One slide named the trade of the year. Three of its four bullets said memory.

Sources
Programmes: Hot Chips 37 official final programme, hc2025.hotchips.org/program, cross-checked against ServeTheHome's June 2025 preliminary schedule — one title changed between the two, Broadcom's "Tomahawk-F1" becoming "Tomahawk Ultra" at launch in July 2025 · Hot Chips 38 programme, hc2026.hotchips.org/program, read live on 24 August 2026, cross-checked against a schedule screenshot supplied by John. The 2026 category ranking (Very Interesting / Interesting / Boring / Probably Junk) is from that screenshot and is not mine.

Presenter job titles are externally sourced — the Hot Chips programme prints only name and company, and slide PDFs are attendee-gated. Titles come from company newsrooms and IR releases, LinkedIn, past conference bios and published papers. Confirmed from a primary or strong source for 25 of 57 named presenters; 18 could not be confirmed and are marked as such; 14 rest on LinkedIn self-reporting or a dated citation and should be treated as approximate.

Memory-cohort window: closes on 16 September 2025 — the day the keynote video was published — against 21 August 2026. Every exchange traded on both dates; no nearest-day substitution. That window differs from the 25 August dates used for the conference cohorts, which is why Micron reads +508.7% there and +730.4% elsewhere — it had already moved between the conference and the upload. Kioxia announced a 3-for-1 split on 31 July 2026 effective 1 October 2026, after this window, so these figures are unaffected; data pulled after that date will be divided by three. SanDisk has had no split despite persistent speculation — its adjusted close equals its raw close on every row. · Price data via stockanalysis.com (S&P Global Market Intelligence) for US listings, Yahoo Finance Japan for TSE, the KRX series for Korean listings and the TWSE STOCK_DAY endpoint for Taiwan. All prices are actual closes on the exact dates — 25 August 2025 and 21 August 2026 — with no nearest-day substitution; every exchange traded on both dates. Market caps are intraday snapshots taken around midday EDT on 24 August 2026 while US markets were open and AI and memory names were selling off, so expect two to three points of drift against the close.

Cohort figures: HC38 median +59.1%, mean +161.1% across the fourteen with a full year of trading, eleven of fourteen positive. HC37 median +19.4%, mean +66.1%, six of eleven positive — a median identical to NVIDIA's +19.4% over the same window. Cerebras has no August 2025 price (private until it listed 14 May 2026 after pricing at $185), so no one-year figure exists and none is invented. Posters are excluded from both years: Murata (6981.T, +192.0%) gave an HC37 poster rather than a main-programme talk, and HC38's eleven posters are likewise excluded; counting Murata would lift the HC37 median to +22.3%.

Presenter titles: the programme prints only name and company. Titles confirmed from a primary source for 25 of 57 presenters; 18 could not be confirmed; 14 rest on LinkedIn or a dated citation. Two attribution notes: "Think Fast: LPU Accelerator" is listed under NVIDIA and both presenters came from Groq — the ex-Groq silicon team under the NVIDIA banner after the licensing deal; and Aayush Ankit is listed as Meta on the programme while aggregators place him at Google, with the programme treated as authoritative. The schedule's fifth category is not reproduced — that talk was withdrawn. Day chips: purple Sunday tutorials, blue Monday, pale blue Tuesday.

Listing status verified individually in August 2026, not assumed. Excluded as private: OpenAI (confidential S-1 submitted, not yet public), SambaNova, SiFive, d-Matrix, Lightmatter, Ayar Labs, Together AI, XCENA, Oxmiq Labs, BOS Semiconductors, Canonical, Objective Analysis, Everactive, Huawei, PEZY Computing, Rapidus (IPO targeted FY2031), and Waymo (wholly inside Alphabet — no spinoff, no tracking stock). Two corrections to bad data in circulation: Lightmatter has not IPO'd — EDGAR shows only Form D private placements, and secondary vehicles were still buying private shares on 20 August 2026; and Ayar Labs was not acquired by Nvidia — that story misreads Nvidia's $6.5B portfolio-wide photonics commitment. Celestial AI was genuinely acquired, by Marvell, closing 2 February 2026. Fabric8Labs has agreed to a TDK acquisition (announced 10 June 2026); closing unconfirmed.

Where this could be wrong: Samsung and SK hynix both announced large buybacks in the final week of the window, so the closing price sits on an event spike — Samsung fell 8.7% on 24 August, with Micron −5.6% and SanDisk −7.4% the same day. Intel's +267% is real per share but heavily diluted, share count 4.4B to 5.25B. And one slide is one slide: Shazeer also listed PFLOPs and network bandwidth, and picking memory out of four bullets is easier afterwards than before.

Calculated, not sourced: all cohort medians, means, positive counts and the new-arrival versus both-years split are computed by me from the price table above. Cohort sizes are twelve and fourteen — far too small for statistical inference, and described that way in the text.

Conflicts and caveats left unresolved: Cerebras closed at $196.13 on 21 August 2026 per stockanalysis.com, while John supplied a price of $202 for the same date in earlier work; both figures are stated rather than reconciled. A research pass separately reported Cerebras as still private, which is wrong — it listed on Nasdaq on 14 May 2026 following a 13 May pricing at $185. Samsung and SK hynix closes sit on top of capital-return announcements made in the final week of the window; Samsung fell 8.7% on 24 August. Intel's return is real per share but the share count rose from roughly 4.4B to 5.25B over the period. Aayush Ankit is listed as Meta on the programme and as Google by aggregators. No stock split, reverse split, redomiciliation or ticker change affected any name in this set between the two dates — Broadcom's 10-for-1 (Jul 2024), Fujitsu's 10-for-1 (Apr 2024) and Murata's 3-for-1 (Sep 2023) all predate the window.