I drew colossus from Starcraft 2 to represent laser beams. And prepared a whole thesis but kept getting automodded for "low quality". So here's the more TLDR version of my thesis: The Entire AI Industry is shifting to photonics from Google TPU to optical interconnects. The entire AI "Growth" story ends in 2026 if there's no InP substrates + materials. BUT GUESS WHO CONTROLS IT ALL? One Company: $AXTI. There's two bottlenecks: InP Substrates - - Hyperscaler optics (TPU pods, etc) - Optical transceivers (5g, data) - LiDAR (robotaxis, drones, military) -Optical Modules (interconnect clusters) - Silicon photonics laser dies (Nvidia’s future co-packaged optics and Intel/Broadcom SiPh engines use InP CW laser arrays.) This is a DUOPOLY from -AXTI (est. ~30–35%) -Sumitomo (est.~30%) - JX Nippon (est. 10-15%) Indium Phosphide (the source material for everything): Vital Materials - 35% AXT - 25% Before, this was a commodity with low TAM just for telecom. Now they're used for the entire AI buildout. Just to give u an example $AXTI -> $LITE -> $GOOGL TPU. without any of these members, the program shuts down. Google would literally pay $5B (50 TIMES prices + ~$140m TAM from 2024) DIRECTLY to one of these suppliers -> hand to COHR just so their whole TPU program doesn't stall because Meta decided to buy them out. And this would only be a like a 3-4% added cost to their BOM because this thing was so cheap. If Meta does it first, then Google's TPU program stalls. If Google does it first Microsoft's ASIC problem stalls. THE WORLD IS AT MAX CAPACITY RIGHT NOW (demand > supply by multiple factors pre-ramp) AND THIS IS GAME THEORY on materials supply chains. Guess who shows up twice in the WHOLE AI bottleneck? Both as the duopoly bottleneck and the duopoly bottleneck of the bottleneck AXTI. This is the holy grail of supply chain analysis + materials research. Nobody's posted about this stock here in the past 5 years, you're welcome. Anyway I decided to max OTM some spare change on Calls last Friday, because there's a low chance this goes from $15 to $150 if we see the same memory supply stock in 2026. I will buy more shares on Monday when markets open up but wanted to share this at the start as proof. NFI, there's a chance China sends this to $0 with export controls so don't follow along I just wanted to share my thoughts. But if this goes to $0 so does the entire growth phase of the AI buildout. I just thought this could also easily be a $7B company given they control 1/3rd of the world's entire substrate capacity and then 1/4th of the world's entire materials used for AI buildout. It's a monopoly in mining -> refining -> substrate production. And a duopoly for InP substrate production and Indium Phosphide. I just wanted to share as proof in case this becomes legendary. TLDR: THE ENTIRE AI INDUSTRY IS BOTTLENECKED TWO TIMES BY THE SAME COMPANY. FOUND THE SINGLE POINT OF FAILURE OF THE ENTIRE MANY TRILLION USD WESTERN AI BUILDOUT IS SOME $700m COMPANY CALLED AXTI, WORTH LESS THAN SOME PRE REVENUE LLM STARTUP.   submitted by   /u/AleaBito [link]   [comments]