By CMC Aureon
Publication Date: 2026-04-24 00:00:00
On the I’m looking for alpha In the April 9 podcast, analysts Amrita Roy and Uttam Dey identified technology themes with potential upside in 2026.
One sector Dey highlighted was “this whole optical artificial intelligence (AI) game.”
The key point here, said Dey, is that AI inference is driving profound changes in scale-up networks as the industry moves from linking 100,000 GPUs to clusters of up to 1 million operating as a single computing instance.
This tenfold increase in scale in approximately 15 months has greatly increased network complexity and placed significant strain on bandwidth, latency and overall system architecture. The existing infrastructure is proving inadequate to meet these requirements, forcing a rethink of the way such systems are designed and operated.
To meet performance requirements, the industry is moving to optical networks that integrate laser-based chips, modules and switches. This in turn leads to an increase in demand for optical components in AI…
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