Motley Fool Money - 1 Chip Stock Making Bold Plans

Episode Date: May 7, 2026

It takes a lot of careful thought and planning to add more semiconductor manufacturing capacity. ARM Holdings has said they’ve seen enough demand that they are getting into the manufacturing business themselves. On today’s show, we break down ARMs decision to add production capacity, how it compared to AMD’s results, Doordash’s peculiar earnings, and we dig into the mailbag. Tyler Crowe, Matt Frankel, and Jon Quast discuss: - ARM Holdings and Advanced Micro Devices blowout earnings - ARM’s ambitious new goal to build its own chips - The bottlenecks to bringing on new chip capacity - Doordash’s earnings missing guidance - Mailbag: Why do Starbucks and Dominoes have negative shareholder equity? - Mailbag: How will the SaaSpocalypse affect CRM and WIX? Companies discussed: AMD, ARM, NVDA, GOOG, META, ASML, LCRX, KLAC, DASH, SBUX, DPZ, CRM, WIX Host: Tyler Crowe Guests: Matt Frankel, Jon Quast Engineer: Dan Boyd Disclosure: Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. The Motley Fool and its affiliates (collectively, “TMF”) do not endorse, recommend, or verify the accuracy or completeness of the statements made within advertisements. TMF is not involved in the offer, sale, or solicitation of any securities advertised herein and makes no representations regarding the suitability, or risks associated with any investment opportunity presented. Investors should conduct their own due diligence and consult with legal, tax, and financial advisors before making any investment decisions. TMF assumes no responsibility for any losses or damages arising from this advertisement. We’re committed to transparency: All personal opinions in advertisements from Fools are their own. The product advertised in this episode was loaned to TMF and was returned after a test period or the product advertised in this episode was purchased by TMF. Advertiser has paid for the sponsorship of this episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠megaphone.fm/adchoices⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We've got earnings galore on Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. Welcome to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. I'm your host Tyler Crow, and today I'm joined by longtime contributors, John Quas, and Matt Frankel. We're going to do a whole bunch of earnings reactions today because it's been a busy week related to earnings. And, of course, we're going to hit our mailbag at the end of the show. First, as we're going to start, we're going to talk about basically semiconductor earnings because it has been one of the big talking points of the week. arm holdings and advanced micro devices AMD, both reported within the past couple of days.

And after both earnings, we saw shares explode as they blasted past earnings expectations, 15, 20% moves in the day. We're going to start with arm holdings today because shares are quickly retreating after the company mentioned on its call after hours that mobile growth was, well, not really growth. and that rising costs were going to impact commodity mobile device sales. John, Matt, you two played rock, paper, scissors to cover the two. John, you happened to pick arm holdings as a result. What did you see in the earnings release and the conference call? And was today's reaction to this, hey, maybe mobile growth isn't great? Was that like an appropriate response, do you think, to what you saw?

Well, Tyler, I think the market reaction is appropriate, but not for the reason that you mentioned here. And so I just want to frame this. It is important that you mention the mobile aspect of the business, because if we zoom way out, I don't want to take for granted that all of our listeners know what Arm Holdings is. This is a company that really rose in prominence due to mobile devices. Its chips are more energy efficient than other chips on the market, and that's a really big deal when you're looking at battery life and a mobile device.

So it was able to rise. It does not make its own chips historically. it licenses these products to the manufacturers of the mobile devices. But if you look at what we have right now in AI, we have a bottleneck. You've heard about many bottlenecks. The big one is electricity.

Power is scarce, and this is driving AI companies to try to find more energy-efficient solutions. And so Arm makes CPUs, and it claims they're two times more efficient than conventional X-86 infrastructure, or architecture. And that's the kind that Intel makes, for example.

And so Arm is claiming that they can save AI companies $10 billion per gigawatts in capital expenditures in a data center. So that's a really big deal. And I think the big news here lately with Arm has been it's not going to just license the technology anymore. It's going to make its own chips. It's going to actually be a chip maker.

And it's kind of a no-brainer. According to the company, it can make 10 times the gross profit per chip than just licensing it. So, I mean, that's a huge thing. And if you look, management says here in the most recent quarter, it already has $2 billion worth of demand over the next two years for its custom or for its in-house chips. So that's a really big adoption curve.

That's really good. But what is the hang up here? The hang up here is that if you look out to fiscal 2013, which mostly overlaps with calendar 2030. So just four years away from now. It's saying that, look, by them we'll have $25 billion, maybe, in trailing 12-month revenue. Maybe we'll have $9 in adjusted earnings per share. You look at where the market cap was before earnings, and it's gone up a lot mostly due to competitors' earnings results already. It was trading at an over $250 billion market cap, projecting maybe $25 billion in annual revenue in four years. That's over 10 times it's four year forward sales. And you look at earnings.

It's trading it somewhere in the ballpark of 23 times earnings on an adjusted basis four years out into the future. That's a really pricey valuation for a company that a lot of exciting things are happening. And I do believe that its products are going to be more and more needed for AI data centers, but it just got way out in front of its skates here. To say that high valuations, that seems to be par for the course for just about anything that's tangentially related to AI infrastructure or semiconductors, whatever. And, you know, in that vein, we have another relatively highly valued company here with AMD, who shares jumped as much as 20% yesterday after earnings release. Now, Matt, I didn't get a chance as much to look over the details, but I bet it had to do with AI spend. I mean, prove me wrong.

Yeah, and it's not just the 20% gain yesterday. AMD has tripled over the past year. And yes, it has to do with AI spend. That's really the lazy explanation for it, though. So I'm going to go a little bit into depth with that. So revenue, of course, grew significantly faster than analyst thought. And the big driver was, as you say, the 57% growth into that data center segment, which is AI spend.

But the guidance was a big part of the reaction to the stock. second quarter revenue guidance came in much higher than expected and implied a surprising acceleration in growth. And Lisa Sue, the AMD, CEO said AMD expects server growth to accelerate and that the company should deliver tens of billions of dollars in just data center AI revenue next year alone. But really, the X factor here, this is kind of what I meant by that the AI spend just doesn't tell the full story, is the strong CPU business that AMD has. that's a big differentiator from invidia.

AMD is a distant second to Nvidia on the GPU side of the business, which is to this point has been generally synonymous with data center chips. But AMD is a CPU leader, and this is becoming an increasingly important part of AI compute power, especially in the agentic age that we're approaching.

So although the data center segment is the main story here, it's also important to note the client segment, which includes the chips that AMD puts in PCs and laptops and things like that, that grew rapidly and indicated that the AMD Risen processors continue to take market share from Intel. So that just kind of underscores the strength of their CPU business and why the market might be so optimistic on them right now. There's a lot to look forward to with AMD later this year. They're going to start shipping their Helios full rack system for AI data centers. That's a direct competitor with products and video offers and charged about $3 million a piece for.

And Open AI and meta have already placed large orders. Meta in particular is an especially interesting deal because it's literally one of the single largest AI infrastructure deals that has ever been announced so far. So there's a lot to like. It's tripled over the past year, but it's for a reason. I want to kind of expand on what John was talking about with Arm getting into building their own chips now. Because we're seeing. more and more companies wanting to do this. Alphabet said they want to do it. I think Metas even mentioned it. Tesla has floated the idea of the tariffab. It all sounds ambitious, and I understand why. But one of the things I think about with the semiconductor industry is that,

yes, building fabs is nice and new. It definitely increased production. But also there are bottlenecks behind the bottlenecks, right? You have companies like ASML, Lamb Research, as well as KLA corporations. You know, these companies that, you know, we think of like the bottleneck. It's like, oh, Taiwan semi or Intel, they're like the only game in town in terms of chip manufacturing. Well, ASML is the only game in town when it is the equipment to make the chip factories. And I'm very curious when I hear these companies saying, we're going to do this, that they're all going to have to put in orders with these, you know, chip manufacturing equipment companies. And I do wonder to arms, you know, ambitious goals, how long we're going to be. How long we're

are they going to have to wait in line for this equipment? How long is it going to take to build out? We've been talking about cost inflation and things like that. And I bring this up specifically because I've been thinking about this a lot lately, that as much as this is an explosive growth, and we have, you know, AI infrastructure, basically finding any chip that they can find, whether it's, you know, reused crypto mining or whatever. It seems like whatever spare parts or compute power, we can get their hands on, they're going to use it. But, it is still a cyclical industry. And as ambitious as all this growth is, you know, how much capacity expansion can we have in chip manufacturing

before something really starts to like shift, right? Because even if we have this five-year growth period and we bring all this new capacity online, we could be looking at it six, seven years from now, and all of a sudden we're way over capacity. And I feel like that's a major risk for some, especially somebody like arm holdings who doesn't have this yet. and wants to get into it. So do you, are you guys seeing something similar or is it like, I think you're just kind of, you know, shaking at the wrong problem here. I do see that as a problem.

I don't see it as a problem yet. I'll put it that way. So like I said, arm holdings is, is a different animal because they're building this chip business from scratch, essentially. You know, AMD already has enough capacity for what it's doing now. It has somewhat of a backlog, but it's very managed. And I mean, the big question is, you know, how long can we see this exponential growth go for? And how much are they going to invest in infrastructure and production capacity and things like that before things turn?

And that's really, you know, because right now supply and demand are clearly not in equilibrium, right? I mean, there's far more demand than there is supply in the chipmaking industry. That's why we're seeing companies like micron, you know, the memory companies. You know, they literally can't build their products fast enough. Same with Nvidia and AMD. You know, Invidia used the word sold out in its latest earnings report several times to talk about products. So for now, it's, yes, there's a backlog on the, you know, ASML, the equipment that the chipmakers are using to make their products. But right now it's working on the favor of AMD and Nvidia.

With Armand, I'm curious to get John's thoughts here. It's a little bit of a different animal, like, can they scale? quickly enough while the demand is still on the rise, while they still have the ability to turn this into a significant revenue stream. And I don't know the answer to that. Yeah, I think that's the key, Matt. If these companies could snap their fingers today and increase the production to meet the current demand, then I think that it would be a higher risk of overcapacity. But because these things do take multiple years and because there are bottlenecks, even to them increasing their production capabilities. And you mentioned ASML. I think that's a good point right there.

That is going to mitigate some of that risk because they can't increase the capacity as much as they would like to right now. So it's multiple years out into the future to bring the supply up. And I guess it really depends on where you fall personally on the growth curve of the ongoing AI revolution. Does the demand continue to increase from here for these products and services? If so, then the supply is still going to tend to lag behind for multiple years. But if demand is plateauing already while supply is ramping, yes, that is the higher risk right there. I'm personally in the camp that I think that the demand for the products are going to continue to rise at least with the supply. So I don't see the big risk.

As much sickocality risk as I've seen in the past. Yeah, and just wrapping it up here, I think I'm more or less in line with you guys, but I reserve the right on some curveball of like algorithm, algorithmic efficiency where like power and compute use goes way down relative to what we're seeing out of Anthropic, OpenAI, and the big power users today. You know, maybe they start seeing some sort of deep seek-esque drop in compute power per token or however we want to measure it. So, yes, I think it's there,

but I think we should all be ready for those curves that could happen. I mean, we've seen it in numerous other industries before. After the break, Matt and John are kind of walk me through what I don't understand in DoorDash's earnings. Dell PCs with Intel Inside are built for the moments that matter, for the moments you plan and the ones you don't. Built for the busy days that turn into all-night study sessions, the moment you're working from a cafe and realize every outlet is taken.

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BATES built for you. Like I said before the break here, I had a really hard time understanding what's going on with DoorDash's earnings and like the response that we're seeing in the stock based on what they released. So you're going to have to help me here. DoorDash order volume. It's gross order value. It's revenue. They were all up a nice clip like 25, 30%.

But operating profit, net income, operating cash flow were all down year over year on rising operating costs. Now, the market seemed to like this. Shares are roughly up, I think, 2% as we are taping. And I'm a little perplexed by this because, in theory, this is supposed to be one of those capital-light economic-scale businesses where growth is supposed to outpace overhead costs and lead to expanding margins. I think at where we're at right now, you know, was it like $3,4 billion over the past 12

months in terms of revenue? That's pretty good scale for an online delivery company. but we're still headed in the other direction with operating costs. And so as you guys looked at, again, conference calls, earnings, maybe some press releases that you've seen over the past quarter, what's been going on with DoorDash, is this just like a one-time blip? Is this something that there's something else going on here

where costs are expanding because of who they're delivering to or something like that? What am I missing when I see this in the market reaction? First of all, everything you said was right. And it's also rare for a company to miss revenue expectations on top of everything you just mentioned, and then rise the next day. That's pretty rare. I mean, in addition to Q2 guidance was a little stronger than expected. That's usually not enough to completely offset of revenue miss and rising costs. But there are three specific things I see

from kind of reading between the lines and listening to the conference call. So number one, the dash pass, the membership program, the growth rate of that accelerated. That was the one part of the business that accelerated during the quarter. And that's a good indicator that the company is creating a more engaged customer base, and it should help drive future growth. Membership growth is kind of a lagging indicator when it comes to revenue growth. So that's one thing. Second, the company, they reported an all-time high when it comes to engagement with its members using its services for things other than restaurant deliveries, say groceries or drugstore deliveries. That's a crucial part of the future thesis, and it's still a relatively

small part of the business. Restaurant delivery is the cash cow. So that doesn't show up as much in the numbers as, you know, enough to really move the needle yet. And finally, recall, in late 2025, the reason DoorDash's stock originally took a dive was because management was planning to spend, quote, hundreds of millions more than expected on technology initiatives, marketing, things like that, the rising costs that you mentioned. In this report, we saw the first clear indicator for management that they're getting a decent ROI on these investments, particularly when it comes to the international business, which is also a very big part of the thesis. So that was a really long way of saying that, yes, everything you mentioned is correct,

but they're giving us a lot to like when it comes to looking to Q2 and beyond, not just the guidance numbers. Well, I mean, it's correct on a technicality, but there is a lot of one-time blip here that I think is worth highlighting. And when I say one time, I don't mean quarter. I mean annual, on an annual basis, there's a blip here. that is due to an acquisition that Doordash made in Deliveroo late in 2025. Because of the acquisition, we have a huge jump in expected depreciation and amortization expenses this year. In fact, it's expecting a greater than 50% jump from last year. And when you look at it, about 40% of what it's amortizing this year, $450 million of that, that's from

acquired intangible assets. Outside of this, you look at the operating expenses and things actually look pretty good. So sales and marketing only up 27 percent, R&D of 30, GNA of 30. That is behind revenue growth of 33%. So Deliveroo, it brought some inorganic growth there to contribute to that 33% top line number. But DoorDash itself grew over 20%. And I think at this stage of the business, to still see 20% growth on its own. That's huge. So yes, you have to back out this one-time blip from the acquisition. Overall, the acquisition is a net positive so far. And you look at all the other operating expenses. They're actually, you're seeing that operational leverage that you referenced in the outset of this conversation, Tyler. All right. So we have a big acquisition coming in Deliveroo. Also, it looks like,

you know, the mix of deliveries might be headed towards ever so slightly. compressing margins. So with kind of these, like, I would call them shorter term, like headwinds or elevated costs or whatever you want to call it, do you feel like the company is on track with what they want to do as an investment today? Like if you were to look at this company and be like, if I wanted to buy shares today, would you say kind of like all green lights ahead? What are some of the things that actually may have concerned you that would make you either think twice or make you want to think a little bit harder before you actually make the acquisition yourself?

I mean, on one hand, I want to see their Q2 numbers. I want to see that, you know, what they're talking about is actually translating into reality in terms of the engagement with, you know, non-restorants with, you know, they're getting a better ROI on their, on all these hundreds of millions they're spending. So I, but at the same time,

it looks like everything's progressing as they want. And I mean, as I don't own shares of Dordas yet, but it is definitely on my, watch list and I think it's moving in the right direction. From a business perspective, I don't see any big red flags here, Tyler. In fact, DoorDash continues to surpass my expectations. What concerns me from a value, from a investment perspective is the valuation trading at 40 times free cash flow. I don't necessarily mind that. I just question, how big is this market? I don't really know personally. And when something is trading at 40 times free cash flow and I don't know what the

trajectory looks like over the long term, that kind of concerns me. But from a business perspective, continues to just blow me away. After the break, we're going to do a dip into the mailbag. This episode is brought to you by FedEx. These days, the power move isn't having a big metallic credit card to drop on the check at a corporate launch. The real power move is leveling up your business with FedEx intelligence and accessing one of the biggest data networks powered by one of the biggest delivery networks. Level up your business with FedEx, the new power move. Hey, as always, quick reminder, if you have a question for us and you want to get

and have it read on air, we'll do our best to answer as many as we can. We're getting a lot. We're trying to find ways that we can answer them all. So we're actually going to do a little bit of an expanded version of this today. But if you want to get your own questions in, send them to podcasts at fool.com. That's podcast at fool.com. my three requests, the list keeps getting longer, is keep it foolish, keep it short, and we cannot give personalized advice. That's a lawyer thing, and we don't want to get in trouble with any

regulators on giving personalized advice when we are not registered people to do so. So just keep those things in mind when you're asking questions. Now, I'm going to get, our biggest question is about the SaaSpocalypse, and we had a couple people write in specifically about a couple companies, but I wanted to hit this one first because this one just absolutely tugged at my heartstrings because it's an esoteric balance sheet question. And it comes from Shannon. And the question is Starbucks and Domino's pizza currently have negative stockholder equity. Would you please address how an investor might interpret negative stockholder equity in a company and whether it's a sign of poor capital allocation? Guys, I think I'm in love. But just give me a minute for here. And I'm going to

explain this because this is kind of like wonky balance sheet stuff that I love to get into. So you can basically have negative equity for two reasons. You can lose money over time and have negative retained earnings. You have, you know, unprofitable companies for a long time. But you can also have negative retained earnings if, negative equity, if, for example, you buy a company buys back a lot of its stock or it pays a generous dividend because dividends are not retained earnings and bought back stock is called treasury. stock and it goes against the earnings of a company. So if you buy back more stock than you earn and retain in earnings, you can actually dwindle down the equity in the company to the point

of zero. As you mentioned, Domino's is a version of this and Starbucks is a version of this. And there's several other companies too. I think it's either Moody's or MSCI, both companies that have negative shareholder equity because they've done so much to reward shareholders with buybacks and dividends that they don't have shareholder equity anymore. So when you see this, you have to look at it as whether or not the company is doing it because they're unprofitable or because they're throwing a bunch of cash back to its investors. In this case, I would say, at least in Domino's and Starbucks's case, over time, it's been

good capital allocation because they have been able to enhance shareholder returns through buybacks and dividends to knock down the equity. So I hope that answers your question. I saw this question and I was like, I have to answer this one by myself. I'm sorry that I made you guys sit through that, but this was absolutely what I wanted to hit. But for you guys, we had a couple, this was basically an aggregation of about four or five different questions, about SaaSpocalypse hitting software companies. And we had Daniel S asked specifically about Salesforce and Laura M asked specifically about Wix.

I'm going to let you guys pick which one you want to discuss in relation to the SaaSpocalypse, John, you go first. Yeah, I picked Wix here, Tyler, and this is a online website building kind of a company, e-commerce if you wanted to build your own platform. I do believe that there is trouble coming for many software companies because of the capabilities of AI and just how fast they are accelerating. I wouldn't necessarily lump Wix in with that crowd personally, and here's why. If you're a

AI, or if you're a software customer, you're asking, why am I paying for this when there is AI tooling out there? So what, why do I need this? And in the case of Wix, yes, it does offer software, and some of that could theoretically be replaced with AI, but there are other things that Wix offers,

and I would lump GoDaddy in with this crowd as well, when you look at web domain hosting, and you look at memory, These are things that you may need if you're building a website or building an e-commerce business, and Wix offers those things. So I don't think that you're going to abandon Wix for an AI tool because of the things that you get from Wix that you really do need, and that AI doesn't necessarily replace today. And in fact, I believe that AI can be additive for a business such as Wix because they can provide now AI enhancements to what they already offer,

especially with like website design. You can just bolt on some AI and we can potentially get easier to develop websites and flashier and more like what you want. So I think that's a net positive in the end. Now, there are other concerns I have with Wix in particular, free cash flow.

I don't like how they backed out some corporate headquarter build out to their calculation of free cash flow. I don't like that they tout that they're repurchasing shares and the share count is still going up. I have other issues and I own this and I may consider selling it at some point in the future for those reasons. But I'm not concerned about the AI taking over this business component

of what a lot of people are scared up here with Wix. I chose Salesforce and it's a stock that I'm a little bit more on the fence about when it comes to AI disruption than John is with Wix. So it's certainly a stock that investors seem to be concerned about. For Salesforce to move down 35% from its 52 week high, as far as text, go, it's generally a low volatility name, so that's a really big move. There are solid bull and bare cases to be made when it comes to AI disrupting Salesforce's business. I mean, on one hand, the company is still growing the top line by double digits, not by much, but 10% is still double-digit growth and generating really strong cash flow. Plus the AI-related metrics have all

been moving in the right direction. Annual recurring revenue from the agent force platform is now $800 million. Not a giant part of its revenue yet, but up $100,000. 70% year over year. Plus, and this is probably the most interesting statistic, over 60% of agent force, agent force and data 360 bookings in the most recent quarter came from Salesforce's existing customers, not from outside of the ecosystem. So that indicates that it's using AI to expand its customer relationships. It's not losing customers and churning them. So on the other hand, the core, the CRM business is growing at a pretty slow, just a single-digit, rate. And it remains to be seen if, you know, the headwinds are going to be more powerful

than the AI tail wins. Because like I mentioned, the AI part of the business is growing nice, but it's still a small part. Management seems confident with an accelerated $25 billion buyback, but I'm going to channel my inner Tyler Crow here and say that that also says that they can't do anything, they can't find anything better to do with $25 billion than just buy back their own stock, which for a tech company that's supposed to be fast growing and leaning into AI is also kind of a little bit of a concern. So this is a long way to say that I think Salesforce will be relatively unscathed by the AI headwinds over the next few years, but beyond that, there are legitimate questions. Yeah, it seems like with a lot of software companies, it's like, oh,

AI is killing us when sometimes it might actually be something that's not AI related, that's the actual problem here. Potentially, that's what's going on with Wix in Salesforce today. And that's why we see their stocks go down. As always, people on the program may have interests in the stock, they talk about, and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you're here. All personal finance content follows Motley Fool 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. Thanks for producer Dan Boyd and the rest of the

Motley Fool team. For John, Matt, myself, thanks for listening and we'll chat again soon.