Optics and photonics should be among AI's biggest winners as faster GPU networks need optical connections that suppliers cannot expand quickly enough. Lumentum says some components are sold out through early 2029; Sivers is investing $30M to target more than 100M lasers a year, with operations expected in Q4 2027. Potential US restrictions on Chinese transceivers could reshape supply in 2027. Applied Optoelectronics and Sivers are the favorites. x.com  x.com 

Co-packaged optics standards could make finished transceiver modules smaller and more interchangeable as chip designers build optical engines inside their packages. That is another reason to avoid Lumentum, Coherent and Applied Optoelectronics and prefer Soitec. Lumentum and Coherent now earn a lot from finished modules, leaving them exposed if the architecture changes. x.com 

Plan Optik is not a buyable way into glass substrates for AI chip packaging, even as a leading glass wafer maker serving Infineon, Samsung and Bosch. With €11 million of annual revenue and extreme illiquidity, it is closer to an acquisition bet than a position that can be built normally, and a 90% one-day move without fundamental news is not a buy signal. Glass substrates' option value is real but arrives in 2027-2028; 2026 is a qualification year with lower yields and 2-3x higher costs. x.com 

Optical suppliers face demand beyond capacity, strengthening the sector's case for the coming months. Lumentum's CEO says it is effectively sold out through early 2029; Ciena says lead times limit growth, and Coherent cites constraints across nearly every product line. Applied Optoelectronics doubled its share count to expand capacity and meet demand. Soitec raised guidance twice this year; Marvell raised guidance and its 2030 TAM, while Broadcom sees 4x EPS by 2030 on visible demand. x.com 

PlanOptik's latest report is likely its last transition report, with a very different company emerging as capacity ramps. Expectations are high for 2027 component launches showing what it can do with silicon, not just glass, followed by glass core substrates. Progress is already hidden in the numbers: automotive MEMS and sensors, historically most of revenue and weak, are holding. @KairosPraxis notes revenue grew 5.7% and EBITDA 8.9%, with heavy recent capex set to lift revenue and margins. … Show more

Plan Optik is not an AI or high-performance computing play, because all of its material is about wafers and it has no panel capability whatsoever. The glass panel cited as evidence was made with SCHMID and 4JET, not Plan Optik, and SCHMID is effectively a competitor in etching, deposition and metallization. Plan Optik has never said it targets HPC or AI, and it does everything in-house rather than through an OSAT, aiming at much smaller-scale applications. x.com  x.com 

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.com 

PlanOptik sits upstream of Lumentum's optical circuit switch supply chain, a link the market is only starting to price. Silex research materials and patent language directly mention PlanOptik as a glass wafer substrate supplier, and Silex, the leading pure-play MEMS foundry, is a key optical-switch supplier to Lumentum. That puts a €50M-market-cap German glass wafer maker in the middle of the AI data center buildout. Credit to @vlmkapital for the finding. x.com 

Applied Optoelectronics looks undervalued if its capacity converts into the modeled revenue ramp. From disclosed capacity, quarterly revenue could rise from $858M in Q1 2027 to $1.89B in Q4 and $2.14B in Q1 2028, against a $6.8B market cap. A $7.5B annualized exit rate in 2027 at 40% gross margins would make an unchanged valuation surprising. Lumentum's capacity agreements into 2030-31 suggest demand may last beyond 2027-28, but execution risk remains. x.com 

A projected 322-fold expansion in scale-up optical engines favors Lumentum, Coherent and Applied Optoelectronics. Bloomberg Intelligence forecasts the market growing from $279 million in 2026 to $90 billion in 2030. Optical engines are the most valuable part of the photonics bill of materials. x.com