Valuations Slashed, Shipments Surging: The Week NVL576 Slipped, Taiwan Suppliers Posted Record Revenue (2026 W28)
On 7/6, SemiAnalysis reported that NVIDIA's Kyber NVL144 has slipped to 2028, NVL72x2 has been canceled, and NVL576 — which links eight racks over optical links — has been delayed or limited to small volumes. AI optical interconnect stocks pulled back across the board that week: AAOI -17%, COHR and LITE -10% each, Astera Labs -11.52%.
Yet every shipment number that same week pointed up: Foxconn's June revenue rose 52.11% YoY and Wistron's 53.9%, both records for the period; FOCI's FAUs begin volume shipments in Q3; and Largan confirmed it has received formal specifications from a CPO volume-production customer.
Prices being slashed on one side, records being set on the other. This isn't a contradiction — it's a timeline mismatch. There is only one question: whose assumptions were actually cut?
1. All the Bad News Is on Paper; All the Good News Is on the Books
In the second week of July, the optical communications supply chain faced the hardest set of signals to read this year.
The bad news on paper. On 7/6, SemiAnalysis reported that NVIDIA's next-generation Kyber NVL144 rack (originally slated to ship in 2027 with Vera Rubin Ultra, connecting 144 compute chips in a single rack) has slipped to 2028 because its dedicated PCB midplane is hard to mass-produce; the interim NVL72x2 solution was canceled after customer pushback; and most critically, NVL576, which links eight racks via optical links, was reportedly delayed or scaled back to small volumes. NVIDIA did not respond to requests for comment.
At the same time, the “compute glut” worries sparked by Meta Compute (Meta reselling the surplus capacity it built for itself) dragged on through 7/7, rewriting AI hardware's underlying assumption from “GPU scarcity” to “supply may catch up.” Stack the two threads together and the result was a systematic pullback across high-beta optical stocks all week:
7/2: AAOI fell 17% in a single day, with COHR and LITE down 10% each; media explicitly noted there was no stock-specific catalyst.
7/7: Astera Labs plunged 11.52% in a single day to close at $382.89, again with no company-specific negative news.
The good news on the books. The same week, not a single number from Taiwanese suppliers mentioned a slowdown:
Company | Figure | Change |
Foxconn (2317) | June revenue of NT$821.763 billion | +52.11% YoY, a record for the period |
Foxconn (2317) | Q2 revenue of NT$2.5133 trillion | +18.02% QoQ, +39.83% YoY |
Wistron (3231) | June revenue of NT$321.822 billion | +10.9% MoM, +53.9% YoY, second-highest month ever |
FOCI (3363) | FAU volume shipments start in Q3 | ASP and gross margin higher than existing products |
Largan (3008) | Received formal specs from a CPO volume-production customer on 7/9 | First time |
Prices cut on one side, records set on the other. This isn't a contradiction but a timeline mismatch: the market is trading 2027–2028 assumptions, while revenue reflects 2026 shipments.
So whose assumptions were actually cut?
The above is a summary of the key points of this article.
STT's full analysis — why it's scale-up that got delayed, not all of optics; which companies feel it as Kyber's delay gives copper two more years of life; why Largan receiving formal CPO specs is the most underrated item of the week; and the real signal behind Innolight “raising capital in Hong Kong with one hand while rebutting the CPO-replacement thesis with the other” — is available in full in the premium section.
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