EU backs CamGraPhIC’s graphene photonics line with €211 million for Milan pilot plant

The European Commission has approved €211 million in Italian state aid for CamGraPhIC, giving the graphene photonics startup a major financing lift as it moves to industrialize optical interconnects and build a pilot manufacturing facility near Milan. The company says the site is scheduled to become operational in 2028.

CamGraPhIC’s graphene interconnect plan clears a major public funding hurdle

The approval, announced on April 16, 2026, is one of the largest public investments yet in an Italian deep-tech startup focused on graphene-based semiconductor-adjacent hardware. The money is earmarked for a pilot line that would take CamGraPhIC’s technology from research-stage development into manufacturing, with a pathway toward foundry-style production processes.

CamGraPhIC, a subsidiary of 2D Photonics, is targeting the growing bottleneck in AI infrastructure: moving data between chips, accelerators and memory fast enough, and with less power loss, than conventional electrical interconnects can manage.

Why the company is betting on graphene for optical I/O

The company’s pitch is that graphene-based optical input/output can offer higher bandwidth density, lower latency and lower energy consumption than current silicon photonics approaches. In practical terms, that matters most in AI systems, where interconnect power and heat are becoming limiting factors as compute clusters scale.

Graphene has long been attractive in device research because of its electrical and optical properties, but making it reliably at commercial scale has remained a persistent challenge. That is why a funded pilot line matters: it is the step where promising materials work begins to confront yield, repeatability and packaging constraints that determine whether a platform can move beyond the lab.

What the Milan facility could change for European chip supply chains

If the project stays on schedule, the Milan pilot line would add a European manufacturing foothold for a class of photonics hardware increasingly tied to AI data centers and advanced semiconductor packaging. CamGraPhIC says the project should also create more than 150 skilled jobs in photonics engineering, materials science and semiconductor manufacturing.

For Europe, the approval is also a signal that graphene is being treated less as a speculative materials story and more as a candidate for industrial infrastructure, especially in components linked to AI systems. For CamGraPhIC, the next test is execution: turning funding approval into a functioning line that can prove graphene photonics at scale.