Editor’s Note: On Tuesdays we often turn the spotlight outside of Porter & Co. to bring you exclusive access to the research, the thinking, and the investment ideas of the analysts Porter follows.
Each month we focus on an analyst who isn’t part of the Porter & Co. family, whose work Porter thinks you need to be aware of – and that he believes could make a big difference to your finances.
These are analysts Porter has known and followed for years, if not decades – whose ideas and insights have withstood the test of time. This month’s Spotlight is a man who truly exemplifies this. Enjoy.
Meet The Prophet
Prophets walk among us.
I (Porter) have met them. Men and women who can intuit the future with an almost supernatural degree of accuracy.
I’m not talking about predicting what a company’s earnings will be next quarter, or which sectors will benefit from some new policy.
I mean envisioning what the world will look like five, 10, and even 20 years down the line… and being so close to the mark that it’s uncanny.
Over the course of my life, I have met maybe a handful of these thinkers… and the greatest of them is our Spotlight today.
He’s predicted everything from the rise of the microchip to personal computers, iPhones, Netflix, cryptocurrencies, and more – often years before anyone else.
I’ve been following his work for close to 30 years, and I can’t express the impact he’s had on my life.
When I was in my early 20s, he helped shape my understanding of supply-side economics… the inherent morality of capitalism…and the dangers of collectivism.
He also helped lay many of the foundations for my first newsletter, as it was his research that opened my eyes to the inevitable dominance of the internet.
Without him, I likely would never have seen the rise of Amazon, Qualcomm, Adobe, or any of my other early recommendations.
All these years later, when I want to know where the world is going, George Gilder is one of the first I turn to. Today, George is taking us inside what he calls the wafer-scale breakthrough.
Enjoy!
Convergence X And The Wafer-Scale Breakthrough
By George Gilder
November 3, 2025
The moment we have been anticipating has arrived!
For decades I have studied the great convergences that redefine economies and civilizations… moments when multiple technologies accelerate, each reinforcing the others. Steam power and steel forged the railways that built America.
The “Aluminium Moment” brought jet airplanes, micro-electronics, and men on the moon.
Today, the convergence of computing, communication, and semiconductors that birthed Silicon Valley leads us to the tenth great convergence, what I call Convergence X.
Now many of our great technologies collide: artificial intelligence, robotics, autonomous vehicles, biotechnology, photonics, wafer-scale computing, and advanced manufacturing.
At the center of this convergence stands a new generation of American-made nano-devices, enabling power and precision at scales measured in billionths of a meter, forming the central nervous system of the new economy.
From Nano To Wafer-Scale: A Wider Convergence
Convergence X is not confined to the digital domain.
Artificial intelligence (“AI”) now demands hardware that no longer exists in the purely classical world.
The chips that power AI data centers are reaching a reticle limit, the physical boundary imposed by light itself on the size of a lithographic image. To create more powerful processors, manufacturers must leap beyond this barrier.
One solution, now emerging in advanced U.S. manufacturing facilities, is called multi-beam lithography.
In simple terms, electron beams “write” circuits in parallel on a silicon wafer, a technology that bypasses the optical constraints of single-beam light.
This is the first step toward what I call the wafer-scale epoch: processors the size of entire wafers, carrying scores of trillions of transistors and transforming gigawatt hyperscale data-centers into small treasure chests of wafer-scale devices.
First, however, we will consummate the epoch of the microchip. Only a handful of American firms possess the security clearance, scientific culture, and government partnerships to bring the chip era to its coming climax.
Their facilities already build chips for defense and intelligence systems that, for national security reasons, cannot be fabricated abroad.
They carry the DOD’s highest “trusted foundry” designation, known as a Category 1A Trusted Supplier, a mark once reserved for the giants of the Cold War era.
Today they sit at the nexus of AI acceleration, robotics, and sovereign manufacturing, the first intersection where Convergence X now becomes tangible.
The Golden-Hour Pattern
Across history, breakthrough epochs reveal repeating rhythms…periods when new technologies converge to create surges of opportunity.
In some rare instances, government policies align with entrepreneurial insights, and a Manhattan Project, or a Moonshot, or even a moon landing ensues.
In recent months, President Trump has prompted the U.S. government to take direct stakes in what are believed to be strategic American industries: steel, rare earths, semiconductors and advanced materials.
Think U.S. Steel, Intel among others. Each announcement has sent shares of these companies sharply higher within hours or days. In fact, it’s happened five times this year alone…
Considering the often seditiously seductive perils of government ownership in a free economy, we must scrutinize these actions closely.
The urgencies of national defense do not change the political temptation to favor incumbent industries and obsolescent technologies. U.S. Steel and even Intel are among our more venerable incumbent, or even recumbent, players. Politicians nearly always tend to prop up the past in the name of progress.
Economists may even come to grasp that a trade gap is an investment surplus. Foreigners investing in equities in America make a more enduring contribution than foreigners merely buying goods.
Assuming office in an era of wars, economic nationalism, and technological transformation, however, President Trump has earned latitude for exceptional measures. Investors can prosper from government decisions that would normally summon sirens of socialist danger.
I call this the Golden Hour… a brief window when capital, innovation, and national strategy align.
Every Golden Hour so far has produced immediate market reactions, and I believe the pattern will recur in this final stage of Convergence X, focused on a small, trusted US foundry now fostering a fundamental change in semiconductor technology.
This firm is not a sprawling megacap but a sub-billion-dollar enterprise embedded within defense networks and chip manufacturing for the most sensitive systems.
2025 has shown that when strategic stakes target smaller companies, the impact can be exponential.
Wafer-Scale Fabrication: America’s Hidden Edge
To grasp the scale of what is unfolding, consider how different the wafer-scale supply chain is from the microchip one. In conventional chipmaking, progress means shrinking features; in wafer scale, progress means transcending the limitations of chips in a new exponential ascent of innovation.
Microchip facilities are now extending their reach into silicon photonics and wafer-scale computing. By adapting classical CMOS tools to optical structures, domestic engineers are rewriting the rulebook for how classical systems interconnect.
Each success adds another strand to Convergence X: Superconductivity meets photonics; quantum information meets AI inference; physics merges with computation itself.
Financially speaking, the transition from prototype to production of these critical systems is already under way.
The Broader Map Of Convergence X
Convergence X is larger than any single enterprise. It is the overlapping of these accelerating frontiers that my team and I have laid out:
- Artificial Intelligence, demanding exponential compute.
- Wafer-Scale Computing, redefining what “compute” means.
- Robotics, where intelligence meets motion.
- Autonomous Transport, linking sensors, chips, and algorithms.
- Biotechnology, decoding life with machine learning.
- Photonics, transmitting information at light speed.
- Energy Systems, from superconductors to advanced cooling.
- Secure Manufacturing, anchoring the physical base of all the above.
Each sector amplifies the others. AI designs new molecules; quantum simulators accelerate AI training; photonic networks connect wafer-scale supernodes; robotics and biotech consume the resulting intelligence.
This recursive acceleration where machines endow new intelligent tools defines the essence of Convergence X.
Lessons From Past Convergences
Every previous convergence created fortunes and new empires.
The Bessemer process forged industrial America. The transistor created modern computing. The Internet transformed information itself. Yet each also exposed bottlenecks in energy, bandwidth and fabrication that required new innovations.
I believe we are witnessing the next iteration of that cycle.
The AI boom consumes energy four times faster than new power can be added to our electric grid. Data center cooling threatens to become the limiting factor of our digital civilization.
The frontier companies of Convergence X are already addressing these constraints: one developing immersion systems that cut energy use by 90 percent, another building edge-AI chips for instant decisions in self-driving vehicles, and still another creating humanoid robots that merge language models with physical dexterity.
The convergence therefore extends beyond wealth… Think of it as a restructuring of how computation inhabits matter and how intelligence inhabits the world.
Wafer-Scale, AI, and the Return of Sovereignty
What distinguishes this era from the 1990s tech boom is the re-emergence of sovereign manufacturing. The world has learned that digital empires built on offshore supply chains may become fragile. Energy grids fail, ships clog ports, pandemics close borders. Nations once again compete not merely for data but for atoms and the ability to fabricate the material infrastructure of thought.
Wafer-scale processors, AI accelerators, and defense electronics may be deemed too strategic to outsource. The American facilities that launched wafer-scale computing in 2025 represent more than a contractor; they provide a template for renewal and proof that the U.S. can still manufacture at the frontier of physics.
When government policy and private innovation align, as they are beginning to again in the Trump administration, the result is not protectionism but acceleration: the recoupling of scientific imagination with national purpose.
That is the essence of the Golden Hour.
The View Ahead
I am not merely predicting a single stock outcome here but a civilizational inflection point. The same patterns that once transformed iron into infrastructure and sand into silicon are now transforming vacuum and light into computation. The companies positioned at these intersections, small and nimble enough to move quickly, trusted enough to work with defense, and advanced enough to fabricate wafer-scale devices, form the baseline of our next industrial era.
Whether through direct public stakes, private investment, or organic demand, capital will find them. As Convergence X accelerates, we will see the boundaries blur between classical and quantum, machine and material, computation and creation.
Some call this speculation. I call it physics fulfilling its promise. The Golden Hour is not a metaphor; it is the measurable window in which light itself, guided, split, and patterned by multi-beam instruments, writes the future into matter.
The Pattern Is Undeniable
Every convergence in history has united new sciences with new capital and new purpose. The tenth convergence, Convergence X, fuses these frontiers into one.
At its core is the wafer-scale breakthrough that proved, for the first time, that matter can think in ways no classical machine can match. Around it spin the orbits of AI, photonics, robotics, and energy systems, all drawing strength from the return of American manufacturing.
In Convergence X, the race is not won by the biggest model, but by the company that keeps it alive, makes it adaptive, and gives it form. That is where the next wealth creation begins and where the Golden Hour shines brightest.
Whether the catalyst arrives through policy, markets, or pure discovery, the Golden Hour has begun, and those who see its light first will shape the century to come.
Sincerely,
George Gilder,
Editor, Gilder’s Moonshots
P.S. To find out more about Convergence X and how best to play it, go here now for my full analysis.