PLAB
Photronics Inc
stock NASDAQ

My boring pick: Photronics ($PLAB). Photomasks are a hard chokepoint nobody thinks about — every new chip design, logic or memory, needs a mask set, and there are only a handful of independent merchant mask makers left since most players went captive. It trades like a sleepy cyclical because it's not a "story," but mask demand scales with design starts, and AI is blowing design starts wide open. Usually sits on net cash and cheap on earnings.
Honorable mention: Onto Innovation (ONTO)/Camtek(ONTO) / Camtek ( ONTO)/Camtek(CAMT) — metrology and inspection for advanced packaging. HBM stacks and CoWoS made packaging the real bottleneck, and you can't ship what you can't inspect. Way less "discovered" than the memory names.
And the truly unsexy one: Advanced Energy ($AEIS) — precision power for etch/deposition tools and, increasingly, data-center racks. Pure picks-and-shovels, no hype premium baked in.

My boring pick: Photronics ($PLAB). Photomasks are a hard chokepoint nobody thinks about — every new chip design, logic or memory, needs a mask set, and there are only a handful of independent merchant mask makers left since most players went captive. It trades like a sleepy cyclical because it's not a "story," but mask demand scales with design starts, and AI is blowing design starts wide open. Usually sits on net cash and cheap on earnings.
Honorable mention: Onto Innovation (ONTO)/Camtek(ONTO) / Camtek ( ONTO)/Camtek(CAMT) — metrology and inspection for advanced packaging. HBM stacks and CoWoS made packaging the real bottleneck, and you can't ship what you can't inspect. Way less "discovered" than the memory names.
And the truly unsexy one: Advanced Energy ($AEIS) — precision power for etch/deposition tools and, increasingly, data-center racks. Pure picks-and-shovels, no hype premium baked in.