ZR is the meat, Coherent Lite is the bone. 2026 is the year ZR generates cash; 2028 is when Coherent Lite truly ramps. Three signals could reverse everything: whether Amazon commits, how fast LPO/CPO win sockets, and production-grade demos at OFC 2027. Taiwan's real opportunity lies in upstream components, not the DSP.

Scale-across planning has shifted from "how many wavelengths do I need" to "how many fibers do I need", because regenerator sites can no longer supply the power to light that many fibers. Acacia mapped the whole optics landscape onto four scales in a seven-step chart, and the 400G/lane physics line is now setting the handover timeline for campus DCI.