New York, March 2, 2026, 13:15 EST — Regular session
- Nvidia said it will invest $2 billion each in Lumentum and Coherent to deepen its data-center optics supply chain
- Coherent and Lumentum shares jumped in midday trade; Nvidia’s stock also rose
- The deals put a spotlight on photonics — using light to move data — as a new pressure point in AI buildouts
AI-linked shares of Coherent Corp and Lumentum Holdings jumped in midday trading on Monday after Nvidia said it will invest $2 billion in each optics supplier, lifting Nvidia’s stock as well. Coherent was up about 14% and Lumentum about 8%, while Nvidia’s stock price rose roughly 3%. 1
The move puts fresh attention on a quieter corner of the AI stocks trade: the lasers, cables and optical gear that link chips inside data centers. As models scale, moving data around the cluster is starting to look like the constraint.
Photonics is the shorthand for using light, not electricity, to carry data. In dense AI systems, optical links can push more bandwidth with less heat than copper over similar distances.
For Lumentum, Nvidia described the tie-up as a multiyear, nonexclusive agreement with a multibillion-dollar purchase commitment and future capacity access rights for advanced laser components. “AI has reinvented computing and is driving the largest computing infrastructure buildout in history,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in the announcement. 2
A separate agreement with Coherent also carries a multibillion-dollar purchase commitment and future access and capacity rights for advanced laser and optical networking products, Nvidia said. “We are proud to expand our 20-year relationship with NVIDIA,” Coherent CEO Jim Anderson said. 3
A Coherent regulatory filing showed Nvidia bought 7,788,161 shares at $256.80 each for $2 billion in cash, in a private placement. The filing said Nvidia will get access to five additional Coherent product families tied to “co-packaged optics,” where optical parts sit alongside the chip package. 4
The optics rally came during a jittery session after crude prices jumped more than 8% on fears of wider Middle East disruption, leaving major indexes split. “At times when there is nervousness, people will go to the leaders in the market,” said Joe Saluzzi, co-head of equity trading at Themis Trading. 5
Nvidia has framed the optics push as part of a broader effort to stay ahead as cloud providers build more custom silicon and rivals chase alternatives to traditional electrical links. Marvell last year agreed to buy photonics startup Celestial AI for $3.25 billion, and Meta signed a $60 billion AI chip supply deal with Advanced Micro Devices, a Reuters report on Monday noted. 6
For investors, the read-through is straightforward: if AI spending keeps climbing, more GPUs mean more optical connections, and the suppliers closest to the bottleneck can re-rate fast. The moves can also reverse quickly if customers change designs or timing.
But photonics is not a quick fix. New fabs take time to build, optical components can be hard to qualify at scale, and any pause in data-center budgets would likely hit the smaller optics names before the chip giants.
Traders will look for fresh timelines on co-packaged optics and next-generation links at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference, which runs March 15–19 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. 7
