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Wednesday, October 7, 2026

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Convequity on X

$TSEM + $SOI: positioned on both sides of the biggest shift in AI datacenter interconnect — and Google's new TPUv8i just supercharged the story. Leg 1 — Smarter optics, much bigger chips. Next-gen optical links ("coherent-lite") encode data far more densely than today's IMDD links. But the sophistication has a physical cost: the photonic chip needs roughly 2–2.5x more silicon area per port, because it packs in multiple modulators, splitters, and detectors where today's simpler links need one of each. Factor in that bigger dies yield worse, and you need ~3–4x the wafer starts per port. More area × more volume × worse yield = several-fold growth in SiPh wafer demand over the cycle. Leg 2 — The switch itself goes photonic. TPUv8i connects its chips through an optical circuit switch (OCS) built from silicon photonics — a genuinely new thing. $GOOGL's old scale-out OCS used MEMS mirrors: zero SiPh content. The new one puts a very large photonic die (300–450mm², heading toward 500–800mm² — near the reticle limit) in every pod. That's a brand-new ~10–20% layer of demand on top of the transceiver story, and it scales faster than linearly as switch radix grows from 64×64 to 128×128. The elegant part: Leg 2 forces Leg 1. The optical switch loses 5–10dB of light — 70–90% of the signal is gone by the time it exits. Today's IMDD transceivers can't read a signal that weak; coherent ones can. So every transceiver plugged into the switch fabric has no choice but to go coherent — and coherent means the 2–2.5x bigger chips from Leg 1. Google's switch decision doesn't just create its own SiPh demand; it automatically triggers the transceiver upgrade too. Tower has manufacturing flows for both legs: high-speed modulator + Ge flows for transceiver PICs, AND mature passive flows for the huge fabric dies. Soitec supplies the photonics-SOI wafers upstream either way — it wins regardless of which foundry takes the socket. One more kicker: Celero, the Alphabet-backed startup tipped for Google's coherent DSP socket, has no fab of its own — its companion photonic chip has to land somewhere, and an open specialty foundry is the obvious somewhere. Risks: coherent modulators migrating to InP/TFLN would leak the PIC leg out of silicon photonics; Marvell verticalizing into its own photonics partially bypasses the open-foundry path.
@convequity

Convequity on X

Ciena — the underappreciated coherent layer As AI clusters move beyond a single building into campus and multi-site “scale-across” architectures, short-reach optics hit their physical limits. Signal distortion and dispersion make conventional detection unusable over distance. $CIEN’s coherent technology recovers both amplitude and phase, reconstructing a clean signal where others cannot. The market remains focused on the high-volume short-reach stack — pluggables, CPO, and related optics inside the data center. Coherent is the quieter, longer-reach piece that becomes essential once clusters themselves become distributed.

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New Position (ONON): Game is On

On Holding (ONON) is gaining sportswear share, expanding store space and launching soccer with Kylian Mbappé as investors debate U.S.

ONON $12B
Aurelion Research 3 clicks

Deep Dive: Intuit ($INTU)

Intuit’s $21.4 billion software franchise faces AI-driven pricing pressure in tax and accounting, even as QuickBooks and TurboTax retain…

INTU $82B
Rebound Capital 4 clicks

Canterra Minerals: Research Note

Canterra Minerals increased Lundberg indicated tonnage 55% to 26.1Mt, with 226.2Kt of contained copper equivalent, supporting a Buchans…

EQX $13B
Atrium Research - Equity Research

Kenorland Minerals: Research Flash

Franco-Nevada bought 10.0 million Kenorland shares, a 12.4% stake, for C$22.2 million in a secondary transaction that issued no new shares.

FNV $46B
Atrium Research - Equity Research 1 click
VEEV · long

Veeva Systems INC

Veeva Systems is a vertical software company valued as if its best growth years are behind it.

VEEV $48B
Value Investors Club

Practical Parametric Yield

Cerebras’s WSE-3 faces parametric-yield constraints that could restrict supply, making power and clock-speed tradeoffs central to its next…

CBRS $39B
Irrational Analysis 3 clicks

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