Silicon carbide is the material behind the most efficient power electronics in electric vehicles and, eventually, robots. The “Elon Musk’s NEW AI Masterplan” pitch from Brownstone Research’s Near Future Report points at onsemi as its applications pick, but onsemi does not own the material on its own. It competes in a small peer group of silicon carbide players, and understanding that group is the best way to judge the pick.
The pitch’s headline promise is that three “secret” stocks can “unleash enough wealth to make every household in America $2.38 million.” The silicon carbide peer group is the deeper layer underneath that promise, so it is worth laying out who the players are and how they differ.
The players, in plain terms
The silicon carbide market breaks into a few categories. There are pure-play material companies, like Wolfspeed, which grows silicon carbide wafers and makes devices on them. There are the diversified power giants, like Infineon, STMicroelectronics, and onsemi, which sell silicon carbide devices alongside a much larger silicon business. And there are equipment and substrate suppliers further up the chain.
onsemi is the second-largest power chipmaker in the world and has built silicon carbide capacity through its own fabs and acquisitions. That makes it a diversified way to play the material, with most of its revenue still coming from plain silicon power chips and automotive image sensors. It is also one of the biggest suppliers of image sensors to the automotive market, which gives it a second angle on robotics.
Pure play versus diversified
The pure play and the diversified approach trade risk differently. Wolfspeed gives concentrated exposure to the silicon carbide ramp, which means more upside if the material takes off, but more sensitivity to the cost of ramping fabs and to demand timing. A diversified name like onsemi or Infineon gives you the silicon carbide story as one slice of a larger, profitable business, which is steadier but less concentrated.
For an investor choosing between them, the question is whether you want a bet on the material itself or a broader bet on power electronics that happens to include the material. Neither is wrong. They just answer different questions.
How the pitch maps onto the group
The Masterplan pitch does not name its picks outright. Our teardown identified the three as ASML for the chips step, STMicroelectronics for the energy step, and onsemi for the applications step. STMicroelectronics is itself a major silicon carbide player, so two of the three picks sit in this peer group. The pitch frames onsemi as the “backdoor” into robotics, and it says onsemi is “already supplying Tesla with a key piece of sensor technology,” which is accurate.
The honest caveats
The same caveats that apply to onsemi apply to the group. onsemi trades at about 18 times forward earnings with a roughly $28 billion market cap, and its tease price equals the current close of $71.67, a re-pitch at the current price. The robot catalyst is real but years away, and today’s revenue is overwhelmingly automotive and industrial.
There is also a marquee number aimed elsewhere. The ad’s “$500 billion in 2027” figure is aimed at ASML, whose annual revenue is around $30 billion. It is a rhetorical flourish, not a forecast, and the “39 hedge funds are investing” line is filler that is true of every large-cap.
The supply chain is the detail that explains most of the risk in this group. Silicon carbide devices start with wafers, and growing defect-free silicon carbide wafers is harder and slower than growing silicon ones. That bottleneck is why vertical integration, growing the wafer and making the device under one roof, is such a big deal here. Wolfspeed is built around exactly that, while diversified players like onsemi and Infineon supplement their own capacity with outside substrates. The wafer bottleneck is the single most important technical variable in how fast the whole group can grow, and it is the reason the pure play carries more near-term balance-sheet risk than the diversified names do. When you read about silicon carbide stocks, the wafer question is usually the difference between a smooth ramp and a stumble, which is exactly the kind of fine print this site exists to surface.
The takeaway
Silicon carbide is a genuine technology shift, and the peer group around onsemi gives investors several ways to play it, from the concentrated Wolfspeed to the diversified onsemi, Infineon, and STMicroelectronics. Each trades risk for focus differently. For more on the material itself, see our silicon carbide explainer, and for the robot angle, our Tesla Optimus coverage.
The offer is worth stating plainly. The Near Future Report costs $179 for the first year and renews at $199, with a 30-day refund window, so you can read the full reports and ask for your money back if they do not hold up. Subscribing unlocks the special report the pitch is built around, the “Manifested AGI Revolution,” which names the stocks the ad teases. The fine print worth remembering is that these are large, well-covered companies trading near their current prices, not the “secret” the headline suggests.
Ready to see the research? Click here to view the Elon Musk’s AI Masterplan presentation.
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