Jason Luongo
Growth-Stock Options Trader, LEAPS & Income Strategies
Lumen Technologies is priced for its legacy debt rather than its AI fiber demand, and that gap is the trade. It is the fiber backbone nobody talks about: strategic revenue grew 14%, Gartner named it the company to beat in enterprise AI connectivity, and it just closed the Alkira acquisition for AI workload networking. x.comÂ
Prepaid fiber orders make 2027-28 demand a stronger signal than capex plans. Corning reports $639M in net customer deposits in the first nine months and expects data-center interconnect to beat its former $1B-by-2030 target on timing and size. That backs Lumen's intercity build, though its next allocation may require a bigger commitment. Tight Corning supply gives Amphenol room to gain share until capacity expands; strong demand alone has not lifted stocks across the chain. x.comÂ
AmpliTech is the overlooked supplier in the fiber buildout because its low-noise amplifiers keep signals clean over distance, the chokepoint once fiber spans millions of miles. Lumen signed $13B of fiber contracts with Microsoft, Amazon and Anthropic to reach 58M fiber miles by 2031, and that spending flows downstream. AmpliTech is qualified with defense primes and quantum labs, a hard-to-copy moat; the CEO, COO and CFO each bought 50,000 shares at $3.04 in February. Risk/reward is asymmetric. … Show more
Lumen could be a strong sympathy play on Corning, a very bullish name, because the two are partners rather than competitors. Lumen's option premiums are not yet inflated the way Corning's are. x.comÂ
Sumitomo Electric Industries is a growth company priced as value, at a 16.2x trailing P/E despite holding many long-term agreements with AI hyperscalers spanning fiber to lasers. AI has created a bigger medium-term anomaly, pushing value investing toward high-growth, deep-value companies. x.comÂ
Networking is the next AI hardware trade after memory, whose share of rack value rose from 15% to 35%. Optics is moving inside the server, as Nvidia's Feynman architecture builds in co-packaged optics and silicon photonics. Scale-across networking could grow 30% a year just linking existing data centers, as inference moves closer to users and training spreads across sites. Supply is tight: Lumentum's CEO said it can meet only 30% of expected 2027 demand and sees optics tighter than memory. x.comÂ
AXT's Q2 2026 results confirm its role as an upstream indium phosphide supplier to AI optical modules. Revenue rose 164% year on year to $47.6 million, well above $30.4-34.1 million consensus, with GAAP net income of $11.1 million and adjusted EPS of $0.19 versus $0.07 expected. Lumentum signed an InP substrate capacity reservation through 2031 with $87 million of prepayments. InP revenue hit a record and backlog topped $100 million as data-center links move to 800G and 1.6T. x.comÂ
Ciena is becoming an AI infrastructure story rather than a telecom equipment one, because bandwidth between data centers could become the next major constraint as AI capacity spreads across campuses and regions. Its CEO framed Ciena as a critical connectivity layer as larger AI clusters drive structurally higher optical networking demand. Per Bloomberg's framing, the selloff after a Q3 beat looks like an expectations and valuation reset, not weaker demand, possibly a better entry point. x.comÂ
Arista Networks is a great, not widely known way to gain exposure to AI networking. It makes high-performance networking equipment and software that move data across data centers, cloud infrastructure, campus networks and AI clusters, used by hyperscalers, cloud companies and enterprises that need fast, reliable, programmable networks. x.comÂ
Hewlett Packard Enterprise's real story is networking, which the market is not giving nearly enough credit at the current valuation. With Juniper, HPE challenges Ciena and Cisco in optical networking and Arista in AI fabric; Juniper's optical, routing and Mist AI tech completes a stack from AI servers to interconnects, driving margin expansion from the low-20% range and a re-rating toward a networking power. Integration speed and margin resilience are the real upside trigger beyond AI demand. … Show more
Corning remains a long-term AI infrastructure winner even after Morgan Stanley's cooling note, as demand for fiber, optical materials and future glass substrates keeps growing. Per Morgan Stanley, the roughly 40% one-month rally outran fundamentals, driven by Fujikura's raised outlook, the GlassBridge fiber-to-chip platform, Nvidia long-haul fiber rumors and short covering, and high Q2 expectations could add volatility. GlassBridge gives Corning more room in next-generation optical links. x.comÂ
