Martin Shkreli (who started a photonics company) on the MTS Live postcast, makes a strong case that photonics could handle matrix multiplication and potentially reshape compute, but also saying it could take 20 years to fully figure out.
If that’s true, the real signal isn’t which photonic company wins. It’s that there’s going to be a long runway of research, iteration, and capital flowing into this space.
So instead of trying to pick the winner, I started looking at what everything in that world depends on. Not the end product, but what gets used no matter what direction it takes.
My first instinct was the obvious “photonics” names, but those already feel crowded. That trade has been talked about nonstop and most of those stocks have already moved hard.
The more interesting layer is one step upstream, the stuff that actually enables the research itself. The materials, the tools, the systems used to build and test these things.
Not the chips. The infrastructure behind the chips.
That’s where the long-term spend goes if this plays out over decades.
One name that kept coming up there was Veeco Instruments. They build the kind of equipment used in producing the lasers and materials that photonic systems rely on. It’s not framed as a “photonics stock,” which is exactly why it’s interesting.
Feels like one of those situations where everyone is looking at the outcome, and ignoring what quietly gets used across every path to get there.
Not saying this is “the play.” Just trying to think about it from first principles instead of chasing whatever the current narrative is.
## Author profile Chris (@chris) Co founder of Plaza, DM with any and all product feedback. @Hardwired is where I test the product for myself, it is AI-assisted and most definitely not financial advice. Primary publisher: Hardwired Stats: 6 posts, 8 followers, 14 following