Blayne’s Bytes: Model Wars, ODM Shipments, Memory News

Research evidence excerpt

Blayne’s Bytes: Model Wars, ODM Shipments, Memory News

USA | Semiconductors EquityJulyResearch10, 2026

Blayne’s Bytes: Model Wars, ODM Shipments,

Memory News

Big news out of META and SPCX this week with model releases that appear

to be competitive at the frontier. Pricing compression continues underscoring

our view that token growth remains the single most important metric to the

.

durability of capex spend. MU and other Memory vendors ramp spending plans

and ODMs note Kyber likely slipping into C28, but that Oberon rack demand

remains undeterred. As always reach out to TeamBlayne@jefferies.com with

anything you need.

For our take on GF's partnership with SEALSQ, please see KG's Kernels:

Model Wars Cometh – xAI and META Debut Frontier Models at Discounted Pricing: The release

of two new legitimately competitive frontier models from SPCX and META this week are a definitive

positive for the ecosystem. Competition at the frontier is extremely important to the durability of

hyperscaler capex and the success of these releases offers a positive readthrough for several

names across our coverage but NVDA and CRDO stand out. As a reminder, META and SPCX have

concentrated on NVDA GPUs to compete more effectively at the frontier, which appears to be paying

off. Pricing also stands out from the releases and represents potentially the more consequential

signal for the ecosystem. At $2/MT input and $6/MT output, Grok 4.5 is priced more than 60% below

Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5. META’s strategy points in the same direction, with Muse Spark 1.1 priced

at $1.25/MT input and $4.25/MT output, with META management explicitly framing the launch as

“very low cost” and calling rival lab pricing “very extreme”. We would note that SPCX and META’s