Technoprobe has quietly become one of the best performing stocks on Piazza Affari. The Italian maker of probe cards, the highly precise devices used to test chips while they are still on the silicon wafer or just after they are cut apart, has returned about 370 percent to shareholders over the past year, pushing its market value to roughly 20 billion euros. Milan's exchange operator is expected to confirm in September that the company will join the FTSE Mib, the index of the forty largest listed Italian companies.
The rally traces back to a shift few outside the semiconductor industry noticed coming. In 2025, work tied to artificial intelligence made up 38 percent of Technoprobe's sales. In the first half of 2026 that share jumped past 50 percent, as chipmakers raced to test faster processors built for data centers and AI accelerators. Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung, AMD, Intel and TSMC are all customers, and each new generation of chip requires new, more complex probe cards to test it before it ships.
Analysts have kept raising their numbers to catch up with the company's results. After the latest quarterly figures, Equita called it another significant beat, and the firm's guidance now points to Ebitda growth of 12 percent in 2027 and 6 percent in 2028, driven mostly by continued AI related demand rather than any single new contract.
The company is still closely tied to the family that built it. Cristiano Crippa, who chairs Technoprobe as president, and his brother Roberto, the vice president, are each worth an estimated 2,6 billion euros on paper. Their father Giuseppe Crippa founded the company and became a billionaire only in his late eighties, before his death in 2025. Day to day management now sits with chief executive Stefano Felici, the founder's nephew.
A place in the FTSE Mib would do more than flatter the family's balance sheet. It would force index funds tracking the benchmark to buy the stock automatically, and it would put a company most Italians have never heard of, one that makes nothing consumers ever touch, alongside the banks and utilities that usually define Piazza Affari. For a business built on testing other people's chips, that would be a fairly direct test of its own.