The next Sivers Semiconductor?

Pre-Generational Wealth runup?

WARNING: This is speculation. I am going to Yolo on this.

Disclaimer: This is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice, a recommendation, or an offer to buy or sell any security. The views expressed are my own and may change without notice. I may hold positions in securities discussed and may buy or sell them at any time. Information is based on sources believed to be reliable, but accuracy or completeness is not guaranteed. Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of capital. Please conduct your own research and consider your individual circumstances before making any investment decision.

AMS Osram has a few things that look ripe for a speculation.

-It recently announced its strategy to develop complete integrated photonics engines for AI interconnects.

-NVIDIA Hire now VP & GM, Optical Interconnects.

-Much of the underlying micro-emitter, CMOS-integration, wafer-manufacturing and packaging platform was already proven in automotive. (Not NEW Tech).

-Exposure to AR/VR - a fast growing industry on the cusp of a real blowout.

-Trades at forward EV/EBITDA of 8.4x. (adjusted- big on adjusted)

And I think, most importantly for a speculation, it has similar characteristics to Sivers- optics ‘bottleneck’, growing social media presence, analysts changing their assumptions of the technology & the stock… Again, this is speculation on my part, but it feels ripe…

The game just changed for ams OSRAM

Until very recently, the AI case for ams OSRAM was interesting but also fairly easy to dismiss. The company has worked on MicroLEDs and VCSEL for a long time.

As a generalist, I won’t pretend to be an expert on the technology. There are plenty of Optics accounts on X, and Substack, who I rely on to form a view for a technology I can only broadly understand.

What matters mostly here is the VCSEL- its a lazer.

One of the analysts I rely on when dipping my toes into optics is Irrational Analysis.

Irrational Analysis Has long HATED MicroLED, calling it a hoax. His opinion on VCSEL was more nuanced, but basically described it as approaching the end of the road in January.

But then Ashkan Seyedi (from NVIDIA) joining AMS OSRAM materially changed his view.

According to Irrational Analysis, Seyedi came from Nvidia's ring-modulator side of the internal photonics debate and had publicly criticised MicroLED approaches. So seeing someone with that background move to AMS OSRAM made him think there must be something interesting happening around VCSEL CPO/NPO rather than MicroLED.

His thesis went from: “VCSEL CPO might technically work but probably isn’t the winner.”

to:

“Wait… AMS OSRAM may possess exactly the integration technology required to make the architecture commercially viable.”

Now, for generalists like me who find it difficult to keep track of all these acronyms…his current position is essentially that ams OSRAM’s VCSEL technology might have a legitimate place in the datacenter. More specifically- a legitimate role, in optical interconnects, especially in short-reach CPO/NPO architectures.

Furthermore, another specialist Vikram Sekar, is also constructive on microVCSEL for short-reach AI interconnects..

How did we get here? How did Osram get here?

The company had a lot of the right technology. It knew how to manufacture microscopic light emitters at scale. It had spent years developing microLEDs, VCSELs, optical sensors and advanced packaging. Some of that expertise had already been industrialised in automotive products such as EVIYOS, where thousands of individually controlled microscopic emitters are manufactured in volume.

OSRAM benefits from mature manufacturing know-how.

One of the emerging problems inside enormous AI clusters is no longer just producing more compute. It is moving enormous amounts of data between GPUs without burning an equally enormous amount of power.

Copper is beginning to struggle.

Optics is moving closer and closer to the processors.

And ams OSRAM realised that the same ability to manufacture huge arrays of microscopic light emitters could potentially be used to move data instead of illuminate a road.

That was the first breadcrumb.

But the original investment case was still relatively modest:

Maybe ams OSRAM could become an important supplier of the tiny lazers that sit inside these new optical links.

Interesting.

But ultimately still a component supplier.

Then the breadcrumbs started getting bigger.

In May 2026, ams OSRAM announced that it had signed a development agreement with a leading AI data-centre infrastructure partner and had formally begun product development for optical interconnects. Somebody on the customer side was apparently interested enough to start developing the technology with them.

Around the same time, something else happened that deserves more attention. ams OSRAM brought in Ashkan Seyedi to run Optical Interconnects. Seyedi wasn’t coming from lighting.

In 2024 he was Director of LinkX Products at NVIDIA, working specifically on high-bandwidth, energy-efficient optical interconnects for next-generation AI processors. Before NVIDIA he had worked on photonics at Intel and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

In other words, the guy now running ams OSRAM’s optical-interconnect business had previously been sitting inside NVIDIA thinking about essentially the exact problem ams OSRAM was now trying to solve.

Then came August.

ams OSRAM announced that it wasn’t stopping at the light-emitting side.

It had started developing micro-photodiode arrays which are the components that receive the light at the other end of the fibre and turn it back into an electrical signal.

Management explicitly described this as “expanding BoM (Bill of Materials) coverage.”

That is a deceptively important phrase. Because suddenly the story was moving from:

We make the lazer.

to:

We make the lazer... and perhaps the receiver as well.

And on 1 July the company had already established dedicated Digital Photonics business lines to accelerate development and commercialisation.

At this point the pieces were beginning to form a picture.

Then came 21 September.

You follow the breadcrumbs and eventually end up standing next to the loaf.

ams OSRAM finally told investors explicitly what it is trying to build. At ECOC 2026 it unveiled a new Thin-Film microVCSEL platform designed specifically for AI scale-up networks.

The individual emitters demonstrated:

32 Gb/s operation.

Approximately 0.25 pJ/bit energy efficiency.

More than 2,000 hours of accelerated reliability testing without failure.

The most important sentence:

The company’s stated goal is to combine what is has into what it calls a “complete and optimized photonics engine.”

ams OSRAM said it is now developing:

“fully integrated 3D photonics stacks combining microVCSEL arrays, micro-photodiode arrays and mixed signal CMOS electronics.”

And Seyedi described ams OSRAM’s role as:

an “integrated electro-optical engine provider.”

That changes the investment case.

Selling an integrated photonics engine is very different to selling a component of it. They want to sell the whole pie. If they can sell the whole pie, they can charge a higher margin for it.