▶ Explore this week’s Tape — live, sortable, drill-down →

Three Bottlenecks, One Multiple, and Only One Monopoly

The AI argument flipped sides this week. For two years the only question that mattered was whether anyone would actually buy all this compute, and Wednesday’s show put that one to bed. The question left standing is whether the supply chain can physically build it — the lithography, the power, the memory. And in the rush to own the chokepoints, the market did something lazy. It paid all three the same monopoly multiple. Only one of them is a monopoly.

Start with the one that is. ASML makes the machine that etches the most advanced chips on earth, and it makes it alone — no second source, no roadmap to one, no credible challenger inside a decade. The Cash Flow Memo has it trading around sixty times free cash flow, on roughly eleven billion dollars of trailing free cash flow translated from euros.¹² That is a monopoly multiple, and for once it is bolted to an actual monopoly. The thing that can dent it is not a competitor — it is a government. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told ASML, per Bloomberg, that he is concerned a top-tier extreme-ultraviolet machine may have reached China in violation of export controls; the company denied it has ever shipped one there.³ Notice what the risk actually is. Not the machine. The map of who is allowed to buy it. ASML’s customer list is the only variable that has ever moved this stock, and it is the one variable ASML does not control.

Now the two the market is paying as if they were ASML. GE Vernova booked more data-center power orders last quarter than it did in all of the prior year, and its turbine backlog now stretches past a hundred-ten gigawatts into 2029.⁴ ⁵ Free cash flow grew almost four hundred percent.⁶ Real demand, real scarcity — for now. But a gas turbine is not an EUV machine. Siemens Energy and Mitsubishi build them too, and slot scarcity is the kind of bottleneck competition fills in three or four years, not three or four decades. GE Vernova is renting its scarcity. The order book is genuine; the durability is the open question, and a thirty-times multiple is pricing the scarcity as if it were permanent.

Then memory — the bottleneck with the longest rap sheet. Micron reports Wednesday with its entire 2026 high-bandwidth-memory output already sold under contract and DRAM pricing set to jump fifty percent this quarter.⁷ ⁸ The cashflow read is in Marcus’s column below — short version, the trailing multiple is the cheap number, not the scary one. But here is the part the show had no room for: memory is the one bottleneck on this list that has detonated itself before. Every prior cycle ended the same way. All three makers see the shortage, all three turn the capex spigot at once, supply overshoots demand, and the pricing that looked structural turns out to have been a moment. Micron is committing roughly two hundred billion dollars to new capacity, and its two competitors are spending into the same shortage.⁹ That is either supply discipline or the seed of the next glut, and you cannot tell which from inside the shortage. You never can. That is what makes memory memory.

So three bottlenecks, three very different half-lives, and a tape paying all three the monopoly rate. The durable one — the cornered machine — arguably earns it. The other two are borrowing the multiple from the durable one, and the loan comes due the day a competitor adds a turbine line or a third memory maker blinks first on capex.

What changes the read is Wednesday, and the tell is Micron’s gross-margin guide. Guide above where consensus already sits and the cycle is still accelerating into the glut question, not away from it.¹⁰ Merely meet it, and a sold-out company that only meets gets sold on the news. The trade across the whole supply chain breaks the moment any one of the three memory makers signals it is racing the other two to fill capacity rather than pacing itself.

Wall Street’s consensus on the supply chain: own the bottleneck, any bottleneck, at any multiple. The math says own the one nobody else can build — and rent the other two only as long as the scarcity lasts.

The Tape — W2625

Universe of 94 cashflow-memo names, snap dates 2026-06-15 → 2026-06-19. Composite is rank-sum percentile of FCF Yield + NTM Revenue Growth (higher = better balance). Banks and finance-book names shown separately.

Telltales Yield — Top 10

From the Cashflow Desk — Marcus Graham

Micron reports Wednesday, and the reporters table holds the whole argument in two cells that read like a contradiction: a 1.0% trailing FCF yield sitting right beside 64% forward revenue growth. Trailing, Micron screens at 102x free cash flow — and that is a cyclical at the bottom of its cash cycle, where the trailing multiple measures the past and tells you nothing about the print. The 1.0% yield is the trough. The 64% is the market pricing what sold-out capacity earns once contract prices reset higher. The cheap-looking cell is the lie; the expensive-looking one is the tell. The test Wednesday is the gross-margin guide — clear where consensus already sits with the cycle still accelerating, or a sold-out name that merely meets gets sold on the news.

Telltales Yield — Bottom 10

This Week’s Reporters

Sector Medians

Debt / FCF Watch (highest leverage on TTM FCF)

Weekly Price Movement

Top 5 (week-over-week price)

Bottom 5 (week-over-week price)

Banks (shown separately — FCF metric not meaningful)

Finance-book — FCF not comparable

Customer-float / captive-finance / reserve businesses (IBKR broker float, KMX CarMax Auto Finance, PYPL customer funds, CRCL stablecoin reserves). The memo’s operating-FCF method overstates their FCF, so they are held off the ranked leaderboard pending the P&L-waterfall rebuild.

Data Gaps

90 of 90 ranked-eligible names ranked. 0 dropped for missing FCF yield or NTM revenue growth; 7 shown separately (banks + finance-book, FCF not comparable).

Source: cashflow-memo master_2026-06-19.csv. NTM growth from analyst-estimates consensus. Composite is a percentile rank, not a recommendation.

The Issue — This Week's Brief

The Cashflow Memo

The Week AI Became a Supply Story

The bottleneck moved from demand to supply this week. Micron’s Wednesday print is the first real test.

The Telltales Weekend Update. Ava Cabot and analyst Marcus Graham walk through what happened this week — and what’s coming next — across the 86 companies in the Cash Flow Memo. About 13 minutes. No filler. Download the memo at telltales.us. Hunt, Jason, and Mike are back Wednesday on episode E2626.

Chapter markers

* Time | Segment

* 0:15 | Cold open — the supply side of AI

* 0:45 | Theme — the two hardest things to build (ASML, GE Vernova)

* 4:45 | Deep dive — Micron, the print that sets the cycle

* 8:45 | Rapid-fire — Moderna, FedEx, Nike, Cheniere, Intel

* 11:45 | Close — Consensus Watch + the week ahead

Full transcript

Opening disclaimer

Ava: The following conversation is intended for informational purposes only. You should always do your own work to determine if an investment is suitable for you.

Cold open

Ava: You’re listening to the Telltales Weekend Update. I’m Ava Cabot.

Marcus: And I’m Marcus Graham — the cashflow desk.

Ava: Quick note: the show is produced entirely with AI tools, and both voices you’re hearing are AI-generated. Send feedback through the Substack. This is still a pilot, so tell us what’s working and what isn’t.

Ava: And one more thing before we start — this one lands on Father’s Day. So happy Father’s Day to all the dads listening. We’re glad you’re spending part of the morning with us.

Ava: Here’s the week in one sentence. The argument about whether anyone will actually buy all this AI compute? That got settled on Wednesday’s show. This week the question flipped to the other side of the ledger — can we build the supply. The machines that print the chips, the power that runs them, and the memory that feeds them. All three flashed at once. Three different stories, one spine — the build is now gated by what can physically be manufactured, not by whether the demand shows up. On this week’s Telltales, episode 2625, Hunt, Jason, and Mike spent the hour on the demand side — NVIDIA at $5 trillion, the end of the subsidized-token era, who actually pays for the compute.[^ep-e2625b] ...