A surge of 330% in one year! Probe card leader Technoprobe rises as the most eye-catching dark horse in the European AI hardware chain.

An Italian company, Technoprobe SpA (THNBY.US), controlled by a billionaire family, has quietly become one of the most astonishing targets in the European artificial intelligence wave, thanks to its key empowerment in the chip manufacturing process of NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA.US). Over the past year, the stock price has surged by more than 330%. The stock was only included in the European benchmark Stoxx 600 index in March of this year. Despite a recent pullback from its highs along with other chip stocks, as of now, it ranks fifth in terms of year-to-date gains in the index for 2026. The core business of the company is probe cards - critical equipment for functional testing of chips before delivery, covering applications from smartphones to NVIDIA Corporation's AI accelerators. With the massive deployment of data center computing power infrastructure and the increasing demand for advanced semiconductor processing, the demand for testing equipment has surged in tandem, becoming the core engine driving the rise in stock price. Director of Bakewell Alpha Fund, Ken Hui, said, "Probe cards are one of the fastest growing sub-sectors in the AI hardware supply chain. As the complexity of AI chips continues to increase, the testing time also lengthens, directly driving the demand for probe cards." In the past, when chip designs were relatively simple, the probe card market was more competitive. But now, as architectures become more complex - for example, NVIDIA Corporation's Blackwell series integrates two silicon dies into a single package - the demand for testing accuracy has significantly increased, an area in which Technoprobe specializes. The team of Bank of America analysts led by Oliver Wong stated last month that Technoprobe is expected to maintain a majority share in the testing of NVIDIA Corporation's graphics processing units (GPUs), making it their preferred target among European mid-cap stocks. Analysts believe that the industry dividend goes beyond NVIDIA Corporation: the continuous increase in the complexity of testing for storage chips, custom logic chips, etc., is expected to keep demand in short supply in the long term. Strong demand is fully reflected in the financial reports. In May of this year, Technoprobe raised its 2027 performance guidance and expected to achieve revised targets a year ahead of schedule. The stock price soared by 32%, marking the largest single-day increase in history. The company anticipates an EBITDA profit margin of around 45%, well above last year's 32%. Behind the rapid rise is also the limited float of the stock, with the public holding less than one-fifth of the total shares. The founding family, the Crippa family, holds over half of the shares, while two major supply chain partners, Teradyne, Inc. and Advantest, collectively hold 15% of the company. In terms of valuation, the continuous upward shift in market expectations has pushed the stock to the high range since its listing in 2022. Technoprobe's current price-to-earnings ratio (TTM) is about 58 times the expected earnings for the next year, significantly higher than its three-year average and the US peer FormFactor's 43 times. Giovanni Selvetti, an analyst at Berenberg, pointed out that the market focus in the next earnings report, scheduled for August, will be on the company's capacity expansion plan scheduled to be completed in the first quarter of 2027. Currently, the revenue share of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) testing business is small, and the key is whether the company can quickly obtain qualifications from major storage chip manufacturers. Selvetti rates the stock as "neutral," believing that the current valuation already "fully reflects" the good news. Adam Montanaro, investment manager at Montanaro Asset Management, is more optimistic. The fund he manages holds a position in Technoprobe. He stated that although the valuation based on one-year forward earnings may seem expensive, analyst profit forecasts still have room for upward revision, and relying solely on simple valuation metrics could underestimate the company's growth potential in the coming years. "They are rapidly expanding capacity," he added, "the demand for high-end probe cards is exceptionally strong and still accelerating."