CPO Interlude 1

Spreading the Word

This newsletter - Eternally Paranoid - is a new newsletter written by two like-minded technologists based in America (Jack Huang) and Europe (Omer Cheema) who believe in market-driven innovation and seek to add value for busy engineers, executives, analysts, portfolio managers, and venture capitalists in the Anglophone world. The focus is on technological trends and themes involving a global supply chain that affect their portfolio companies’ bottom lines. The name “Eternally Paranoid” is directly inspired by a classic book by the legendary tech CEO Andrew Grove, “Only the Paranoid Survive”, a book that described the epic transformation of Intel from a memory giant to a microprocessor one in the face of Japanese competition a generation ago. As a starter, we will start with co-packaged optics (CPO), a key enabling technology for the buildout of AI data centers globally. Tentatively, we plan to write a series with comprehensive coverage of all aspects relevant to CPO. This is an interlude 1 of the CPO series - photonics events.

Disclaimers:

• The authors may be invested in stocks mentioned in the newsletter.

• Opinions are solely those of the authors and not related to past/present/future employers.

• All content published in this newsletter is based solely on public information and independent research.

• This newsletter does not constitute financial advice and readers should always do their own research before investing in any security.

Summary:

• We recapitulate the value proposition of the newsletter and encourage you to spread the word about the newsletter to like-minded friends in the target demographic.

• We will be taking a short interlude as we look into more companies of the co-packaged optics ecosystem with information from multiple photonics industry events.

Target Demographics

With feedback from some current subscribers, we will expand the target demographics to be:

• Technology: engineers and executives

• Finance: buy-side analysts and PMs, venture capitalists, and family offices

Newsletter Value Proposition

Why bother with reading another Substack newsletter? For brevity, we gave an overview of our backgrounds in the “About” page of Eternally Paranoid. Fundamentally, NO SINGLE PERSON OR COMPANY has a complete picture of the entire global supply chain underlying technologies such as semiconductors and optics. Due to what is known as the Rashomon effect, different people may have different understanding of the same topic. The pretense that you can elucidate such a complex supply chain easily as in the case for a pencil in a classic essay “I, Pencil“ by Leonard Read was just that, a pretense. Yet, given our unique linguistic and cultural backgrounds, training in both technical and business areas, and value creation and capture at top global semiconductor companies (“skin in the game”), we believe that we have an unique valuable perspective and will attempt to give our incomplete view of the global ecosystem on technologies such as co-packaged optics.

Now, why should you subscribe and potentially reach out to us for mutually beneficially conversations if you are from the target audience? The reason is quite simple - you only have a small narrow view from your vantage point. If you are a typical engineer or executive at a semiconductor-related technology company, you might not even know what the rest of the company or industry is working on or appreciate the business model of the company. If you are a typical buy-side analyst or portfolio manager, you might not have any technical training underlying the technologies for the names you covered, especially when some of these names were foreign ones and poorly covered in English in the Anglophone world. Given our backgrounds, we understand your pain points and provide a time-efficient way to stay ahead of the curve on such technologies. In other words, as the newsletter title suggested, we want you to “stay paranoid” for opportunities for both yourself and your company as the technology icon Andrew Grove (legendary former CEO of Intel) might have put it.

Spread the Word

As Jack learned many years ago in business school class, “your network is your net worth.” The value add of the newsletter scales with the penetration of its community among the target demographic (see above). Please help spread the word of our newsletter in the right crowds. To date, we have a truly global subscriber base all around the world with subscribers in both technology and finance industries from all four of the regions (North America, Europe, East Asia, and Southeast Asia) mentioned later. We operate under Chatham House Rule here (of course, you can send private DMs to either of us as you wish), but we are pleasantly surprised by our newsletter’s popularity with folks hailing from top:

• Investment funds (asset managers, multi-strat hedge funds, early stage venture capital specialized in deep tech and semis, proprietary trading firms, private equity, banks, family offices)

• Wafer, semi equipment, fabless design, deep tech startup companies

• Research universities

• Irrational Analyst (category by himself)

We are not exactly sure why there are any students in the subscriber base as the value add of the newsletter is the largest for practitioners who appreciate the implications of what we write here.

In particular, we anticipate coverage of CPO names across the globe and thus would appreciate subscribers with relevant technical and business backgrounds from the following areas:

• Co-packaged optics ecosystem hotspots (semiconductors + photonics)

  • North America (USA, Canada):

    • Bay Area (Sunnyvale–Santa Clara–San Jose), Silicon Valley.

    • Portland–Hillsboro, Oregon (advanced CMOS/foundry ecosystem).

    • Albany, New York (AIM Photonics; packaging/test).

    • Rochester, New York (optics/photonics cluster).

    • Boston–Route 128, Massachusetts (silicon photonics R&D).

    • San Diego, California (optics/photonics firms).

    • Austin, Texas (semiconductor design and packaging).

    • Phoenix metro, Arizona (leading fabs and supply chain).

    • Canada: Ottawa (optical networking), Toronto–Waterloo Corridor (quantum/silicon photonics), Montreal (semiconductor + photonics).

  • Europe (Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Israel):

    • Germany: Munich (semiconductor and packaging), Dresden (leading fabs), Aachen/Jülich (photonics R&D), Jena (precision optics).

    • Netherlands: Eindhoven/Brainport (PhotonDelta hub), Delft (TU Delft photonics), Nijmegen (NXP).

    • Belgium: Leuven (imec; integration/packaging), Ghent (UGent photonics).

    • France: Grenoble (CEA‑Leti; silicon photonics), Paris‑Saclay (labs/startups), Toulouse (optoelectronics).

    • Switzerland: Zurich (ETH; industry), Lausanne (EPFL; CSEM in Neuchâtel).

    • Israel: Tel Aviv metro (startups, semicon), Haifa (Technion; optical R&D).

  • East Asia (Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Mainland China, Hong Kong):

    • Taiwan: Hsinchu Science Park (foundries + SiPh), Tainan, Taichung (fabs/OSATs).

    • Japan: Tokyo–Yokohama (SiPh/networking), Tsukuba (research), Kyoto–Osaka (semicon), Nagoya (devices), Sendai (Tohoku; photonics).

    • South Korea: Pangyo Techno Valley (ecosystem), Suwon/Giheung/Hwaseong (device/fab), Daejeon/Daedeok (research).

    • Mainland China: Shanghai (Zhangjiang; fabs/SiPh), Shenzhen (optics/modules), Beijing (Zhongguancun; labs), Wuhan (Optics Valley of China), Suzhou (SiPh manufacturing).

    • Hong Kong: Hong Kong Science Park (R&D, modules).

  • Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore):

    • Vietnam: Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon Hi‑Tech Park; semicon assembly/packaging), Hanoi (electronics R&D).

    • Malaysia: Penang (OSATs, advanced packaging), Kulim Hi‑Tech Park (fabs/ecosystem).

    • Thailand: Eastern Economic Corridor (electronics manufacturing, optoelectronics supply chain).

    • Singapore: one‑north/Fusionopolis (SiPh startups, labs), Tampines/Woodlands Wafer Fab clusters (fabs), Ayer Rajah/Science Park (R&D, modules).

Of course, if you believe that we are missing a key cluster, please DM either of us (on Substack or Linkedin) so that the list can be updated.

If you work for a company within the CPO ecosystem and wish for us to mention your company and highlight it and its products, please DM either of us (on Substack or Linkedin). For example, we have been very thrilled to be watching a video of a ficontec machine (here is one we found from their website) - we will share the video with you all in the appropriate followup article of the CPO existing ecosystem. For context, it is not good enough to make a CPO system - you also need to test many of them at industrial scale with machines like the ones offered by the likes of ficontec.

Upcoming Events

In the upcoming days and months, there will be three photonics industry events relevant for the CPO ecosystem:

• Upcoming events for co-packaged optics

  • PIC Summit USA: 19 January 2026 — Sunnyvale, United States. ​⁠https://www.photondelta.com/events/pic-summit-usa-2026/

  • SPIE Photonics West (Exhibition): 20–22 January 2026 — San Francisco, United States. ​⁠https://spie.org/conferences-and-exhibitions/photonics-west/photonics-west-exhibition

  • OFC (Optical Fiber Communication Conference & Exhibition): Technical Conference 15–19 March 2026; Exhibition 17–19 March 2026 — Los Angeles, United States. ​⁠https://www.ofcconference.org/schedule/

We won’t attend in person this year, but quite a few subscribers will likely attend. Please let Jack know via DMs - Jack has a list of pointers on what to focus on that he can share. Of course, if you have highly specific questions on specific names, Jack can add that to the list.

Monetization Plan

To date, we haven’t made a concrete monetization plan yet. Like Irrational Analyst, we are simply excited about the underlying technologies and businesses and hoped to build a community of investors and technologists excited about the same things as us with zero consideration for profit. Writing this newsletter is definitely not the highest value add thing we could be doing. We appreciate the minority of subscribers who already pledged to pay for subscriptions. For now, you can show your support by pledging for subscriptions for us to better gauge the true value add for our subscriber base and how much effort we should dedicate to it.

Contact Us

Here is how you should contact us - via email at eternallyparanoidsociety@gmail.com. If we don’t already know you, then include in your initial message your name, company affiliation, brief introduction, and short message on what we can do for you. We have our own day jobs and will respond with some delay.

If you have highly specific questions about this piece or series, please feel free to reach out to either of us on Linkedin or Substack with the same aforementioned message:

• Omer Cheema (English/French/Hindi/Urdu) - Eindhoven time zone

• Jack Huang (English/German/Cantonese/Mandarin) - Chicago time zone