DeepSeek's New Model Cuts HBM Needs by 75%
US markets are closed for the weekend. The next session opens Monday, September 14, at 9:30 a.m. ET (4:30 p.m. in Istanbul).
The story carrying into the weekend came out of a model release. DeepSeek's V4.1-Flash, published September 10, needs one-quarter the HBM and one-eighth the SSD capacity of the previous generation for its KV cache. The technical report puts the resident HBM footprint at 890 bytes per token.
The memory thesis rested on one assumption: AI usage and memory demand rise together. DeepSeek loosened that link.
The reaction came Friday in Seoul. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix each fell more than 3%. Micron and SanDisk closed higher in US trading the same day; that gap can close on Monday.
The numbers are tighter at SanDisk. Data center revenue reached $2.98B last quarter, up 103% sequentially.
About two-thirds of that growth came from price rather than volume. Pricing power rests on the scarcity assumption.
The second item is an index mechanic. Nasdaq's pro forma data puts SpaceX's Nasdaq 100 weighting at roughly