Coherent signs $20B in laser orders shipping from 2028 for AI CPO optics
demian_ai · x · 2026-11-10
Coherent signed $20B of laser orders that don't ship until 2028, anchored by one unnamed AI data center buyer and a 400 mW continuous-wave laser — the light source for co-packaged optics.
- In CPO, optics move onto the switch package but lasers stay outside in hot-swappable modules because they run hot; one strong laser feeds many channels, so every CPO switch needs a tray of indium phosphide lasers.
- InP laser wafers come from a small number of fabs: Coherent doubled its InP output in a year and plans to more than double again by end-2027; quarterly capex hit $776M vs $104M a year earlier.
- Ramping to $4B/year against $9.5B annualized revenue today; the risk is CPO slipping a generation, leaving a 2028 promise resting on 2026 capex.
More from Infra
- New Export Control Push After Spy Scandal Adds to Nvidia's Headaches — pstAsiatech · 2026-11-10
- You can download a model but not a substation: investor case for AI compute bottlenecks — McDonaghMatthew · 2026-11-10
- Report: Moonshot AI obtained Nvidia's advanced chips this summer; skeptic says not a serious training cluster — pstAsiatech · 2026-11-10
- The Softmax Wall: in FP8/FP4 attention is no longer bottlenecked by matmuls — burny_tech · 2026-11-10
- Data center investment up 21% in a year, one of only two US investment booms — soumitrashukla9 · 2026-11-10
- Open-source Mac Studio + RTX 5090 sidecar hits ~210 tok/s on Qwen3.8 — GabGarrett · 2026-11-10