Well, so far, I've been destroyed by this trade in the Great Leopold Liquidation™ of 2026. Figured I would start with some honestly. The point of this post is to revisit the fundamentals of this trade idea and they are STRONGER THAN EVER FFS.
Okay. Wolfspeed reports earnings on the 19th. Let's look at what may be announced based on news surrounding the sector/trade thesis that I have spent many posts and months researching and explaining.
Check my post history for the 1.5Billion in grants that Wolfspeed is in line for. I would have thought that they would have come already, but this damn administration is edging me with all of the adjacent CHIPS act money and general legislation that has passed since my last post.
On July 29 the Department of commerce got their money gun out for CHIPS dollars. GlobalFoundries got $300 million for co-packaged optics, Kepler $245 million for AI memory, Multibeam $140 million for advanced packaging, Extropic $75 million, etc. etc.
Here is the part that matters. The Department of Commerce is taking a minority, non-controlling equity stake in every single one of them as a condition of the money. Not a grant. Equity. THIS WAS MY THESIS FOR WOLF. I HAVE BLUE BALLS DAMMIT.
This is the template now. Equity plus a loan for the most strategically important domestic semi manufacturers.
WTF is polysilicon?
On August 6 the President signed a Section 232 proclamation on polysilicon and its derivatives. Effective December 4, 2026, it establishes price floors and a 15 percent tariff.
The justification paragraph in the announcement is the tell. US' share of global polysilicon production capacity fell from 50 percent in 2005 to under 2 percent in 2024. That is the entire argument. A strategic upstream material with defense and defense-adjacent uses, where domestic capacity was competed to zero by (Chinese) foreign supply.
Do you think they forgot about SiC?
Chinese manufacturers had roughly 40 percent of global silicon carbide substrate and epitaxial wafer capacity by 2024 and are aggressively scaling 8-inch. State Council approved fifteen new lines. SICC and TankeBlue shipped 680,000 six-inch-equivalent wafers in 2025. Digitimes ran the piece in June about China tightening its grip on SiC as the industry shifts to 8-inch. This is the same movie as polysilicon, roughly fifteen years earlier in the plot, running on a material the Presidential Determination of April 20, 2026 already named as essential to national defense under DPA Title III via "power control electronics."
These are two different materials but there is no rational reason why the us govt would treat either of these differently.
This polysilicon action is the exact template that the us gov has used before. Section 232 for the upstream material, price floor, and company-specific negotiated deals for whoever is actually building here. This admin has now run that playbook on steel, aluminum, copper, timber, lumber, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors under Proclamation 11002, rare earths, and now polysilicon (and probably optical transceivers though that one is regarded)
Wolfspeed owns the only 200mm silicon carbide device fab on United States soil. In every one of these actions the company that already built the domestic capacity is the one that gets the money. WOLFSPEED IS GONNA GET THE FUCKIN MONEY. I just don't know when.
On to actual company news:
August 6 : Wolfspeed and LITEON announced a strategic partnership and, more importantly, the successful qualification of Wolfspeed silicon carbide for deployment in LITEON's 800 VDC power sidecar and compute rack PSU platforms, targeting data centre (likely starting with Vera Rubin) i.e. these deployments are imminent.
Who TF is LITEON? They are one of the named power system component partners in Nvidia's 800 VDC ecosystem, alongside Delta, Flex Power, Lead Wealth and Megmeet. At GTC 2026 they showed an 800 VDC power rack, a 110 kW power shelf built for the Vera Rubin NVL72 platform. W