€211m for graphene photonics
The European Commission approved €211 million in Italian state aid for 2D Photonics to develop graphene‑based optical technology intended to ease AI infrastructure bottlenecks. The funding approval was reported as part of Frontier IP’s investee announcements and positions graphene photonics as a targeted industrial policy bet. The project is being promoted as a way to boost Europe’s semiconductor and photonics capabilities for AI workloads. (uk.finance.yahoo.com)
Italy can give €211 million in state aid to CamGraPhIC, after the European Commission approved the subsidy on April 9 for graphene-based photonic chips. (digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu) CamGraPhIC is the wholly owned subsidiary of 2D Photonics Group, and the money will come as a direct grant under European Union state-aid rules. The Commission said the project will be carried out in Pisa, Tuscany, and Bergamo, Lombardy. (digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu) Optical transceivers are the parts that send and receive data with light instead of electrical signals inside chips and servers. The Commission said replacing silicon with graphene is expected to improve performance and efficiency in those devices. (digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu) The company is pitching that hardware at a problem inside artificial intelligence systems: moving data between chips, accelerators and memory fast enough without adding as much heat and power draw. Frontier IP, a shareholder in 2D Photonics, said the technology is aimed at higher bandwidth density, lower latency and lower energy use than silicon photonics. (londonstockexchange.com) That matters because recent artificial intelligence systems are increasingly limited by data traffic inside machines, not only by raw compute. The NATO Innovation Fund, which backed 2D Photonics, said interconnect bandwidth and power consumption have become central constraints as systems get denser. (nif.fund) The Commission approved the aid under Article 107(3)(c) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union and the 2022 framework for research, development and innovation. It said the subsidy had an “incentive effect,” meaning CamGraPhIC would not make the investment without public support. (digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu) Brussels also said the measure was proportionate and would not create undue harm to competition and trade inside the European Union. The non-confidential decision will be published later in the state-aid register as case SA.115733. (digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu) 2D Photonics said a pilot manufacturing facility near Milan is a core part of the plan to move the technology from research into production. Frontier IP said it owns 9.1 percent of 2D Photonics. (londonstockexchange.com) The company raised a €25 million Series A round in March 2025 from investors including the NATO Innovation Fund, Sony Innovation Fund, Bosch Ventures, CDP Venture Capital, Join Capital and Indaco Ventures. CamGraPhIC was founded in 2018 by Andrea Ferrari of the Cambridge Graphene Centre and Marco Romagnoli of the National Inter-University Consortium for Telecommunications, known as CNIT. (frontierip.co.uk) The grant puts a small Italian chip-and-photonics company inside a much larger European industrial policy push: public money for semiconductor capacity, local manufacturing and artificial intelligence infrastructure. For CamGraPhIC, the next test is not approval in Brussels but whether graphene photonics can be built at scale in Italy. (digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu)
