Everyone should stop being like a event driven pod anal-yst (patent @jukan05 ), the $mrvl $lite M&A headline is less about whether $lite is done with upside, but about take-out value now nailed in the price, it’s about improved risk reward, while upside being +50-100% premium
$LITE high likelihood to post at least 100% gain in next 6 months - met Senko today who showed confidence in exponential improvement in yield for scale up CPO in the coming months
$LITE high likelihood to post at least 100% gain in next 6 months - met Senko today who showed confidence in exponential improvement in yield for scale up CPO in the coming months
ScPo retweeted
$LITE $COHR $AAOI
🚨 LUMENTUM'S OPTICAL CIRCUIT SWITCH BUSINESS IS SCALING FAST: 1,000 BUILT THIS SUMMER, ITS FIRST $100M+ QUARTER GUIDED, AND ORACLE'S AI ARCHITECT SEES PRODUCTION DEPLOYMENT ABOUT A YEAR OUT
SAN JOSE, Oct. 15 - Lumentum ($LITE) OCS product line manager Michael DeMerchant shared the stage at the OCP Global Summit with Oracle AI infrastructure architect Kannan Raj to talk about running optical circuit switches (OCS) across hyperscale AI fabrics. Raj said the main uses in his deployments are scale-out between buildings on a campus and scale-across over longer distances.
- Factory insertion-loss data for 1,000 OCS units built over the summer, with total variation "on the order of 0.2 dB"
- On the slide, median loss at 1310 nm sits around 1.2 to 1.45 dB and the 98th percentile around 1.6 to 1.9 dB
- The same slide checks the switch against three transceiver loss budgets: 4 dB for IEEE FR/FR4/FR8, 6.3 dB for LR/LR4/LR8 and 11+ dB for OIF ZR/ZR+, all ticked
- Each OCS weighs 50 kg. Optical alignment, calibration and testing are fully automated
- Customers reserve about 5% to 10% of OCS ports as spares, DeMerchant said
"Having the greatest OCS design in the world, if you can only make five a week, that's not deployable," DeMerchant said. Asked when OCS volume inflects, Raj said it depends on how workloads spread across the buildings of gigawatt-scale campuses: "My take is probably about a year away." Pressed on whether he meant early trials, he said: "For production deployment."
On its May earnings call the company outlined about $400 million of OCS it could ship in the second half of 2026, said the number keeps stepping up in 2027, and called OCS "probably our biggest ramp." On its August call it said OCS shipments doubled from fiscal Q3 to Q4 and guided its first quarter of more than $100 million in OCS revenue. Now it's showing 1,000 units from one summer on the line, all within 0.2 dB.
Every port on that switch closes on standard O-band and coherent transceivers, the InP laser parts Lumentum, Coherent ($COHR) and Applied Optoelectronics ($AAOI) sell. I hope Lumentum puts an OCS unit count next to the revenue at its next results, and Raj's one-year call should put OCS into 2027 campus builds.
ScPo retweeted
$LITE $COHR $MRVL $AAOI $SIVE
Optics sold off today on the NVIDIA and Cisco news.
They just co-designed a new pluggable module that packs 4x the bandwidth into the same slot. Fewer modules per GPU sounds bearish for the optics names, and that’s exactly how the market traded it.
I read it the other way. More lasers per module, new 400G DSPs, and the clearest sign yet that pluggables still have years of runway, even with co-packaged optics coming.
On the latest article I make a full breakdown what NVIDIA gave away at OCP, what it kept, and who actually wins among the interconnect names ⚡
renstocks.substack.com/p/nvi…
Bullish Interconnect ⚡
People maybe still underestimating $LITE CEO interview in Tokyo - it’s less about what he said, but more about what he did, ie. why he is in (InP) Japan now
$6976.JP Taiyo Yuden setup:
1. In June there was an expert saying “gigantic order” from a CSP led Taiyo Yuden to shift 50%+ capacity to high-end
2. Market too confused about price increase mechanism towards distributors vs. direct customers, ie. too many discrepencies
@moro_ken_jp Taiyo Yuden worth attention - it’s been up on its own for a while vs Murata and Semco muted. Leopold used to own 16% and was forced to sell out. Not impossible that he’s in again… Can see why?
ScPo retweeted
Deep|Optics: OCS Content per Accelerator Grows with Each Generation as Demand Widens Beyond Google
A year ago, optical circuit switches were mostly a Google program with one outside supplier shipping under $10m a quarter. Lumentum now expects its September-quarter OCS revenue to exceed $100m, and we believe its OCS revenue will pass $2.5b next year. TPU 8i put OCS ports into inference pods for the first time and the 6D torus would give the next training chip four times as many OCS ports as today.
Demand for OCS is widening beyond Google. We expect Nvidia to adopt OCS once their scale-up domains pass eight racks, from late 2028. We see more than $20b a year of OCS demand by 2030. Lumentum leads merchant OCS shipments today, and Coherent is the other US-listed supplier. Google remains the only hyperscaler confirmed to buy OCS and nothing at Nvidia is in production yet.
An OCS connects one fiber to another with a mirror, a liquid crystal cell or a chip and leaves the light untouched. With no transceiver and no DSP inside it, the same switch works at 800G, 1.6T or 3.2T and uses about 80% less power than a packet switch on Lumentum’s figures. Google has run OCS in their datacenter network for a decade and in their TPU pods since TPU v4. Until last year they built almost all of their switches themselves. Below is an illustration from Lumentum of how an OCS can fit within a datacenter.
A TPU in Google’s 3D torus has 1.5 OCS ports. Google’s inference pods had none until TPU 8i, which links 36 groups of chips through OCS at about 1.25 ports per chip. The 6D torus reported for the next training chip would take the count to six ports per chip from 2027, or three if two transceivers share a port. Nvidia has no OCS in production. Direct fiber links tie up to eight racks together. Beyond eight racks, our model gives each GPU four ports, $800–1,200 of content at $200–300 a port.
Some of this is already in reported numbers. Lumentum targets $400m of OCS for the second half of 2026 on a backlog from three customers. Coherent doubled its addressable market estimate to $4b by 2030 between February and March. Nvidia took part in iPronics’ $125m round on September 2.
We attended ECOC in Málaga in late September and met with teams from Oriole Networks, Salience Labs, iPronics, LightDance and others. OCS was one of the topics discussed during the week. This note updates the OCS market outlook and presents both the bull case and the pushback we heard from the industry.
The companies discussed in this report include:
1. Lumentum
2. Coherent
3. Huber+Suhner
4. Google
5. Nvidia
6. Broadcom
7. Marvell
8. Astera Labs
9. Arista Networks
10. Ligent
11. nEye (private)
12. iPronics (private)
13. Salience Labs (private)
14. LightDance (private)
15. Oriole Networks (private)
Detailed Report
fundaai.substack.com/p/deepo…
ScPo retweeted
BULLISH — $LITE $COHR $AAOI $SIVE
Rosenblatt’s Mike Genovese, on Fox Business: “We’re addressing a hundred-billion-plus opportunity with all of this optical.”
100% agreed. Citi’s $11B optical-switching number is short by 10x. Maybe 100x.
“Chinese lasers are years behind” on 1.6T, 3.2T and CPO. Lumentum is still supply-constrained, and prices are still going up. At least three good years.
The whole stack gets paid too! Lasers, substrates, modules, the reliability layer. $IQE $AXTI $CRDO
We are long many stocks mentioned here. NFA.
ScPo retweeted
Andrew Huberman on why Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic are all going to become biotech companies.
"Dario came up through neuroscience. Sam, I've spoken to, is extremely smart about the neuroscience, as is Zuck.
The technologists who used to just engineer stuff, they're becoming neuroscientists...and I think most people don't realize that.
They will all tell you, 'Okay, here's the goal. The goal is to be able to read and write from your brain non-invasively.'
Even just for things like drive and motivation, a non-invasive device where you could literally crank up your level of motivation by stimulating the nucleus accumbens and related pathways while engaging in a particular learning task or in hard work, and then turning it off so that you can capture more energy.
That's coming, and those companies are all about that. That's what the real arms race of AI is about."
My conversation with Andrew Huberman (@hubermanlab).
I didn't expect us to spend so much time on the frontier of neurotechnology, and how we'll soon be able to precisely measure and change our brain states, both awake and asleep. It was fascinating.
Also discuss:
- Building and keeping energy
- How to downshift and fall asleep quickly
- Neuralink and BCI
- The state of health media
- Following your curiosity
This was a fun one. Enjoy!
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
1:00 Building Energy for High Performance
7:00 How to Fall Asleep
18:10 What’s Gone Wrong With Health Optimization
24:10 AI Companies Could Become Biotech Companies
30:45 Implantable Devices
33:45 Memory
42:50 Controlling Your Brain
59:00 Genetic Engineering
1:11:05 The Key to Meaningful Success
ScPo retweeted
Zack, I see why you connect those dots, but I have a different view. Competition for impressions is real. What I question is the implication that “Unity is doing well” leads to “that must be bad for AppLovin.”
Take Google and Meta. They’ve been fierce competitors in digital advertising for over a decade. If you look only at their competition for advertiser budgets, it’s easy to assume that one’s gain must be the other’s loss. But together, they helped build an entire economy supported by online advertising. A business that finds its first customers through Google can grow into a major advertiser on Meta, and vice versa. Each benefits from businesses the other helped create and grow. They compete within that economy, while also making it bigger for each other.
I think the same possibility exists here. When advertising works better, advertisers can grow their businesses. When developers earn more, they can invest in better games and apps. That creates more opportunity for everyone serving them. It doesn’t mean every company wins, or that competition is painless. But there is more to the story than dividing up a fixed pie.
I’m deeply committed to outperforming our competitors. I also respect what they’re building, and I don’t wish them to fail. I want us to succeed by being better. There’s room to be ambitious for our own business and generous toward someone else’s success.
$MTK $AVGO $GOOGL market again overreacting to Broadcom claiming strength - for v10, it’s always been a fair game as it can will adopt SerDes 448G that Broadcom masters (and MTK will catch up), so the UBS note is not disruptive at all, just restating facts
Substantial upside to be captured in AIDD space, especially in $TWST
@AltimeterCap is bullish, a very strong signal