Custom Silicon
ASICs and custom accelerator designs (in-house or merchant silicon) for specific AI workloads.
Stack position
Where Custom Silicon sits in the AI stack
L4 · HBM / Memory
HBM/DRAM bandwidth beside accelerators, plus enterprise NAND/HDD capacity. US-listed tickers or ADRs only.
L4 · Custom Silicon
ASICs and custom accelerator designs (in-house or merchant silicon) for specific AI workloads.
L5 · Networking
Interconnect, switching, and high-speed data-movement silicon linking compute clusters.
L5 · Optical
Optical transceivers and fiber connectivity for datacenter-scale networking.
Icons mark layer roles — not company logos. Position only; not a price chart.
Why this layer matters
Hyperscalers large enough to amortise a tape-out design their own accelerators rather than buying only merchant parts. That shifts value toward the design partners and IP that make an in-house chip possible.
What is the bottleneck?
Custom silicon competes for the same advanced packaging and HBM supply as merchant accelerators. Designing your own chip does not create capacity, it reallocates it.
A structural observation about supplier concentration and lead times — not a view on any security.
Who sits in this layer?
Company
AVGOPrimary business sits hereCustom ASIC design partner for hyperscaler in-house accelerators.
Company
MRVLPrimary business sits hereCustom silicon and ASIC design for cloud/AI infrastructure customers.
Public 13F filings citing these securities
Research context, not a recommendation. These are facts on file with the SEC; the classification that puts a security in this layer is ours, and the filer made no such claim.
- ARK Investment Managementreported a position inAVGOForm 13F-HR for the period ending 2026-06-30, filed 2026-08-14 · SEC filing
- Appaloosa Managementreported a position inAVGOForm 13F-HR for the period ending 2026-06-30, filed 2026-08-14 · SEC filing
- Bridgewater Associatesreported a position inAVGOForm 13F-HR for the period ending 2026-06-30, filed 2026-08-14 · SEC filing
- Coatue Managementreported a position inAVGOForm 13F-HR for the period ending 2026-06-30, filed 2026-08-14 · SEC filing
- Fundstrat Capitalreported a position inAVGOForm 13F-HR for the period ending 2026-06-30, filed 2026-08-13 · SEC filing
- Tiger Global Managementreported a position inAVGOForm 13F-HR for the period ending 2026-06-30, filed 2026-08-14 · SEC filing
Rows below are public SEC Form 13F-HR filings, reported by the filing entity for the period shown and filed later — they are never current holdings. Form 13F covers long US equity positions only: it excludes short positions, cash, non-US holdings and most derivatives, and a reported position may have been sold since. Assigning a ticker to a layer is XingAI's classification, not the filer's. Nothing here is a recommendation, and an institution reporting a position is not a reason to take one.
Coverage boundary
Coverage boundary: US-listed tickers or ADRs only (same rule as TSM / ASML). Important suppliers without a US listing are omitted even when they matter to the stack. That is a coverage rule, not a quality ranking.
No hand-listed notable omissions for this layer yet. The US-list / ADR rule still applies.
Checked 2026-10-09. Not exhaustive.
Same track
Descriptive positioning only. The positioning label says whether a company's business is exposed to a layer, never whether to buy it. Layers with no exposure are not recommendations to add any.