Herwig Van Hove

The $10T AI Buildout Has a Photonics Problem

Herwig Van Hove, Yannick De Koninck, Molly

Responding to the physical bandwidth limits of copper interconnects in AI clusters, Tima leverages a $4x market-scale investment to industrialize optical photonics through a turnkey European foundry located near IMEC. The company, founded by ex-NVIDIA executive Yannick Van Den Abbeele, targets a 2027 production ramp-up to address critical supply chain gaps while recruiting senior leadership from IMEC and TSMC to overcome manufacturing yield challenges. By establishing a sovereign European hub, Tima aims to transform the $10 trillion AI infrastructure market by solving the latent bottleneck where 50% of an AI factory's value resides in GPU interconnection technology.