Saturday, October 24, 2026

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Tower Semiconductor Deep Dive

Tower Semiconductor’s low-loss photonics chips halve lasers in 1.6T optical modules, supporting a $680 million annualized photonics run rate and customer wafer prepayments through 2027.

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@convequity

Convequity on X

Photonics Pt.4: OCS Roadmaps Are Splitting Convequity’s latest note examines how Optical Circuit Switching is diverging by workload. High-radix MEMS remains the practical choice for scale-out and training clusters that prioritise scheduled reconfiguration. Lower-latency silicon photonics is being pushed into the scale-up layer for inference, where millisecond switching is no longer acceptable. $GOOGL's V8i architecture is the clearest example. It moves OCS down into the scale-up domain for the first time and pairs it with 2.4T Coherent Lite modules that dramatically reduce fiber and port consumption. The combination is designed to close Google’s main networking gap versus NVIDIA. $NVDA's Feynman (2028) appears to be taking a dual approach: CPO for dense short-reach connections and OCS for larger cluster-level scale-out. Near-term deployments will likely rely on mature MEMS, with silicon photonics as the longer-term path once insertion loss improves. The broader OCS market is projected to grow from ~$400M in 2025 to over $2.5B by 2029 (58% CAGR). Silicon photonics offers a relatively open competitive field compared with MEMS, where incumbents hold stronger positions. We also re-examine CPO’s path forward and assess microLED as a more radical parallel alternative — one that inverts the industry’s “fewer, faster lanes” assumption and is physically confined to short-reach scale-up links. Full Part 4 is now live. Link in the comments.

Margin Call

Petrobras’s Morpho-1 well revived hopes that Brazil’s Equatorial Margin can become a major new oil frontier after hydrocarbons were…

Our Views on CoreWeave

CoreWeave's financial statements point to a business model familiar to the authors after a closer review of the AI infrastructure company.

Capital Wars

CoreWeave’s $35 billion to $39 billion 2026 spending plan relies on debt as unsecured yields reach 15%, making its GPU cloud expansion a…

TCEHY · long

Tencent Holdings LTD

Tencent, valued near $500 billion, is a long idea built on its Chinese gaming, social-network and advertising franchises.

Putting bear cases to rest

Medpace authorized $1 billion of buybacks through 2028 after Q3 revenue rose 8.5% to $716 million; service revenue grew roughly 12% as…

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