Ren
Head of AI, Ex-Product Manager, AI Supply-Chain Bottlenecks
PlanOptik sits upstream of Lumentum's optical circuit switch supply chain, a link the market is only starting to price. Silex research materials and patent language directly mention PlanOptik as a glass wafer substrate supplier, and Silex, the leading pure-play MEMS foundry, is a key optical-switch supplier to Lumentum. That puts a €50M-market-cap German glass wafer maker in the middle of the AI data center buildout. Credit to @vlmkapital for the finding. x.com
PlanOptik may be an upstream beneficiary of two AI buildout waves converging on 2027, optical circuit switching and glass substrates, at a €35M market cap. MEMS foundry Silex just IPO'd at SEK 8.9B with OCS a top segment; an inferred chain runs PlanOptik glass wafers to Silex to Lumentum switches. Glass wafers are likely a tiny part of Lumentum's switch cost, so gains may not be material without price hikes. The Silex link is unconfirmed, liquidity is thin and 2025 brought a net loss. x.com
PlanOptik looks massively mispriced at a €35M market cap if it is the bottleneck for the glass wafers behind Silex's MEMS business ahead of the 2027 ramp. Per @ren_stocks, PlanOptik's specialty glass wafers feed Silex Microsystems' MEMS mirror dies, which go into Lumentum's optical circuit switches for Google's AI data centers. Silex earned a 34% EBIT margin in Q1 2026, and its IPO valued it at SEK 8.9 billion. x.com
PlanOptik's latest report is likely its last transition report, with a very different company emerging as capacity ramps. Expectations are high for 2027 component launches showing what it can do with silicon, not just glass, followed by glass core substrates. Progress is already hidden in the numbers: automotive MEMS and sensors, historically most of revenue and weak, are holding. @KairosPraxis notes revenue grew 5.7% and EBITDA 8.9%, with heavy recent capex set to lift revenue and margins. … Show more
Plan Optik is not a buyable way into glass substrates for AI chip packaging, even as a leading glass wafer maker serving Infineon, Samsung and Bosch. With €11 million of annual revenue and extreme illiquidity, it is closer to an acquisition bet than a position that can be built normally, and a 90% one-day move without fundamental news is not a buy signal. Glass substrates' option value is real but arrives in 2027-2028; 2026 is a qualification year with lower yields and 2-3x higher costs. x.com
Optics and photonics should be among AI's biggest winners as faster GPU networks need optical connections that suppliers cannot expand quickly enough. Lumentum says some components are sold out through early 2029; Sivers is investing $30M to target more than 100M lasers a year, with operations expected in Q4 2027. Potential US restrictions on Chinese transceivers could reshape supply in 2027. Applied Optoelectronics and Sivers are the favorites. x.com x.com
Plan Optik's revenue has not yet grown with Lumentum's because Lumentum is currently growing through pluggable optics, while Plan Optik supplies co-packaged optics. Its payoff is therefore more of a 2027-2028 story. x.com
Plan Optik is not an AI or high-performance computing play, because all of its material is about wafers and it has no panel capability whatsoever. The glass panel cited as evidence was made with SCHMID and 4JET, not Plan Optik, and SCHMID is effectively a competitor in etching, deposition and metallization. Plan Optik has never said it targets HPC or AI, and it does everything in-house rather than through an OSAT, aiming at much smaller-scale applications. x.com x.com
Rising 1.6T switching demand favors optical suppliers, though their execution risks vary. Bank of America says the market could grow ~101% annually through 2030. Marvell's leading DSPs and Lumentum's supply-short 200G EML lasers are lowest risk; Applied Optoelectronics' capacity expansion and Fabrinet's customer concentration make them medium risk. Aeluma remains pre-commercial, while Lightwave Logic's polymer modulators are a high-risk moonshot despite its TSM partnership. x.com
Lumentum still has substantial upside despite the selloff: its CEO says optical components are effectively sold out through nearly 2029, extending the earlier severe supply-shortfall outlook. The reported OpenAI revenue projections behind the selloff do not change that demand case. x.com x.com
Lumentum, the largest indium phosphide laser maker and supplier of the ultra-high-power laser in NVIDIA's Spectrum-X CPO switch, has a lot to gain from the silicon photonics roadmap. Its indium phosphide is sold out for years, which explains why its SEMICON Taiwan talk promoted gallium arsenide VCSELs for scale-up, rating them strong on 5 of 7 axes. VCSELs are its only incremental revenue in that period, even though they could displace its InP business. x.com x.com
Networking is the next AI hardware trade after memory, whose share of rack value rose from 15% to 35%. Optics is moving inside the server, as Nvidia's Feynman architecture builds in co-packaged optics and silicon photonics. Scale-across networking could grow 30% a year just linking existing data centers, as inference moves closer to users and training spreads across sites. Supply is tight: Lumentum's CEO said it can meet only 30% of expected 2027 demand and sees optics tighter than memory. x.com
