Paired underwriting of the two venture-stage silicon-photonics pure plays through the Rubin Ultra 2027 CPO scale-up window. CPO can win the technology transition and Ayar and Lightmatter can still lose the economics.
Wolfspeed emerged from a 91-day prepack in Sep 2025. This piece works bottom-up through where silicon carbide climbs in the AI data centre stack, sizes Wolfspeed's exposure by equipment layer, and delivers three scenarios for the reorganised common.
Vicor (NASDAQ: VICR) has been selling factorized-power architecture for forty years. The last three years brought VPD and direct-to-pin modules into the mainstream as AI accelerator power density broke the incumbent multi-stage delivery model. Sub-$4B market cap, ~$400M revenue, meaningfully hi
The behind-the-meter gas microgrid is a firm-power route around the 4-7 year interconnection queue for AI datacenters. Enchanted Rock is the canonical operator; ~366 MW at Meta El Paso and 60 MW Phase 1 at Microsoft San Jose are the flagship deployments.
How grid and AI compute interact through the flexibility right, with an opinionated view on Emerald AI's Series A valuation.
The only independent integrated voltage regulator play left after ADI's $1.5B Empower acquisition. Fe1766, thin-film magnetic inductors on CMOS, TSMC integration, Marvell design win. Six gates, three vetoes, three scenarios.
ADI closed the Empower acquisition for $1.5B on July 7, 2026. Ferric is the standalone integrated voltage regulator play left. Canonical map of the last stage of AI accelerator power delivery: physics, architecture, players, scenarios, and falsifiers.
Semiconductor intensity per MW of AI compute, decomposed across compute, storage, networking, and power layers. Reference case: 1 MW Blackwell/GB200 NVL72 ≈ $34M of semiconductor-bearing equipment value. Vendor exposure map by basket.
Copper loses metres each generation as per-link bandwidth scales from 400G to 1.6T. Silicon photonics fabs (GF Fotonix, TSMC), CPO specialists (Ayar Labs, Lightmatter, Ranovus, Celestial AI) and pluggable optical OEMs capture the migrating value.
The AI-DC battery is migrating through six economic roles (backup, ride-through, power smoothing, peak management, grid services, grid-forming). Each role carries a different vendor cohort, revenue mechanism and regulatory gate. Screen for role-stage exposure before chemistry.
Bottom-up build of the five-layer, five-source capital stack financing AI infrastructure 2026-28. Three headline measurements ($0.65T financing · $0.95T formation+procurement · $0.16T refi) plus the framework for a quarterly Ledger.
Wide-bandgap power semiconductors compete across three end markets with different physics: AI power supply, EV traction inverter, and industrial. Primary spotlight on Navitas (NVTS), Wolfspeed (post-Chapter-11), Innoscience (Nvidia Rubin Ultra 800V design win), and EPC. Extended field: Infineon, ST