Probably not. Perhaps a European photonics cluster. When people talk about AI, it’s usually about NVIDIA, data centers, or the next language models. At the same time, something exciting has happened in Europe: In the planned Chips Act 2.0 , photonics has been explicitly named for the first time as a strategic field of the future.
This comes as no surprise. After all, modern AI systems need more than just computing power. Above all, they must process ever-larger amounts of data quickly, reliably, and energy-efficiently. This is precisely where a future infrastructure bottleneck could emerge.
What I find exciting is that (with the exception of X-Fab and Nokia) my own portfolio and, to some extent, the bottleneck wikifolios already include several European companies that together almost form a complete photonics value chain :
🇫🇷 Riber
$ALRIB (+8,7%)
MBE systems for the production of highly specialized III-V semiconductors.
🇫🇷 Soitec
$SOI (+9,06%)
Specialty substrates and wafer technologies as the foundation for photonic integration.
🇩🇪 Aixtron
$AIXA (+6,11%)
Production equipment for InP, GaN, and other photonics applications.
🇳🇱 X-Fab
$XFAB (+15,67%)
European foundry expertise for sensor technology and photonic applications.
🇸🇪 Sivers Semiconductors
$SIVE (+9,36%)
Photonics and high-frequency chips for data transmission.
🇮🇹 Technoprobe
$TPRO (+6,54%)
Probe cards and test solutions for increasingly complex semiconductor structures.
🇫🇮 Nokia
$NOKIA (+5%)
Optical networking technologies for the next generation of data transmission. The acquisition of Infinera makes Nokia an increasingly relevant European player in the field of optical networking.
🇮🇹 Prysmian
$PRY (+7,95%)
Fiber-optic infrastructure as the physical backbone of digital data transmission.
Taken individually, some of these companies seem rather unremarkable. Taken together, however, they tell a different story. Not that of a continent that has fallen behind. But rather the story of a potential European photonics ecosystem in the making.
Whether this will actually give rise to global champions, no one knows today. But that is exactly where I look for bottlenecks: one level below the obvious winners. Where new technologies are made possible in the first place.
⚠️ Not investment advice.
