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Retail Investor, AI Hardware Supply-Chain Research
POET Technologies' new $400 million registered direct offering is clearly negative for shareholders because it dilutes them by about 20%. It issues about 19.05 million shares to a single institution, roughly 11% dilution, plus three-year warrants for as many more shares at $26.15. POET says the proceeds will fund capacity, acquisitions and R&D; it is unclear whether this ties to its major Lumilens contract, and new customers will matter. x.comÂ
POET Technologies' Lumilens deal looks weak because Lumilens lacks the cash to pay for its purchase orders and needs POET's stock to soar to cash out. Lumilens has nothing in an ultra-competitive optics sector with China. Claims of billions in orders are false; any Amazon order depends on executing several steps first, while Coherent sells about $5B of optics after 30+ years with access to fabs, lasers and ICs. x.com x.comÂ
POET Technologies' market cap rose $850M on a $50M deal, a jump that would require 1,700% margins on the product to justify. x.comÂ
POET is derisked by confirmation that its customer Lumilens is a large, well-funded hyperscaler supplier. Lumilens emerged from stealth at a $5.5B valuation after raising $700M, with a multi-billion-dollar customer agreement, confirming earlier mapping that it supplies a top-three hyperscaler. POET has a $50M Lumilens purchase order, scalable to $500M, plus contracts with Sivers, on top of its large balance sheet. Lumilens's rise is also great for optical valuations generally. x.comÂ
POET Technologies' leadership is very good at hyping the stock, with two such cases in three weeks. It disclosed a new $5 million contract in the SEC filing that announced Marvell's order cancellation, and headlines ran with a "$500 million" Lumilens order that its own release put at $50 million with potential to scale. It is also oddly letting Lumilens buy deep in-the-money POET warrants at greatly reduced prices, not tied to a 30-day VWAP formula, unlike AMD's OpenAI deal. x.com x.com x.comÂ
POET Technologies will likely dilute shareholders soon because it desperately needs to raise cash. That comes after an 80% three-day rally sparked by its CTO confirming an order from Celestial AI. x.comÂ
POET's new supply and joint development deal with Lumilens, a $50 million initial order for optical engines and potentially $500 million over five years, places it at the next AI bottleneck. As GPU clusters scale to hundreds of thousands of chips, moving data between them at the speed compute requires becomes the constraint. Copper doesn't get there and photonics does, and POET's optical engine platform sits exactly at that intersection. x.comÂ
POET has lost its anchor customer, and the way it happened signals a company that is a mess from the top down. Marvell canceled all its Celestial orders, including initial production units POET had touted since around 2023, after POET's CFO disclosed confidential information in an interview. Years of heavy dilution add to the damage. $430 million of cash plus a $400 million May raise covers years of burn at about $9 million a quarter, so dilution could ease, but with this management, who knows. … Show more
POET Technologies carries too much uncertainty after issuing a $400M direct offering right at its all-time high, on top of extreme volatility and continued dilution; it is not one to touch in the near future. That is despite NMR's short report being misleading: per @Scrollingaat, the abandoned office NMR photographed as POET's headquarters belongs to Puzzle Cats, a gaming company on the same floor, while POET's filed address is Suite 1107, 120 Eglinton Ave East, Toronto. x.com x.comÂ
POET's new Lumilens order could make it a pivotal niche bottleneck in AI infrastructure, with a wide moat. Lumilens placed a $50M initial order for POET's AI photonic optical engines, with a potential $500M over five years. If it truly works, it could be colossal, a Vertiv-like story developing in real time. The CEO, a former GlobalFoundries vice president with foundry-level manufacturing experience, could make POET central to the photonics industry. x.com x.com x.com x.comÂ
POET Technologies is uninvestable because its management has lost the trust of the big players. In April its CFO leaked information that led to the cancellation of Celestial AI and Marvell contracts. Being early in interposers and packaging does not make it a co-packaged optics winner, as others will catch up. Its TFLN partner QCI trails Hyperlight and is stuck on a 6-inch line, with no 8-inch wafer demo yet to show it can scale. x.com x.comÂ
