Aixtron: The Growth Step (Pt.1)
The quiet German monopoly behind the compound semiconductor chips that AI data centers cannot be built without.
Optics
SpaceX - Powering AI from Orbit, Space Solar, and the Musk Stack (Pt.3)
The orbital AI data center as tight satellite clusters: redefining photonic demand and unlocking compute beyond Earth’s physical limits.
Soitec - Where Silicon Photonics Begins
The near-monopoly on Photonics-SOI wafers that every leading silicon photonics foundry depends on as the starting material for AI’s optical interconnect boom.
Notes: POET Technologies - The Optical Interposer Thesis
POET’s Optical Interposer replaces costly active alignment with wafer-level pick-and-place packaging, opening AI optical engines to high-volume CMOS-scale manufacturing.
Notes: Light is the Future (Pt.2)
Summary
* The optical supply chain bottleneck into 2026 is EML capacity, with 200G EMLs (needed for 1.6T) far tighter than 100G and keeping pricing and allocations elevated.
* Silicon photonics is the short-term “release valve” for EML shortages by shifting more functionality onto PICs and using CW light sources,
Notes: Light is the Future (Pt.1)
Summary
* DeepSeek, Huawei, and then AVGO in 2025 pulled forward the timeline for optical adoption, flipping the “copper-first” consensus and reshaping cluster design priorities.
* DeepSeek’s P/D MoE inference shows scale-out fabrics can handle high-performance inference across hundreds of GPUs, reducing the marginal value of ever-
Lumentum Holdings: The Optical Engine Behind the AI Data-Center Revolution
Summary
* Record 1Q26: $533.8m revenue (+58% YoY) with next-quarter guide $630–$670m; cloud/AI now >60% of mix, beating the $600m/quarter goal early.
* Growth is structural as hyperscalers shift from copper scale-up to optical scale-out, accelerating 800G/1.6T transceiver demand.
* LITE’s leadership