French chip materials maker Soitec is using a surge in demand for wafers used in AI data-center optics to secure multi-year customer commitments, with deposits and fixed pricing designed to give the company greater visibility over future demand and protect its margins.

The strategy comes as hyperscalers race to expand AI computing infrastructure and increasingly turn to optical connections to move data between processors. Copper connections are becoming less attractive for some high-speed applications because of their power consumption and performance limitations, increasing demand for silicon photonics.

“We are using the current situation to find the right balance between the value we bring and the price we can ask,” Soitec CEO Laurent Remont told Reuters.

Soitec told investors last month that revenue from photonics-SOI, the silicon substrate used to manufacture silicon photonics chips, would more than double in the current financial year from slightly above $100 million. Remont said that forecast now represents “absolutely a floor,” implying revenue of more than $200 million.

The acceleration is of the essence to Soitec because silicon photonics is becoming an increasingly important component of AI infrastructure. As AI systems require ever greater volumes of data to move between computing and networking components, optical technology offers advantages in speed, distance and energy efficiency.

Soitec supplies the substrate used by almost all silicon photonics chips, according to UBS, which estimates the French company controls about 95% of the market. Its shares have almost quadrupled this year as investors have bet on the company benefiting from the expansion of AI-related optical networking.

Rather than simply expanding capacity immediately, Soitec is seeking to make customers commit capital alongside their orders.

About 80% of the company’s capacity reservation agreements with more than 10 photonics customers are expected to be signed within the next one to two weeks, with the remainder expected within a month, Remont said.

The agreements will lock in prices and require customers to put down deposits against committed volumes. Customers that take the agreed quantities will have their deposits returned, while those that fall short will forfeit them. Orders above contracted volumes will be subject to fresh pricing negotiations.

“That’s a way for us to have our customer with skin in the game,” Remont said.

The arrangement gives Soitec greater confidence when allocating scarce manufacturing capacity while limiting the risk that customers reserve more wafers than they ultimately need. Customers will also be required to share inventory information, which Soitec says will help prevent companies from accumulating excess capacity simply to keep wafers away from competitors.

The approach could prove important as the AI supply chain moves from short-term capacity concerns toward longer-term commitments. For Soitec, securing demand before committing billions of dollars to new manufacturing facilities reduces the risk of expanding too aggressively if the current AI investment cycle eventually moderates.

The company does not expect to require a new fabrication plant until around 2029. Instead, it plans to increase production through existing assets.

One option is to shift output between businesses where facilities are underutilized. Another is to install additional manufacturing equipment in existing cleanroom space.

“With that we will cover easily this year and next year,” Remont said.

Soitec can also repurpose part of a French facility originally built for silicon carbide production. The company wrote down €41 million ($47.7 million) of that facility last year.

Singapore provides another potential source of expansion. Soitec produced photonics-SOI exclusively in France until five months ago, but has since qualified customers at a Singapore facility. The company also has an unequipped building there that could be fitted with manufacturing equipment instead of constructing an entirely new plant.

A decision on whether to equip that building is expected within six to 12 months, Remont said.

“We can increase quickly without building a completely new fab, just equipping a building,” he said.

The strategy also means Soitec currently sees little need to establish manufacturing capacity in the United States, even though much of the AI infrastructure boom is being driven by U.S. technology companies.

“We don’t need a U.S. plant at this stage,” Remont said, adding that customers are “more desperate to get wafers than being too picky about where the location for production is.”

The comments indicate that in the AI semiconductor supply chain, demand is no longer concentrated only in the processors that train and run AI models. Supporting technologies such as high-bandwidth memory, advanced packaging and optical networking are becoming critical bottlenecks as data-center operators build increasingly powerful systems.

That creates an opportunity for Soitec to translate its dominant position in photonics substrates into longer-term contracts, better pricing visibility, and potentially stronger returns on existing manufacturing assets before it commits to the much larger expense of building a new fab.

India’s equity benchmarks could face sharp swings in the final minutes of trading on Monday as funds tracking MSCI indexes reposition portfolios ahead of a major index reshuffle, putting the country’s newly introduced closing auction system to its first significant test.

The MSCI changes take effect on September 1, prompting passive funds and other benchmark-linked investors to adjust their holdings a day earlier so their portfolios are aligned with the revised index. Traders expect the resulting concentration of buy and sell orders to increase volatility during the closing auction, where liquidity remains relatively thin after the new system was introduced this month.

“This MSCI rebalance is the first real litmus test for the CAS,” said Arun Kejriwal, founder of Kejriwal Research and Investment Services. “We could again see some ‘chaos’ in individual stocks.”

India introduced the closing auction session, or CAS, on August 3. The roughly 20-minute session matches buy and sell orders to establish a stock’s official closing price, replacing the previous system in which the closing price was calculated using the average price of trades executed during the final 30 minutes of continuous trading.

The mechanism is widely used in major markets including China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea, but its introduction in India has already exposed the potential for sharp short-term price movements when large orders are concentrated near the close.

The MSCI reshuffle provides a crucial test because passive funds can generate sizable one-way flows in individual stocks. Unlike normal trading, where orders are distributed throughout the session, index rebalancing can concentrate demand or selling pressure into a narrow period as funds seek to minimize tracking error.

Four Indian companies will be added to the MSCI basket: Laurus Labs, Lenskart, Adani Energy Solutions and Groww. They will replace Balkrishna Industries, SBI Cards and Astral.

The reshuffle will also reduce the weight of heavyweight Reliance Industries while increasing the weighting of Adani Enterprises. The changes are unlikely to produce a major move in the broader benchmark because the companies being added are relatively small index constituents.

The greater risk is concentrated in individual stocks, where passive flows can be large relative to normal trading volumes.

“The larger names entering the MSCI basket are not major index components. Therefore, the volatility at the headline index level may not be very significant,” said Tejas Shah, head of trading at Equirus Securities.

“The greater impact is likely to be stock-specific, with sharp moves possible in individual names depending on their liquidity and the scale of the passive flows.”

That will be important for investors watching Monday’s close. A large movement in an individual stock does not necessarily indicate a fundamental reassessment of its prospects. Some price moves could instead be the mechanical result of index funds buying or selling shares to match the new MSCI weights.

The new closing auction has already demonstrated how quickly indicative prices can move when trading activity becomes concentrated near the close. Last Thursday, the Sensex’s indicative closing price at one point implied a 3.3% decline during the auction, coinciding with monthly derivatives expiry. The index subsequently recovered and ended the session down 0.7%.

The episode highlighted the difference between an indicative auction price and the eventual market close, while also raising questions about how the new mechanism will behave when large institutional orders collide with limited liquidity.

Monday’s MSCI rebalance should provide a cleaner test because there is no derivatives expiry adding another source of concentrated trading activity.

“MSCI rebalancing will bring its usual volatility. However, with no derivatives contracts expiring that day, even if closing auction results in some price distortion due to rebalancing flows, I expect its broader impact to remain limited,” said Uttam Bagri, managing director of BCB Brokerage Private Limited.

The outcome will nevertheless be closely watched by traders and market operators because the CAS is still relatively new. Its effectiveness depends partly on the depth of orders available during the auction and the ability of the mechanism to absorb large institutional flows without creating excessive temporary price distortions.

For India’s broader market, the MSCI reshuffle also illustrates the growing influence of passive investment flows. As more global money tracks benchmark indexes, changes in index composition and weightings can generate substantial trading activity independent of changes in company fundamentals.

The immediate focus on Monday will therefore be less on the direction of the Sensex and Nifty and more on what happens in individual stocks during the final minutes. Analysts say that if liquidity proves sufficient to absorb the MSCI flows, the auction could reinforce confidence in the new closing mechanism. If prices swing sharply before settling, it could intensify scrutiny of how the system handles large institutional orders.

Either way, the session will offer one of the clearest indications yet of how India’s new closing-price regime performs under the kind of concentrated, predictable institutional flows that routinely occur during major global index rebalances.

China’s manufacturing sector contracted for a second consecutive month in August, although the decline was milder than expected, underscoring the fragile state of the world’s second-largest economy and keeping pressure on Beijing to step up policy support.

The official manufacturing purchasing managers’ index rose to 49.8 in August from 49.2 in July, according to data released Monday by the National Bureau of Statistics. The reading was stronger than the 49.6 median forecast in a Reuters poll but remained below the 50 mark that separates expansion from contraction.

The improvement offers some relief after a weaker July, but the sub-50 reading shows that China’s factory sector has yet to regain sustained momentum. The data also point to a widening divide within the economy, with high-tech manufacturing performing significantly better than consumer-oriented industries.

China’s broader growth outlook has weakened as domestic demand remains subdued and the prolonged property downturn continues to weigh on investment and household confidence. Gross domestic product expanded 4.3% in the second quarter, the weakest pace since late 2022.

The slowdown has become more visible in recent months. Retail sales and industrial production lost momentum in July, while the growth in industrial profits eased to its weakest level of the year. Urban investment has also contracted at a faster pace, while unemployment has edged higher.

The August PMI nevertheless contained some encouraging signals. The production sub-index increased to 50.4, while new orders rose to 50.6, indicating that both factory output and domestic demand moved back into expansion territory.

New export orders also recovered, reaching 50.1 from 49.6 in July. That suggests overseas demand is providing an important source of support for Chinese manufacturers even as domestic consumption remains weak.

Exports have been one of the strongest parts of China’s economy this year, recording double-digit growth for much of the period. Demand linked to the global artificial-intelligence investment boom has helped support shipments of Chinese technology products and equipment, cushioning some of the pressure from weaker conditions elsewhere.

The resilience of high-tech manufacturing was particularly notable. Production and new-order readings for electronic machinery and equipment, as well as computer and communications equipment, exceeded 53. By contrast, consumer-goods production remained in contraction at 49.

That divergence highlights one of the central challenges facing Beijing: investment and production tied to strategic industries are holding up better than consumer demand. China’s policymakers have sought to support advanced manufacturing and technology while also trying to revive household spending, but the latest figures suggest the latter remains harder to stimulate.

Employment and raw-material inventory sub-indexes remained below 50, pointing to continued caution among manufacturers and limited willingness to expand hiring and stockpiles.

There were also signs of higher price pressures at the factory level. The improvement in factory-gate price indicators came partly as global crude oil and metals prices increased. But economists cautioned that the price gains were not necessarily evidence of stronger underlying demand.

“The rise of commodity prices may have benefited some firms in the upstream manufacturing sector,” said Zhiwei Zhang, president of Pinpoint Asset Management, adding that the increase was driven by supply constraints while demand remained weak.

Beijing is expected to increase fiscal support as local governments accelerate spending and policymakers respond to the sharp deterioration in urban investment.

Tianchen Xu, senior economist at the Economist Intelligence Unit, said policymakers were increasingly concerned about the collapse in urban investment and that stronger fiscal measures should “fast-track project approval and fund disbursement.”

The impact of that spending, however, is likely to emerge more clearly from September and into the fourth quarter, Xu said.

Nguyen Hoang Nam, a Chinese economist at Capital Economics, said businesses appeared to be anticipating stronger economic activity as local governments increase spending during the remainder of the year.

The non-manufacturing sector offered less encouragement. The official gauge covering services and construction remained at 49 in August. Construction activity weakened further, with its sub-index falling 0.1 percentage point to 46.9.

Within services, wholesale, retail and capital-markets activity remained in contraction, bolstering concerns that domestic demand has not yet developed enough momentum to offset weakness in property and investment.

The next key indicator will be the private RatingDog manufacturing PMI, due Tuesday. Economists polled by Reuters expect the index, which has greater exposure to smaller and more export-oriented companies, to rise to 51. The private survey has historically produced a more positive reading than the official PMI.

Together, the August data indicate that China’s manufacturing sector may be stabilizing rather than rapidly recovering. Improving production, new orders and export demand provide some support, but weak employment, subdued consumer activity and the property downturn continue to constrain the economy. The figures therefore strengthen the case for additional fiscal measures, particularly those capable of lifting household demand and private investment rather than relying primarily on industrial output and exports to sustain growth.