Bluechip
Value Investor, Short Seller
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 is an AI-hype stock with barely any business behind its $1.5bn market value, and it should fall toward 1x cash. It has about $1.2M of revenue from prototyping contracts and 80 employees after decades in existence. Its circular deal with Lumilens offers no competitive advantage; the story resembles Lightwave Logic's. 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 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 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 looks headed toward zero after Marvell cancelled its Celestial AI orders over a confidentiality breach, costing POET basically its only big customer. With only three or four major end customers, who could use COUPE instead, no revenue and ongoing cash burn, its reputation may never recover. The Marvell contract likely helped its $300M-plus raise, so investors may sue for their money back, and the stock could easily fall below $5. x.com x.com x.com x.com x.com x.com x.com x.com x.com x.com … Show more
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
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 looks like a short on a pattern of partnerships that counterparties deny. @NMRtweet is short after Marvell, which acquired Celestial AI, cancelled POET's product orders, arguing POET isn't transparent and this isn't the only dead partnership. @kovainvest's timeline lists POET press releases each denied by the counterparty, including Lightwave execs who said they had never heard of POET, and Marvell's cancellation citing a POET NDA breach, which sent shares down 47% in a day. … Show more
POET is now an unknown after Night Market Research's short report alleged its partnership story is dead, so stepping aside makes sense until management gives verifiable counter-evidence. Per the report, Celestial AI says POET hasn't come up internally since 2023, Foxconn executives stopped using it two years ago, Luxshare executives never heard of it and its Toronto HQ was empty. The optical interconnect bottleneck is real, but Lumentum and Coherent are the durable picks in the subsector. x.com … Show more
POET's deal with Lumilens is a $500M validation that could move it from lab tech to commercial scale. The supply and joint development agreement starts with a $50M order for optical engines and could scale to $500M over five years, with samples in late 2026 and volume production in 2027. Its optical interposer integrates electronics and photonics in one chip-scale package, beating power-hungry pluggables. 2026 should be the year of validation, 2027 the year of revenue. 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
