Silicon photonics' original sin is that it can't emit light. Lasers hate heat, yet CPO asks them to sit next to a hot chip — making the light source the reliability ceiling, where one failed laser can cost an entire optical engine. External vs integrated sources and four light-source types each bet on a different future.

The 400G-per-lane era is here. At OFC 2026, Coherent showed InP components with more than 100 GHz of bandwidth - but how do you keep TDECQ low while absorbing a 5 dB sensitivity penalty? A deep dive into the technical and commercial tradeoffs of IM/DD for AI interconnects.

When the biggest buyer reaches upstream and index providers add optical names to their benchmarks, the industry's capital structure has shifted gears. NVIDIA's $2B stake in Coherent is not an investment; it is supply insurance.

AI traffic is reshaping network architecture. Nokia's Q1 highlight was not traditional telecom but 49% revenue growth from AI/cloud customers. With its new San Jose InP fab about to come online, how is Nokia using vertical integration to pull ahead in the 800G wave?

AI is igniting demand for optical substrates. Driven by EML and silicon photonics, AXT's InP backlog has topped $100M. Here are the key takeaways from the latest call and how AXT plans to double capacity for the CPO era.

The Big Four clouds locked in $725B of capex, and for the first time the market split on rewarding the spenders. With the demand floor nailed down, the optical race moves to the supply side — upstream InP materials are jammed and the silicon photonics foundry capacity race is heating up. Two gates this week decide who actually profits in 2H26.

Outside the silicon photonics mainstream, Mitsubishi Electric bets on III-V EMLs flip-chipped onto a glass interposer: the prototype already reaches 89 GHz, 106.25 Gbaud PAM4, and 2.37 dB TDECQ. As each lane heads toward 400 Gbps, can this high-speed path clear the hurdles of arraying and cost?

MACOM posted a record quarter with all three end markets growing and book-to-bill at an all-time-high 1.6. It sells chips, not modules, yet sits inside every optical interconnect architecture. Here are the hard numbers and management's real signals in three minutes.

Coherent turned "AI scales on optics" into financial results: accelerating revenue, gross margin up in eight of nine quarters, and leverage down to 0.7x. The real variable is not demand but how fast 6-inch InP capacity ramps.

Goldman Sachs lifted its 2028 optical module market forecast to $148.5B, up 115% - but shipments were raised only 31%, implying ASPs up about 64%. Two-thirds of this growth comes from price, and what props up price is InP, short by more than 70%. The ceiling is high enough; the next year will be decided by the denominator.

In one day LandMark Optoelectronics locked in materials, orders and tools, and its stock hit limit-up at NT$3,255. But the five board resolutions are three facets of one story: materials, orders and machines, and companies lock these down by contract when they are lifelines, not when they are safe.

The optics problem at 400G/lane is essentially solved; what remains is electrical, packaging and connectors. Coherent pinpointed the bottlenecks: wire bonds collapse above 110 GHz, OSFP connectors dip at 90 GHz, and PAM6 in optics hits an SNR wall. IM/DD can stretch to 800G, but it needs electronics, not photonics.

Five NVIDIA publications are not isolated research but one vertically integrated weapon, deliberately split into four layers. STT merges them into a single technology map: how far this optical interconnect stack is from volume production, and what shape it bends the supply chain into.

With a three-year deal and a ~US$22.3M prepayment, Coherent has locked in the scarcest 6-inch InP wafers. This isn't ordinary procurement — it's supply insurance, marking the InP shortage's shift from waiting in line to grabbing capacity at the source, and forcing a choice between cheapest China capacity and Non-China supply insurance.

Demand broke records this week, and so did costs. The same week NVIDIA posted $96.2 billion in revenue, it told customers prices would rise 15%, and Coherent paid upfront to lock in three years of InP capacity. In 2027, optical module makers will win or lose not on whether they can build 1.6T, but on whether they have secured substrates and how much BOM budget is left for optics.

The FCC wants to move optical module orders away from China, but the Western vendors taking those orders still grow their laser dies on substrates China approves for export. 6-inch InP is up 250% with a supply gap above 70% — de-Sinicization works at the module layer, but has no answer at the materials layer yet. This week's three earnings calls and OCP's CPO move point the same way: the decisive move has shifted down to indium phosphide.

AI's deepest bottleneck isn't the GPU — it's a 6-inch InP wafer. Silicon photonics and TFLN still need it to emit light, supply falls more than 70% short, volume relief waits until 2028, and NVIDIA has stepped in to lock up capacity. STT maps the chain from phosphorus to laser and where Taiwan stands.

Four industry heavyweights on one stage reached an unromantic consensus: demand isn't a bubble, technology isn't heading for a revolution, and the real battlefield is manufacturing. For Taiwan's supply chain, that means the winners will be decided by yield, process, and automation.

LandMark's 2Q26 gross margin hit 57% and EPS reached a record NT$4.62, with SiPh CW lasers now over 80% of revenue. The real signal: nearly NT$6 billion of CAPEX over three quarters, all aimed at 2.5x capacity by 2027, with multi-wavelength capability raising both the technical bar and ASPs.

Nokia's biggest signal this quarter isn't +9% revenue — it's AI & Cloud doubling and orders reaching €2.8B. Management tapped the brakes itself: orders will be lumpy and half won't convert for 12+ months. The real bets are its in-house InP fab and AI-RAN.