building data centers that don't yet have chips in them. So we're not seeing the supply hit the market yet.

[A]

Data center vacancy rates are near record lows. I think right now the assumption, I mean, we see all these companies making deals. SpaceX is selling off its data centers wherever whoever needs it. The neoclouds are all out there. There is a lot more today demand for data centers than there was for this fiber back in the 90s. Look, whether or not it all works out, I don't know. But I think that's an important distinction to remember here.

[B]

Tyler, One of the things I always remember hearing is, well, it's not really a bubble until you start seeing debt involved. We've now seen debt, we've seen special purpose vehicles, we've seen guarantees of other companies obligations. What should we be watching to potentially indicate that, you know, this isn't necessarily sustainable because we've been talking about this circular financing thing for quite a while now.

[C]

Well, as far as I've seen so far, and obviously this in part because it doesn't seem like either Anthropic isn't doing these kind of deals or they're being much quieter about it, which may be the smart thing to do. But it seems like a lot of these circular finance deals that we have heard about kind of all tie back to OpenAI in one way or the other. And sometimes when you hear a lot of this, like, you know, AI bubble, sometimes I almost want to say it's more like an OpenAI bubble because so much of this, you know, creative financing, you know, these circular finance deals, meta, you know, off balance sheet deals, a lot of these things seem to, or especially Oracle too, with a lot of like the debt financing they're doing to build out, a lot of that is tied to these IOUs that, you know, OpenAI has out in the field out there somewhere. And they're starting to look like the, the briefcase from Dumb and Dumber where when they open it up, instead of a million dollars, it's just a million IOUs.

[B]

Yeah, to, to bring Oracle. That was the one that I was thinking about as you were talking. Oracle shares since they signed that huge deal with OpenAI, $300 billion worth of remaining performance that was announced in late 2025, their stock is down 63% since then. So the IOUs are great, but you also need that confidence in the market. So we will see if that maintains with Nvidia backstopping a lot of its own customers. When we come back, we're going to talk about the latest IPO in the memory market. You're listening to Motley Fool, Hidden Gems Investing.

[D]

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[B]

Hidden Gems Investing. We have the hottest IPO of 2026 hit the market in the last 24 hours. It's not SpaceX. It is CXMT. Lou. This is a company that most of us had never heard of until a few weeks ago. But this is a Chinese memory maker, the number four memory maker in the world. We talk a lot about Micron, sk, Hynix and Samsung. Those are the big three. This could be number three as early as next year because they're raising a whole bunch of money to expand their DRAM capac and the market's not reacting positively on the US side. But this stock was up almost 500% today.

[A]

Yeah, not bad for one day, right? And yeah, it was over in China. So we can't. I guess we can if we really, really want to try and play it, but it's not easy for us to play. But look, you know, in theory, this is kind of bad news for all of those other players we've talked about. Memory is very, very commoditized over time. And this is like you say, this is an expansion ipo. The company already existed, but they're raising a ton of money to capacity, which should impact the supply. In theory, though, because, look, we still don't know if customers like Apple can buy products from cxmt. The Pentagon classifies this company as a Chinese military operation. The Department of Commerce has not blacklisted it yet, and we don't know that they will. I know Apple is lobbying for it, but wait, this would solve a lot of our problems. So we'll see. But you know, look, this is, this is another company that's out there. They are expanding. It should, I mean there is the rest of the globe even if US buyers can't, can't access it. But this is again part of the big picture and memory that you really have to watch before you buy into these companies.

[B]

Tyler, you've been following the energy markets for a long time and the commoditization of memory looks a lot like the energy markets where you add a whole bunch of supply, it impacts prices. This is one of those things I've been hearing for months. You know what, this time is different in the memory market and I don't know, this is now a fourth supplier that's going to bring a lot of, of capacity online. You start having four or five, six suppliers. That's how you get to commodity pricing. You're no longer an oligopoly.

[C]

One thing that management teams at commodity companies, whether it be oil and gas or mining or production of solar panels, basically anything that's commoditized like that, management teams there do tend to be pretty good at shooting themselves in the foot with overcapacity when things are a little too exuberant. So it's not like, you know, I feel like you and I have had

[B]

too many conversations about this over the years.

[C]

Yeah, it's quite a few of them. Look, if I'm going to squint hard enough and try to be like, okay, maybe it's not that bad. The thing that you could justify here is the fact that CXMT doesn't really make a high bandwidth memory chip.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

To the, you know, technology specifications that Micron is making these days or SK Hynix, basically the things that are being used in data centers. And there is the argument to be made of Micron and SK Hynix and all these other memory companies are just going to push into high bandwidth memory because they have the capacity, they have the technology, they have the data center demand and all of that lower commodity commoditized, you know, to a lesser degree some dram but not as severe but also down into the flash memory level. A lot of that stuff that is getting left behind, the consumer electronics and all that stuff that we're hearing these nightmare scenarios of iPhone prices going up, people can't get Nintendo's and Xboxes because memory is going to go away. The theory is like a company like CXMT can backfill some of that with the lesser technologically demanding sort of product. Maybe that's the case. The One thing that you do have to keep in mind here, this is a Chinese memory company. They are going to want to get into high bandwidth memory. Some other presentations are saying within two to three years they're going to be able to replicate more or less like SK Hynix's capacities about three years ago in terms of the technology. So there's a Runway here. It's hard to tell and I find it kind of fascinating where we're looking at this particular equity raise of like $10 billion and they want to surpass Micron. But Micron has said they're going to spend $250 billion over the next 10 years on capacity expansion too. So it's not just like, oh yeah, this is going to be the Chinese silver capacity fault too because everyone else is doing this and they're going into their respective niches. So it goes back to what we were talking at the top here with Nvidia is like, if we do believe that the current spend rates are sustainable and that the power demands, the compute demands and everything maintains its current trajectory, then overcapacity may not be a problem. But those are some pretty bold assumptions whenever it comes to technological advances like this. There is going to be something that's going to make it cheaper, more affordable, less demanding on compute. Something along the way is going to come around to make that better. And that would more than anything be a bigger fear for these commoditized esque type things like memory chips, whatever.

[B]

Lou, there could be a potential upside here. That's if this brings more of that commodity, that DRAM supply to market. That means that electronics, whether it's Apple, I mean this is, you're filling a hole that there is in the market, whether it's Apple's products, whether it's Nintendo's products or just everywhere else the DRAM goes, could help pricing, which is actually good for consumers. And there should be some other investment opportunities as well.

[A]

Right? There's a reason Apple would like to do business with them because this is capacity now when you need it. Here's the other thing too is hopefully again the data center is all this and more. But there is a risk that Micron and some of these other companies are kind of abandoning their core customer, these kind of simple memory users as they chase the data center. And that could bite you if supply. Apple isn't going to say, oh Micron, yeah, you kind of left us hanging, but if you won our business now, we'd be happy to come back to you.

[B]

Well, is the TSMC in this same scenario, you know, kind of, hey, we don't really want to talk to intel, but if you're not going to make our chips that we need to make our products, we gotta talk to Intel.

[A]

Yeah, right. There's just a lot. And again, we don't know how this plays out. So this is hard. Not really predicting future, but there's a lot of room for unintended consequences here that I think is worth watching.

[B]

Unintended consequences may be the term of the rest of the year because I have a feeling things aren't going to go quite as planned on the market. When we come back, we're going to talk about potential merger mania coming. You're listening to Motley Fool, Hidden Gems Investing.

[E]

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[F]

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[B]

Motley fool and Gems Investing. To say the current administration has a different approach to mergers and acquisitions than the previous administration in the US Is, I think, an understatement. You've gotten a very little pushback on some of the latest mergers, including Paramount buying, Warner Brothers Discovery, at least on a federal level. So Tyler, you had some interesting thoughts of this could lead to a boom in M and A activity at least over the next couple of years. As companies go, hey, these deals that we couldn't get done may actually get through and may actually get through pretty quickly.

[C]

Yeah, these things have been bubbling up a little bit to the surface in recent months, especially in industries where it almost seems like consolidation was never going to happen again. Talking about the Warner Paramount deal was obviously one. Talking about railroads with the Norfolk Southern and the Union Pacific deal that seems to be working its way through, which I don't know, Lou. I think probably four or five years ago we would have thought that is just unheard of, that nobody would have done that. And then just this earlier today, again, we're all of us just kind of opened up the Wall Street Journal this morning and said, hey, that's kind of interesting. There was talks that United CEO, United Airlines, excuse me, basically contacted the CEO of Delta Airlines, said, hey, what do you think about merging now? You know, some sort of like, I don't know, deal of equals. The fascinating thing, though is I think wasn't a couple years ago under the Biden administration, the idea of The Spirit and JetBlue merger happening was like, no, we can't do this. This would be awful for competition. And then all of a sudden the top two or top three in some combination are in the airlines is just going to sneak together. And it's fascinating to me. It seems like a very unique period in time where probably under most other. I feel bad saying this because it sounds like it's very political, but under most other administrations, this sort of stuff would get a lot of blowback. But it's like if we can do this now, it'll be a lot harder for them to try to pull us apart when, you know, after we've already been together. So it does feel like a getting while the getting's good sort of vibe with M and A. I don't want

[A]

to be a wet blanket here because I love M and A. That was, you know, I cut my teeth on M and a. But look, CEOs are not all knowing. They are reading the same press clippings we are, and they're daydreaming and they are seeing if it's time to be opportunistic. The administration talks about being more M and A friendly, but let's look at the actual results here. Paramount, Warner Brothers, Discovery, despite the green light from the feds, they've put that on hold for a year. That's an eternity in corporate time. That is just misery right there. Union Pacific, Northern, Southern, Norfolk Southern are sort of on their way. But again, they're at least a year away and things are about to get more difficult with them. I think when the they actually go to the customers and ask. These deals are still iffy at best. I think that we'd have to just like CEOs can read the press clippings coming out of the election and say, hmm, maybe it's time. I think they're watching this too and that might slow the roll.

[B]

In the case of these are some pretty big deals though. What do you think about potentially smaller deals? And I'm thinking back to Amazon was not allowed to buy iRobot. Like what about those little, you know, the tech industry in particular always used to have these kind of tack on acquisitions. A couple billion dollars here, a couple billion dollars there. Do you think that is potentially opening up more?

[A]

It's always a pendulum. It's probably always more open than it was. But again, I do think that

[D]

the

[A]

states are sort of opening their mouths now too. And again, this isn't a political show, but there is almost more motivation for the states to be overly aggressive. As a CEO before you put capital at risk and time at risk and management bandwidth at risk, you want certainty. You don't just care about the doj. I mean in my part of the world of defense, little deals are getting DOJ attention that we never saw attention before. I think that yes, in general we are more permissive now than we were a few years ago, but I don't think that this is a new golden age for M and A.

[B]

We'll see how this plays out, but there's definitely more to discuss as we get into earnings season. So we will be back tomorrow with more certain that this is the week that I think the earnings season really starts for a lot of us who are following a lot of stocks. So this week and next week, be sure to tune in to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about in the Motley fool may have four more recommendations for or against so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows the Motley Fool's editorial standards and is not approved by advertisers. Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. To see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show notes for Lou Whiteman, Tyler Crowe and Dan Boyd, behind the Glass and Travis Hoyam. Thanks for listening. We'll see you here tomorrow.