Optical
Optical transceivers and fiber connectivity for datacenter-scale networking.
Stack position
Where Optical sits in the AI stack
L5 · Networking
Interconnect, switching, and high-speed data-movement silicon linking compute clusters.
L5 · Optical
Optical transceivers and fiber connectivity for datacenter-scale networking.
L6 · AI Server
GPU servers, racks, and storage systems integrating accelerators into deployable units.
L7 · Cooling
Thermal management and liquid/air cooling for high-density AI compute.
Icons mark layer roles — not company logos. Position only; not a price chart.
Why this layer matters
Beyond a short distance, copper stops being viable and every link becomes optical. Port speeds have moved through 800G toward 1.6T, with co-packaged optics next as pluggable module power becomes the constraint.
What is the bottleneck?
Transceiver supply and the power budget per port both scale with cluster size, which is why optics is usually counted separately from the switch silicon it plugs into.
A structural observation about supplier concentration and lead times — not a view on any security.
Who sits in this layer?
Company
GLWPrimary business sits hereOptical fiber and connectivity products for datacenter buildout.
Company
COHRPrimary business sits hereOptical transceivers, lasers, and photonics for datacenter interconnect.
Company
LITEPrimary business sits hereOptical components and transceivers for datacenter and telecom networks.
Company
FNPrimary business sits hereContract manufacturing of optical modules and photonics assemblies.
Coverage boundary
Coverage boundary: US-listed tickers or ADRs only (same rule as TSM / ASML). Important suppliers without a US listing are omitted even when they matter to the stack. That is a coverage rule, not a quality ranking.
No hand-listed notable omissions for this layer yet. The US-list / ADR rule still applies.
Checked 2026-10-09. Not exhaustive.
Same track
Descriptive positioning only. The positioning label says whether a company's business is exposed to a layer, never whether to buy it. Layers with no exposure are not recommendations to add any.