Ben Pouladian

Good morning. I’m sending this early Saturday because Monday I’ll be at GTC and the pace won’t slow down until Friday. The world feels chaotic right now. But the AI infrastructure buildout doesn’t pause for macro uncertainty, and the companies locking in multi-year capacity commitments with customer prepayments are telling you exactly how confident they are in the demand trajectory.

At the end of The Quiet Architect, I wrote: “There’s also a foundry layer underneath all of this that most investors haven’t identified yet. The silicon photonics chips inside every optical engine, every 1.6T transceiver, every CPO module have to be fabricated somewhere. That story is coming next, for paid subscribers.”

This is that story.

Every layer of the optical interconnect thesis we’ve been building at BEP Research, from Lumentum’s laser dominance to Credo’s AEC ramp to NVIDIA’s $4 billion photonic investment, all share a common dependency that most investors haven’t fully mapped. Someone has to fabricate the silicon photonics chips. The Photonic Integrated Circuits inside optical transceivers, the SiPho engines going into CPO modules, the 1.6T optical engines that NVIDIA just contracted for its next-generation networking architecture. All of them need a foundry with mature SiPho process technology, available capacity, and the willingness to prioritize photonics as a core business. Not a side project. Not a research line buried inside a $70 billion revenue giant. A core business.

That foundry is Tower Semiconductor.