Summary:
Our AI Investor Podcast hosts, Eric Bleeker and Austin Smith, have been counting down 12 trends they believe AI investors will want to keep an eye on in 2026.
Recently, the two discussed an area of AI that might not scream “sexy” but still provides a tremendous opportunity for investors – advanced packaging.
“If people were looking down at a list of trends, it’s not the first one anyone jumps to,” says Bleeker. “It is something newly emerging, deeply technical, but it’s important because it’s going to drive a lot of money in 2026. The big idea is that in the past, semiconductor progress was thought of as shrinking transistors. Now, incremental gains are coming from how components are packaged together.”
The two discussed how companies like BE Semiconductors, Teradyne (NASDAQ: TER) | TER Price Prediction, and Taiwan Semiconductor (NYSE: TSM) are positioned to benefit from this technological shift, with Bleeker noting that co-packaged optics could generate billions in revenue over the next few years.
“This trend being very boring means it’s going to be one of the last ones that people rush hand over fist to claim,” Smith explains. “It just shows that when you have trends this big, and technology changing as quickly as they are in this space, there’s always an opportunity to invest.”
Watch the full discussion on advanced packaging in the video above, or check out the podcasts sharing all 12 trends via the link below.
Transcript:
Austin: Talk to me about some of the innovations going on with shrinking transistors and advanced packaging. Not all chips are created equal, but what are some of the changes in the architecture of them that we could follow at the investor level?
Eric Bleeker: Advanced packaging. If people were looking down at a list of trends, it’s not the first one anyone jumps to.
Austin: Right.
Eric Bleeker: We’re talking about companies that years ago, you couldn’t pay anyone to get interested in. It is something newly emerging, deeply technical, but it’s important because it’s going to drive a lot of money in 2026. The big idea is that in the past, semiconductor progress was thought of as shrinking transistors. Now, incremental gains are coming from how components are packaged together.
High bandwidth memory is a great example of this. It’s not deeply technical in the sense of stacking DRAM on top of each other, but it gets memory closer to your computing. Your logic die. This year we’ll see something similar in photonics called co-packaged optics, which begins with Vera Rubin. So company we recommend in this space is BE Semiconductors. We recommended it without buying because it’s a foreign stock, though I’m interested in looking at OTC options, since BE Semiconductors is one of the most underestimated companies in the market. They’re hybrid bonding technology enables connections between chip dies and is one of the most essential technologies. But this isn’t a household name or a company many people think of it at all.
There’s also a company named Teradyne (NASDAQ: TER) that we discussed last year. Estimates suggest co-packaged optics could generate $1.8 billion in revenue over the next two years, while the company made $3.2 billion last year. When Taiwan Semiconductor (NYSE: TSM) talks about where they’re increasing spending next year, it’s on advanced packaging. It’s the highest growth rate in actually the semiconductor equipment space. So this is an area we’re gonna be looking at.
I think we’re looking at two or three recommendations. In this area. And I think it’s a backdoor way to invest in things like HBM or a lot of these growth markets. So this is something deeply unsexy, right? Like our YouTube video, co-package optics, will get the least views of all, but you know, the next trend we’re gonna go to is optics, Austin. And when we first started this podcast. We couldn’t get anyone interested in it. We had an expert on to do an entire episode diving deep into it, and it’s just no one cared. And now optics has become the number one growth area, right? So, it is showing appreciation to these deeply technical spaces that often allows you to see the highest returns.
Austin: One of the things I love about this trend, aside from being very boring, which means it’s going to be one of the last ones that people rush hand over fist to claim, is it just shows that when you have trends, this big and technology changing as quickly as they are in this space. It’s easy to look at the thing that you just missed, whether it was optics or whether it was, you know, Nvidia early on, or whether it was cooling and think that you missed it.
But there’s always another opportunity because the technology’s changing. It’s moving so fast, we’re seeing literally hundreds of billions of dollars flowing into this space. And that doesn’t just mean to buy the existing technology. It’s making new ones. And, you know, those, those technologies have new demands, so.
I love this trend because it’s showing that there’s, there’s always an opportunity to invest.
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