NVIDIA's $4 billion photonics bet tells you where copper dies
Investments in Coherent and Lumentum, OFC 2026 timing, and the conspicuous absence of NVLink CPO. NVIDIA knows optical interconnects are the next bottleneck, and it's moving to own the solution.
In early March, NVIDIA invested $4 billion across two companies: Coherent Corp and Lumentum Holdings. Both are photonics companies. Both make components critical to optical interconnects in data centers. The timing, weeks before OFC 2026 (the optical networking industry's premier conference), was not coincidental.
NVIDIA doesn't write $4 billion checks casually. This tells you that optical interconnects have moved from "interesting technology" to "strategic priority on par with GPU silicon."
The question isn't whether photonics replaces copper in AI data centers. It's how fast, in what form, and who controls the technology.