Technoprobe’s 330% Surge Makes It a European AI Stock Standout

An Italian firm whose products are key to the chips being made by Nvidia Corp. has emerged as one of Europe’s biggest winners in the artificial intelligence boom.

Technoprobe SpA, which is controlled by a billionaire family and employs over 3,000 people, has seen its shares surge more than 330% over the past year. Having been added to the benchmark Stoxx Europe 600 index only in March, it has already become the gauge’s fifth best-performer in 2026, despite pulling back from highs in recent months along with other chip-related stocks.

The company specializes in probe cards, which test chips before they are used in products ranging from smartphones to Nvidia’s AI accelerators. As the data center build-out spurs demand for more advanced semiconductors, so too has demand for the testing equipment needed to validate them — driving the stock higher.

“Probe cards represent one of the highest-growth sub-sectors in the AI hardware supply chain,” said Ken Hui, a director at Bakewell Alpha Fund. “As AI chips increase in complexity, testing times lengthen, directly driving up the volume of probe cards required.”

The probe card market was previously more price-competitive, when chip designs were simpler. But increasingly complicated architectures — such as Nvidia’s Blackwell chips, which combine two pieces of silicon in one package — require more sophisticated testing. That favors Technoprobe, which specializes in the market’s higher end.

The firm is poised to retain a majority share of testing for Nvidia’s graphic processing units, Bank of America analysts led by Oliver Wongnoted last month, naming the stock as a top European small- and mid-cap pick.

They see the tailwind extending beyond Nvidia. Rising testing complexity for the likes of memory and customized logic chips is expected to keep demand outstripping supply, the analysts said.

That demand has already showed up in earnings. Technoprobe in May raised guidance for 2027 and said it expected to hit those revised targets a year early, triggering a record 32% share-price surge on the day. It’s projecting Ebitda margins of about 45%, well above last year’s 32%.

Technical factors may also be in play for Technoprobe’s rapid rally. The stock’s supply is limited, with free float accounting for less than one-fifth of outstanding shares. The founding Crippa family owns over half of that, while Teradyne Inc. and Advantest Corp. — two key supply chain partners — hold a combined 15% stake in the Italian firm.

Rising investor expectations have pushed the stock to some of the most expensive levels since its 2022 listing. Technoprobe is now trading at 58 times next year’s earnings, well above its three-year average and US-listed peer FormFactor Inc.’s 43 times.

Read More: Nvidia’s $1 Trillion Slide Sends Valuation to Pre-AI Boom Levels

For the company’s next report due in August, investors will likely focus on its capacity expansion plan that’s set to be completed by first quarter of 2027, according to Berenberg analyst Giovanni Selvetti. Testing for high bandwidth memory represents a small part of revenue for now, so the question is how soon the firm can gain qualifications from major memory chipmakers.

Selvetti, however, rates the stock as hold as he sees valuation as “full.”

Adam Montanaro, a portfolio manager at Montanaro Asset Management who invests in Technoprobe, is more optimistic. While the stock appears expensive on one-year forward basis, he sees room for analyst estimates to go up further. Using a simple valuation metric like that risks missing the firm’s growth potential in future years, he said.

“They’re having to add capacity very fast,” he said. “Demand for their advanced probe cards is rampant and it’s expanding rapidly.”