Brainport Rising (3): The New European Chip Champions
From promising scale-ups to the foundations of a new industry
Europe has always been the world’s laboratory. But it has rarely been its factory — or its headquarters. It excels at the Eureka moment. It struggles with the “and then”. For decades, European innovation has followed a familiar pattern: breakthrough ideas, followed by foreign capital, foreign scaling and ultimately, foreign control. The continent designs the future — and watches others build it. But something is shifting.
Across the Netherlands and Germany, a small group of companies is beginning to challenge that pattern. Not individually, but collectively. Not as isolated successes, but as parts of something larger.
Individually, they are impressive scale-ups.
Collectively, they may represent something far more significant: the early architecture of a European chip system.
From Breakthroughs to a Stack
To understand what is emerging, it is not enough to look at companies in isolation.
They must be seen as layers.
- Axelera AI builds the compute layer — the “brain” that processes intelligence at the edge
- Innatera develops ultra-efficient sensing — the “nervous system” that detects and responds
- Smart Photonics provides the manufacturing base — the physical substrate where light becomes infrastructure
- Black Semiconductor connects it all — enabling chips to communicate at system scale
Each solves a different problem. Together, they form something Europe has long lacked: a coherent technological stack.
Read MoreThe Glue of Power: Why Europe’s Graphene Highway is the Real AI Revolution
From computation to connection — and the infrastructure that makes intelligence scale
Computation has outpaced communication. We have built digital giants — powerful chips, advanced models, entire AI systems — that are increasingly constrained by a simple physical limit: they cannot move data fast enough. In the world of AI supercomputers, a fast chip without a fast connection is like a Ferrari in a traffic jam. The bottleneck is no longer intelligence. It is bandwidth.
For decades, the semiconductor industry has relied on copper interconnects to move data between chips. But as processing speeds have increased, these connections have become the weakest link.
They generate heat.
They consume energy.
And they simply cannot keep up.
The result is a structural imbalance: chips that can compute faster than they can communicate.
As Daniel Schall explains:
“The bottleneck of AI isn’t the calculation; it’s the communication. We are removing the physical boundaries that have held the semiconductor industry back for decades.”
Daniel Schall
CEO, Black Semiconductor
This is the “copper ceiling” — the point at which traditional materials begin to limit technological progress.
Read MoreThe Cleanroom Mandate: Why Smart Photonics Anchors Europe’s Industrial Future
From lab to fab — and the return of manufacturing power
Much of the conversation around artificial intelligence focuses on models, algorithms and data. But none of it exists without a factory. While companies like Axelera and Innatera design new forms of intelligence, Smart Photonics operates at a different level entirely. It does not design the future — it manufactures it. In cleanrooms in Eindhoven, ideas are translated into physical systems, turning Europe’s technological ambition into something tangible. Because in the end, intelligence is not abstract. It is fabricated.
Smart Photonics specialises in photonic chips based on indium phosphide (InP) — a material that allows light to be generated, amplified and detected directly on a chip.
Unlike traditional semiconductors that rely on electrons, photonic chips use photons. The result is faster data transmission, lower energy consumption and entirely new possibilities in communication, sensing and computing.
For years, however, photonics remained largely confined to research environments. The challenge was never the idea. It was scale.
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