MaxLinear — AI supply-chain exposure

MaxLinear is a fabless mixed-signal chipmaker whose relevance to AI runs through the optical interconnect that stitches data centres together. Its Keystone PAM4 DSPs are the signal-processing chips buried inside pluggable optical modules; they clean up and reshape the electrical signal so it can be driven onto fibre at 400G and 800G speeds. It designs the silicon and has it fabricated elsewhere, competing in a market where a handful of DSP vendors supply the module makers.

The structural hook is bandwidth. As AI clusters scale, the bottleneck moves from the accelerators to the links between them, and every high-speed optical module needs a DSP like MaxLinear's to work. That places the company at a genuine choke point in the networking layer, though it is one contested chip inside a larger module rather than a system-defining position, which is why the model keeps its weight modest.