Aixtron: The Growth Step (Pt.1)
The quiet German monopoly behind the compound semiconductor chips that AI data centers cannot be built without.
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SpaceX - Powering AI from Orbit, Space Solar, and the Musk Stack (Pt.3)
Summary
* The Space DC is not a diffuse mesh of satellites spread around Earth — it is a constellation of tight orbital clusters, each functioning as a single coherent data center with nodes flying 20–160 km apart.
* This tight-cluster geometry means 60–70% of all terminals by unit count are short-range, low-power, cheap EML-based links, radically favoring direct detection over expensive coherent modules.
* The Space DC is not purely additive demand for the photonic supply chain — it partly
SpaceX - Powering AI from Orbit, Space Solar, and the Musk Stack (Pt.2)
Summary
* The bet is that AI compute has outgrown Earth — power, cooling, and land are all hitting walls — and 1.2 million satellites can host it in orbit instead.
* Starship makes launch tractable, but cell chemistry is the real economic lever — HJT and perovskite tandems are what actually collapse the
Soitec - Where Silicon Photonics Begins
Summary
* Near-monopoly on Photonics-SOI, the engineered wafer every leading silicon photonics foundry depends on as starting material.
* Five compounding demand layers — cluster scale, optics-per-accelerator, SiPho share gains, scale-up optics, and memory disaggregation — all converging on the same wafer.
* SiPho is becoming the default, winning on cost and volume today and